Tipu Sultan

(1751 – 1799 CE)
He died on his doorstep — sword in hand, empire on fire, and dignity intact.

“To live like a tiger for a day is better than to live like a jackal for a thousand years.” — Tipu Sultan

The air above Seringapatam on 4 May 1799 could have stripped paint. It stank of cordite, sweat, and British self-congratulation. Cannons had been roaring all morning, and by mid-afternoon, the “Tiger of Mysore” lay somewhere under the collapsed archways of his own palace, refusing to die quietly for the benefit of the East India Company’s quarterly reports.

Tipu Sultan had fought four wars against the British — and the fourth was about to end with his corpse under a pile of his own people, still clutching a jeweled sword like it might cut through fate itself.

Let’s rewind, briefly, before the tiger’s stripes fade.

The Boy Who Hated Company Men

Born in 1751 to Hyder Ali, a soldier who clawed his way from nothing to the throne of Mysore, Tipu grew up with gunpowder under his fingernails and a deep, allergic reaction to British smugness. His tutors were Persian scholars, his playmates were military advisors, and his bedtime stories were tactical briefings.

By his twenties, he wasn’t just a prince — he was a prodigy. He studied military engineering like a hobbyist studies fine whiskey. He wrote treatises on rocketry (yes, before the Brits figured out how to launch anything other than tea shipments), developed iron-cased rockets that made enemy horses soil themselves, and introduced silk manufacturing as both a national industry and a middle finger to British imports.

To the Company men, Tipu was dangerous because he didn’t act “native.” He was literate, innovative, and — worst of all — strategically competent. They preferred their enemies barefoot and bewildered.

The Tiger Roars

When Hyder Ali died in 1782, Tipu took the throne and immediately inherited both a kingdom and a long list of people who wanted it gone. The British, ever allergic to independent brown men with functioning artillery, called him “the Tyrant of Mysore.” He, in turn, called them “thieves in wigs” and began modernizing like his life depended on it — which, of course, it did.

Tipu’s armies marched in tiger-striped uniforms, his cannons were engraved with tiger faces, his personal throne bristled with gold tiger heads, and his mechanical toy — a life-sized tiger mauling a red-coated British officer — growled when wound up. (The British later shipped it to London and put it in a museum, proving irony survives conquest.)

He allied with the French — partly for muskets, partly because the French were also in the business of hating the British. Together, they made India’s colonial accountants very nervous. Tipu reorganized his army along European lines, issued his own coinage, and declared himself “Padishah,” Emperor. This was the kind of self-esteem the British Empire found deeply upsetting.

Wars, Rockets, and Bad Reviews

The First and Second Anglo-Mysore Wars were stalemates. The Third, though, ended with a rough reality check. After some early victories, Tipu found himself cornered by a British-led coalition that included every petty princeling the Company could bribe. In 1792, he lost half his kingdom and two of his sons, sent to the British camp as hostages.

For most men, that would’ve been the credits rolling. Tipu? He doubled down. He rebuilt his armies, expanded his rocketry corps, and swore he’d rather die than sign another treaty with men who wore powdered wigs in tropical weather.

When the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War came in 1799, Tipu was ready. Or so he thought.

The Fall of the Tiger

Seringapatam was his capital — a fortress surrounded by rivers, walls, and arrogance. Inside, Tipu’s men manned the ramparts; outside, General George Harris’s British-Indian army encircled the city like a python digesting its prey. Among the British was Arthur Wellesley — the future Duke of Wellington — learning how to ruin people’s empires before moving on to Napoleon’s.

The siege lasted barely a month. British rockets screamed through the night; Mysorean rockets screamed louder but fell short. Tipu’s French allies had long since stopped replying to his letters — the Revolution had eaten its own diplomats — and his regional “friends” had joined the British payroll.

On May 4, the British launched a full assault. They breached the northern wall in twenty minutes. The streets ran with defenders and blood, sometimes in that order. Tipu fought on foot, sword in hand, his jeweled tiger-head hilt flashing between gunpowder clouds. Witnesses said he personally shot one soldier dead before being swarmed. A musket ball tore through his side; another hit his temple. He died on the threshold of a doorway — the last sovereign ruler in India to fall in defense of his own throne.

When the British found his body, they looted his jewelry before identifying him. A soldier pried a gold buckle from Tipu’s arm while another realized, too late, who it was. The irony? He died defending a city whose walls were breached partly because British officers bribed his own guards.

The Corpse and the Legend

The British buried him with “honor,” which in imperial terms meant burying him quickly and taking his stuff. His throne, weapons, and tigers were packed up and shipped to England as trophies. The British East India Company congratulated itself on defeating “the last enemy of British India.”

But history has a longer memory than empires do.

To Indians, Tipu became a martyr — a man who stood when everyone else bowed. To the British, he remained the “Tiger of Mysore,” equal parts bogeyman and begrudged genius. Victorian writers couldn’t decide whether to vilify him or romanticize him; they settled on both. Modern India split the difference too — some hail him as a proto-nationalist hero, others as a religious zealot. The truth, as usual, is less polite: he was both a ruthless ruler and a visionary inventor, a man who combined enlightenment with autocracy like whiskey and dynamite.

His rockets — the very same iron-cased warheads that terrorized British troops — inspired the Congreve rockets later used by the British themselves. Yes, the “rocket’s red glare” in The Star-Spangled Banner owes something to the man they killed for daring to innovate. There’s your historical footnote, complete with smoke and hypocrisy.

Afterlife of a Tiger

Today, statues of Tipu Sultan stand in India, alternately garlanded and vandalized depending on the political season. Schoolbooks argue about whether he was a patriot or a despot. Meanwhile, somewhere in a London museum, Tipu’s Tigerstill growls mechanically — a wooden British soldier eternally mauled by an Indian tiger while tourists take selfies.

It’s almost poetic: the Empire that stuffed and displayed him can’t quite stop feeding on the spectacle of its own fear.

He lived like a tiger. He died like one too — cornered, bleeding, and still trying to bite. The jackals wrote the report, of course. They always do.

In the end, the Tiger of Mysore proved one thing the British never could — how to die with dignity.

Sources (for those who still believe in those):

Brittlebank, Kate. Tiger: The Life of Tipu Sultan. New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2016.

Reddy, N. Krishna. Tipu Sultan: The Tiger of Mysore. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

The British East India Company — annual reports, smugness edition

Tipu’s Tiger, Victoria and Albert Museum (still growling)