The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

demesne.

deportment

On the following morning, the 12th, the Emperor was enthroned on a silk-draped armchair, perilously perched upon Clive’s dining-room table. The ceremony, which took place inside Clive’s tent, did not last long. As Ghulam Hussain Khan puts it: ‘A business of such magnitude, as left neither pretence nor subterfuge, and which at any other time would have required the sending of wise ambassadors and able negotiators, as well as much parley and conference with the East India Company and the King of England, and much negotiation and contention with the ministers, was done and finished in less time than would usually have been taken up for the sale of a jack-ass or a beast of burden.’88 It was a hugely significant moment: with one stroke of the pen, in return for a relatively modest payment of Rs2.6 million,* and Clive’s cynical promise on behalf of the Company to govern ‘agreeably to the rules of Mahomed and the law of the Empire’, the Emperor agreed to recognise all the Company’s conquests and hand over to it financial control of all north-eastern India. Henceforth, 250 East India Company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 Indian sepoys would now run the finances of India’s three richest provinces, effectively ending independent government in Bengal for 200 years.

Up to now, gold bullion had represented 75 per cent of the EIC’s imports to Bengal, and was the source for much of the ‘prodigious ancient riches of the province’. But now the Company no longer had to ship anything from Britain in order to pay for the textiles, spices and saltpetre it wished to buy and export: Indian tax revenues were now being used to provide the finance for all such purchases. India would henceforth be treated as if it were a vast plantation to be milked and exploited, with all its profits shipped overseas to London.91 As a result, in the words of Richard Becher, the new Company Resident in Murshidabad, ‘the first Consideration seems to have been the raising of as large Sums from the Country as could be collected’ – in other words simply to secure as large a revenue as possible through land taxes, and then to transfer that surplus to London bank accounts.92

sanguine

opulent

But for the people of Bengal, the granting of the Diwani was an unmitigated catastrophe. The Nawab was no longer able to provide even a modicum of protection for his people: tax collectors and farmers of revenue plundered the peasantry to raise funds from the land, and no one felt in the least bit responsible for the wellbeing of the ordinary cultivator. Merchants and weavers were forced to work for the Company at far below market rates; they also seized by force textiles made for their French and Dutch rivals. Merchants who refused to sign papers agreeing to the Company’s harsh terms were caned or jailed or were publicly humiliated by being made to rub their noses on the ground.94 A few years later, in 1769, Becher recorded, ‘it must give pain to an Englishman to think that since the accession of the Company to the Diwani, the condition of the people of the country has been worse than it was before; yet I am afraid the fact is undoubted. This fine country, which flourished under the most despotic and arbitrary government, is now verging towards ruin.’95 The economic indicators were all bad, he wrote, and growing daily worse: land revenues had been declining since the Diwani was handed over, coin was short and Bengal’s internal trade was shrinking.96

Ghulam Hussain Khan, by far the sharpest observer of his time, was quick to realise what this would mean on the ground. Firstly, it signified the effective extinction of his entire social class. The Mughal nobility, whose power had ultimately rested on their expertise as cavalrymen, were now effectively unemployed as the Company replaced them with infantrymen they recruited largely from rural Hindu Rajput and Brahmin backgrounds. Long before anyone else had thought through the full effects of this new corporate colonialism and its infantry warfare, Ghulam Hussain Khan was lamenting the fate of ‘the remaining stock of the ancient nobility … who in these hard times have not one single resource left under the canopy of the Hindostany heaven … Numbers therefore have already quitted their homes and countries, and numbers unwilling to leave their abodes, have made a covenant with hunger and distress, and ended their lives in poverty in the corner of their cottages.’ He estimated that these changes would throw between 40,000 and 50,000 troopers out of employment across Bengal and Bihar, besides dispersing ‘the thousands and thousands of merchants’ who followed ‘that numerous cavalry’. This is turn had an important economic and civilisational effect: ‘The even more numerous artisans whom the noblemen had always kept busy, sometimes in their own houses’ found their patrons no longer capable of sustaining them or their in-house kar-khanas. Alternative employment was hard to find, fo...

But it rapidly became clear that the drain of wealth was real. It soon became common ‘to see every year five or six Englishmen, or even more, who repair to their homes with large fortunes. Lakhs upon lakhs have therefore been drained from this country.’98 This, he wrote, was quite different from the system of the Mughals, who though also initially outsiders, determined ‘to settle forever [in India] and to fix the foot of permanency and residency in this country, with a mind of turning their conquest into a patrimony for themselves, and of making it their property and inheritance’: These bent the whole strength of their genius in securing the happiness of their new subjects; nor did they ever abate from their effort, until they had intermarried with the natives, and got children and families from them, and had become naturalized. Their immediate successors having learned the language of the country, behaved to its inhabitants as brothers of one mother and one language … [Hindus and Muslims] have come to coalesce together into one whole, like milk and sugar that have received a simmering.99 In contrast, he wrote, the British felt nothing for the country, not even for their closest allies and servants. This was why those Indians who initially welcomed the British quickly changed their minds because ‘these new rulers pay no regard to the concerns of Hindustanis, and suffered them to be mercilessly plundered, fleeced, oppressed and tormented by those officers of their appointin...

The monsoon of 1768 brought only the lightest of rains to north-east India. Then the following summer, 1769, no rain fell at all. Instead, the intense heat continued unabated, the rivers dwindled, the tanks dried and the pukhurs – the fish ponds at the centre of every Bengali village – turned first to sticky mud, then to dry earth, then to dust. The Company officials dotted around rural Bengal watched the deepening drought with concern, realising the effect it would have on their revenues: the rice lands had ‘so harden’d for want of water that the ryotts [farmers] have found difficulty in ploughing and preparing it for the next crop,’ wrote one, and the fields of rice, ‘parched by the heat of the sun are become like fields of straw’.1 The price of rice rose steadily, week by week, until it had multiplied five times. By October, as drought began to turn to famine, ‘great dearth and scarcity’ was reported at Murshidabad.2 By November, the farmers were stated ‘to be totally incapacitated to cultivate the valuable crops of Cotton and Mulberries … which usually succeed the rich rice harvest’.3 A month later, Mohammad Reza Khan, who now ran the Murshidabad administration, reported to Calcutta that things were so desperate that the hungry labourers had begun to ‘sell their children to raise money, much less do they spare their effects and cattle. The plough consequently stands still, and numbers of them desert their homes.’4 The first to go hungry were the landless ‘labourers, th...

‘All through the stifling summer of 1770, the people went on dying,’ wrote Sir William Hunter. ‘The husbandmen sold their cattle, they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyers of children could be found. They ate the leaves of the trees and the grass of the field; and in June the Resident at the durbar affirmed that the living were feeding off the dead. Day and night a torrent of famished and disease-ridden wretches poured into the great cities … [so that soon] the streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and the dead.’7 By June 1770, the devastation was unfolding across the entire province. Five hundred a day were now dying of starvation in the streets of Murshidabad.8 Rice was scarce even in Calcutta, where 76,000 died on its streets between July and September. ‘The whole province looked like a charnel house,’ reported one officer. The total numbers are disputed, but in all perhaps 1.2 million – one in five Bengalis – starved to death that year in what became one of the greatest tragedies of the province’s history.9 The famine did not touch the entire province, and in eastern Bihar the situation was slightly better; but in the worst affected districts, fully one-third of all the peasants died, and two-thirds of the old Mughal aristocracy were ruined. Half of all the rural artisans perished. The Hughli was full of swollen bodies, floating slowly downstream to the s...

We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru! They were at least butchers on a religious principle, however diabolical their zeal. We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped – say what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the servants of the East India Company? All this is come out, is coming out – unless the gold that inspired these horrors can quash them.30 His words were echoed in the House of Lords by the former Prime Minister. William Pitt, Lord Chatham, came from a dynasty whose fortunes were made in India: his father, ‘Diamond Pitt’, brought back from his governorship of Madras the fortune that had made possible Pitt’s career. Pitt did not, however, like to be reminded of this, and now raised the alarm that the EIC was bringing its corrupt practices back from India and into the very benches of the Mother of Parliaments. ‘The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us,’ he declared at the despatch box, ‘and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principles of government. Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruptions as no private hereditary fortune could resist.’31

emolument

unscrupulous

censure

The other casualty of the Regulating Act and the parliamentary debates which swirled around it was, perhaps surprisingly, Clive himself. Although he was ultimately vindicated by Parliament, he never recovered from the bruising treatment he received at the hands of Burgoyne and his Select Committee. Despite escaping formal censure, he was now a notorious and deeply unpopular figure and widely regarded around the country as Lord Vulture, the monstrous embodiment of all that was most corrupt and unprincipled about the East India Company. Shortly after the passing of the Regulating Act, Clive set off abroad on the Grand Tour, dining with some of his former Compagnie des Indes adversaries as he passed through France. For a year, he toured the classical sites of Italy, collecting artworks and meeting some of the most powerful and fashionable figures in Europe; but he never recovered his peace of mind. He had always suffered from depression, and twice in his youth had tried to shoot himself. Since then, despite maintaining an exterior of unbroken poise and self-confidence, he had suffered at least one major breakdown. To this burden was now added agonising stomach pains and gout. Not long after his return to England, on 22 November 1774, at the age of only forty-nine, Robert Clive committed suicide in his townhouse in Berkeley Square.

triennial

antiquarian:

The second power was a new force, which in the 1770s was just emerging and beginning to flex its military muscles: the Mysore Sultanate of Haidar Ali and his formidable warrior son, Tipu Sultan. Haidar, who was of Punjabi origin, had risen in the ranks of the Mysore army, where he introduced many of the innovations he had learned from observing French troops at work in the Carnatic Wars. In the early 1760s he deposed the reigning Wodiyar Raja of Mysore and seized control of his state in what today might be called a military coup, rapidly increasing the size of Mysore’s army and using it to occupy the lands of a succession of small neighbouring rulers.

The tables were being turned. It was now Company troops who learned what it meant to be defeated, to be taken prisoner, to be mistreated. Munro, whose failure to rescue Baillie had been a major factor in the disaster, and who on his return to Madras with what was left of his panic-stricken army, was jeered and hooted at in the streets, called the Battle of Pollilur ‘the severest blow that the English ever suffered in India’.123 Worse was to follow. There were so many Company amputees that there were not enough Indian medical orderlies to bear them away from the front lines. Surgeon Thomas Davis wrote, ‘I have been as sparing of Limbs as possible’, but was compelled to remove many of them for lack of adequate medical supplies.124 Of the 7,000 prisoners Tipu captured in the course of the next few months of warfare against the Company, around 300 were forcibly circumcised, forcibly converted to Islam and given Muslim names and clothes. By the end of the year, one in five of all the British soldiers in India were held prisoner by Tipu in his sophisticated fortress of Seringapatam. Even more humiliatingly, several British regimental drummer boys were made to wear dresses – ghagra cholis – and entertain the court in the manner of nautch (dancing) girls.

Over the months to come, with a mixture of imaginatively wide-ranging military action and deft diplomacy, Hastings managed to break both the Triple Alliance and the unity of the Maratha Confederacy when, on 17 May 1782, he signed the Treaty of Salbai, a separate peace with the Maratha commander Mahadji Scindia, who then became a British ally. For the Company’s enemies it was a major missed opportunity. In 1780, one last small push could have expelled the Company for good. Never again would such an opportunity present itself, and the failure to take further immediate offensive action was something that the durbars of both Pune and Mysore would later both bitterly come to regret.

perfidious

benevolent

But the Emperor kept his nerve. He stayed nearly three weeks at Serai Alamchand, sequestered in his tent with Mirza Najaf Khan, ‘invisible to every person’, planning every detail of their march and working out together how to overcome the different obstacles. They secretly sent a trusted eunuch ahead with Rs2.5 lakh** in bags of gold to buy influence among the Maratha nobles. His mission was to discover which of the rival young Maratha leaders was more open to Shah Alam’s rule, and to begin negotiations about handing over the Red Fort back into Mughal hands.28

The Rohilla Nawab of Farrukhabad, Ahmad Khan Bangash, had just died. Shah Alam decided to demonstrate his resolve by demanding that all the Nawab’s estates should now escheat to the crown, in the traditional Mughal manner. His demands were resisted by the Nawab’s grandson and successor, who gathered a Rohilla army, surrounded and cut off the Emperor’s column, and prepared to attack the imperial camp. Shah Alam sent urgent messages to Mahadji Scindia, requesting immediate military assistance. This was the moment of truth: would the Marathas honour their promise and become imperial protectors, or would they stand by and watch their new protégé be attacked by their Afghan enemies? Two days later, just as the Rohillas were preparing for battle, several thousand of Scindia’s Marathas appeared over the horizon. The young Bangash Nawab saw that he was now outnumbered and appealed for peace, quickly agreeing to pay Shah Alam a peshkash (tribute) of Rs7 lakh* in return for imperial recognition of his inheritance. The Shah confirmed the young man in his estates, then moved with his winnings to Nabiganj, twenty miles from Farrukhabad, to spend the rest of the monsoon.31 On 18 November, Mahadji Scindia finally came in person to the imperial camp.

confederated

Five days later, at quarter past eight in the morning, with his colours flying and drums beating, Shah Alam rode through the Delhi Gate into the ruins of Shahjahanabad. That day, the auspicious feast of Id ul-Fitr, marking the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, was remembered as his bazgasht, or homecoming. This was the day on which he took his place in the palace of his fathers, ending twelve years in exile. The Mughals were back on the Peacock Throne.36

The Delhi Shah Alam returned to at the end of his campaign against Zabita Khan bore little resemblance to the magnificent capital in which he had grown up. Thirty years of incessant warfare, conquest and plunder since 1739 had left the city ruined and depopulated. One traveller described what it was like arriving at Delhi in this period: ‘As far as the eye can reach is one general scene of ruined buildings, long walls, vast arches, and parts of domes … It is impossible to contemplate the ruins of this grand and venerable city without feeling the deepest impressions of melancholy … They extend along the banks of the river, not less than fourteen miles … The great Masjid, built of red stone, is greatly gone to decay. Adjacent to it is the [Chandni] Chowk, now a ruin; even the fort itself, from its having frequently changed its masters in the course of the last seventy years, is going rapidly to desolation …’47 The Swiss adventurer Antoine Polier painted an equally bleak vision. Delhi, he wrote, was now a ‘heap of ruins and rubbish’. The mansions were dilapidated, the gorgeously carved balconies had been sawn up for firewood by the Rohillas; the canals in the Faiz Bazaar and Chandni Chowk were clogged and dry. ‘The only houses in good repair were those belonging to merchants or bankers,’ noted the Comte de Modave.48 A third of the city was completely wrecked. Polier blamed Zabita Khan’s father, Najib ud-Daula, who he said had ‘committed every kind of outrage in the city … the...

chide

He first summoned Mirza Najaf Khan, and in full durbar formally rewarded him for his services with the post of Paymaster General, and the gift of estates in Hansi and Hissar, to the west of the capital.56 He then decamped to the monsoon pleasure resort of Mehrauli, with its marble pavilions, swings, mango orchards and waterfalls, to celebrate his return in the traditional Mughal manner: with pilgrimages to Sufi shrines, music, songs, poetry recitations, fountains, feasting and love-making in the tented camps set up within the Mughal walled gardens of Mehrauli. It was around this time that Shah Alam is thought to have written some of his most celebrated lyrics, a series of monsoon raags in the now lost musical mode of Raag Gaund, rain-tinged verses ‘celebrating the imminent moment of joyful union between the clouds and the earth, the lover and the beloved’.57 These were intended to be sung to celebrate the fecund beauty of the season, giving thanks to the patron saint of Mehrauli for his protection, and asking the saint for his blessing for what was to come: The peafowl murmur atop the hills, while the frogs make noise as they gather Turn your eyes to the beautiful waterfalls and spread the covering cloth fully! I beg this of you, lord Qu’tb-ud Din, fulfil all the desires of my life I worship you, please hear me, constantly touching your feet Come on this beautiful day; take the air and delight in the garden, Sate your thirst and take pleasure contemplating the beauties of ...

seraglio,

As word spread of Najaf Khan’s military prowess, his enemies began to flee in advance of his arrival, enabling Najaf to take in quick succession the fort of Ballabgarh, halfway to Agra, as well as a series of smaller Jat forts at Kotvan and Farrukhnagar.65 By mid-December, Najaf Khan had laid siege to Akbar the Great’s fort at Agra. He left Polier to direct siegeworks, and then headed further south with half the army to seize the mighty fortress of Ramgarh, which he took by surprise, then renamed Aligarh.

disingenuous

Under the guise of being his well-wisher, he shamelessly encouraged the Mirza, who till then had spent his time fighting and defeating enemies of the state, to taste the hitherto unknown pleasures of voluptuousness. Latafat Ali Khan was able to introduce into the Mirza’s own private quarters an experienced prostitute, who day and night had slept with a thousand different men. He now had her appear shamelessly at every intimate gathering, till the Mirza became infatuated with her, and little by little became her sexual slave. By this channel, Latafat Ali Khan was able to receive endless sums of money and gifts; but the wine and the woman quickly sapped the Mirza’s strength. The Mirza spent all his time with this woman, worshipping her beauty, drinking wine to excess, his eyes enflamed and weakened, his body feverish and distempered, until he fell seriously ill. But he paid no attention to his health and carried on partying as long as he could manage it, ignoring doctors’ advice to moderate his behaviour. Finally, his illness reached a stage where it could no longer be cured or treated: the bitter waters of despair closed over his head and Heaven decreed he should die suddenly in the full flower of his manhood.84 Whatever may have been the particulars of Najaf Khan’s love life, the truth about his illness was far crueller. In reality, his time in bed was spent, not in sexual ecstasy, but in pain and suffering, spitting blood. The commander had contracted consumption. By Augu...

Mirza Najaf Khan died on 6 April 1782, aged only forty-six. For ten years he had worked against all the odds, and usually without thanks, to restore to Shah Alam the empire of his ancestors. Thereafter, as one historian put it, ‘The rays of hope for the recovery of the Mughal glory that had begun to shine were dissipated in the growing cloud of anarchy.’87 Najaf Khan was remembered as the last really powerful nobleman of the Mughal rule in India and was given the honorific title of Zul-Fiqaru’d-Daula (the Ultimate Discriminator of the Kingdom).88 He was buried in a modest tomb in a garden a short distance from that of Safdar Jung.* Like much of his life’s work, it was never completed. Almost immediately, the court disintegrated into rival factions as Najaf Khan’s lieutenants scrambled for power. Afrasiyab Khan, Najaf Khan’s most capable officer and his own choice of successor, was the convert son of a Hindu tradesman, and was supported by Anupgiri Gossain and his battalions of warrior ascetics; but because of his humble background he had little backing in the court. His rise was strongly opposed by Najaf’s grand-nephew, the urbanely aristocratic Mirza Muhammad Shafi, who organised a counter-coup on 10 September 1782, directing military operations from the top of the steps of the Jama Masjid. The two rival factions battled each other in the streets of Delhi, while outside the city the Sikhs, Jat and Rohillas all took the opportunity to rise as one in revolt. Shah Alam’s att...

With various instances of extortion and other deeds of maladministration … With impoverishing and depopulating the whole country … with a wanton, and unjust, and pernicious, exercise of his powers … in overturning the ancient establishments of the country … With cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name … Crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men – in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper – in short, nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, a heart blackened to the very blackest, a heart corrupted, gangrened to the core … We have brought before you the head, the Captain General of Iniquity – one in whom all the frauds, all the peculations, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied.2 Hastings, Burke explained, was, quite simply, a criminal: ‘He is a robber. He steals, he filches, he plunders, he oppresses, he extorts.’ He was ‘a professor, a doctor upon the subject’ of crime.3 Worse was to come. Hastings, said Burke, was also ‘a rat’, ‘a weasel’, ‘a keeper of a pig stye, wallowing in corruption’. ‘Like a wild beast, he groans in corners over the dead and dying.’4 Every

portentous

conflated

subservient

fecundity

Trade was flourishing, too. Since the low point of the Company’s near bankruptcy in 1772, exports from Bengal had grown fivefold and now exceeded Rs15 million, or around £5 million. There was every sign that this looked likely to continue.27 Fine Bengali textiles – especially cotton piece goods, muslins and fine silks – were selling well, to the tune of Rs28 million* annually, as was Malwa opium and Gujarati cotton; but the biggest success story was tea from China.28 By 1795, tea sales had doubled in less than a decade to 20 million pounds (9,000 tons); one former director of the EIC wrote that it was as if tea had become ‘the food of the whole people of Great Britain’.29 The only thing holding back further growth was the question of supply: ‘the demand for Bengal goods exceed double the quantity that can be procured,’ Cornwallis reported back to London. As a result, the shortages of bullion which had paralysed the Bengal economy in the 1770s were now long forgotten: the Calcutta mint was now striking Rs2.5 million** of coins each year.30 In every way, the Company holdings in eastern India – the Three Provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa – were now effectively the richest of all the regional post-Mughal successor states dotted around South Asia, with resources many times greater than any of their rivals.

In 1783, Haidar Ali of Mysore had died of a suppurating tumour ‘the size of a dinner plate’ on his back. His son Tipu moved quickly to take over his father’s throne. The Governor of Madras called Tipu ‘the youthful and spirited heir of Haidar, without the odium of his father’s vices or his tyranny’.36 According to one British observer, Tipu, now thirty-three, was ‘about 5ft 7ins in height, uncommonly well-made, except in the neck, which was short, his leg, ankle and foot beautifully proportioned, his arms large and muscular, with the appearance of great strength, but his hands rather too fine and delicate for a soldier … He was remarkably fair for a Mussulman in India, thin, delicately made, with an interesting, mild countenance, of which large animated black eyes were the most conspicuous feature.’37 On his deathbed, Haidar had written to Tipu with advice to his son on the art of good government. He warned him that the Company would attempt to exploit any weakness in the succession: ‘The greatest obstacle you have to conquer is the jealousy of the Europeans,’ he wrote. ‘The English are today all-powerful in India. It is necessary to weaken them by war.’ He suggested that Tipu’s best chance of doing this lay in dividing and ruling: ‘The resources of Hindustan do not suffice to expel the English from the lands they have invaded.

Put the nations of Europe one against the other. It is by the aid of the French that you could conquer the British armies, which are better trained than those of India. The Europeans have surer tactics; always use against them their own weapons.’ He then bade his son farewell and good luck: ‘If God had allowed me a longer career, you need only have enjoyed the success of my enterprises.’ But I leave you for achieving them rich provinces, a population of twelve million souls, troops, treasures and immense resources. I need not awaken your courage. I have seen you often fight by my side, and you shall be the inheritor of my glory. Remember above all that valour can elevate us to the throne, but it does not suffice to keep it. While we may seize a crown owing to the timidity of the people, it can escape us if we do not make haste to entrust it to their love.38 Tipu was already one of the most feared and admired military commanders in India: able and brave, methodical and hard-working, he was above all innovative, determined to acquire the arsenal of European skills and knowledge, and to find ways to use them against

Tipu had already proved his capacity to do this on the battlefield, defeating the Company not only at Pollilur but also twice more since then: in 1782, he had annihilated another British army under Colonel John Braithwaite just outside Tanjore and then, a year later, immediately before his accession, ambushed and destroyed a third Company column on the banks of the Coleroon River. The surprise was that within a few years Tipu showed that he was just as imaginative in peace as he had been in war. Tipu began to import industrial technology through French engineers and experimented with harnessing water power to drive his machinery. He sent envoys to southern China to bring back silkworm eggs and established sericulture in Mysore, something that still enriches the region today. He introduced irrigatio...

syncretic

The culture of innovation Tipu fostered in Mysore stands record to a man very different from that imagined by Calcutta: a modernising technocrat who, as Christopher Bayly nicely put it, attempted to fight ‘European mercantilist power with its own weapons: state monopoly and an aggressive ideology of expansion’. His imported French military technology was if anything more advanced than that of the Company; he failed only because the resources of the Company were now larger, and expanding significantly faster, than those of Mysore. Tipu did, however, have some severe flaws which left him vulnerable to his enemies. For Tipu was prone, even by the standards of the time, to use unnecessary violence against his adversaries and those he defeated, creating many embittered enemies where conciliation would have been equally possible and much wiser. Rebels had their arms, legs, ears and noses cut off before being hanged. He routinely circumcised and brutally converted to Islam captive enemy combatants and internal rebels, both Hindu and Christians, Indian and British. More often than not he destroyed the temples and churches of those he conquered. He did this on a particularly horrific scale on his various campaigns in Malabar, Mangalore and Coorg. Huge numbers of people were forced to migrate from their homes: 60,000 Christians from the southern Carnatic to Mysore in one year alone.46 Christian Portuguese missionaries wrote that ‘he tied naked Christians and Hindus to the legs of el...

indigenous

internecine

precariously

prodigious