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Figure i Pair of finials, silver, cast and gilt with chased decoration, Victoria and Albert Museum, IPN 2599 &A. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum

When Tipu Sultan was born, Haidar Ali ensured that he was given the Standard education of a Muslim prince in India at the time, meaning that he was necessarily familiar with Arabic, but also read the classics of Persian literature; in addition, he was proficient in Urdu and Kannada. Tipu Sultan’s literary interests were reflected in the contents of his library, which also contained some of his own compositions.6 As soon as he was old enough, he began to join his father on the battlefield, increasing his military prowess until he was able to take command of particular campaigns himself. Together they extended Mysore’s borders. This made conflict with the British East India Company at the time almost inevitable, given the expansionist tendencies of the Company, their awareness that the increasing stability and wealth of Mysore would threaten their own interests in the subcontinent, and the presence of the French - their arch-enemy - in the Mysore army.

Anglo-Mysore wars

Four wars took place between Mysore and the British between 1766 and 1799. The first ended in 1769 with Haidar dictating peace terms to the British forces near their settlement of Fort St George, Madras. A second conflict took place in 1780, ending in 1784 after enormous losses on both sides, and the capture by the Mysore army of British officers. Some would survive their years of captivity to publish reminiscences of the misery of life in captivity. Haidar Ali had died during this conflict, at the end of 1782, and Tipu Sultan was nominated his legitimate successor. He took formal power, though acknowledging the nominal supremacy of the almost powerless Mughal emperor, as other regional miers also did. A third conflict with the British under the command of Lord Cornwallis ended in disaster for Tipu Sultan in 1792, when he was forced to make peace and cede half of his kingdom to the British, while handing over two of his small sons as hostages to ensure that he kept to his part of the agreement. The final phase began in 1798 with the arrival of Lord Mornington as the new Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:27:16AM Governor-General. His expansionist aims for his country's presence in viathe free access 152 subcontinent coincided with continuing conflict in Europe between England and France. The small French presence in Mysore, and the declaration of an alliance between them and Tipu Sultan proclaimed in French Mauritius, was deemed to be dangerous. In reality, there was little prospect of French troops being despatched to Mysore in any significant numbers.7 Nevertheless, even as letters of peace were being written to Seringapatam, preparations were quietly being made for war. In February 1799, the army began to close in on the fortified Capital, with their Commander-in-Chief General Harris aware that the affair had to be settled before the beginning of May, before the monsoon made the river Kaveri impassable, thus cutting off his troops from Tipu Sultan’s well-stocked citadel. The decisive attack took place on 4 May. The army stormed across the breach at 1 p.m., and by 2.30 p.m. the victory was won.8 Contemporary sources recount the details of the violent assault: The column [advancing on the breach] carried everything before them. The enemy were shot and bayoneted without mercy. Some leaped over the parapet into the outer ditch, or fausse-braye, and were either killed by the fall, or shot from the rampart above; others plunged into the inner wet ditch, and were drowned. Those who attempted to escape to the inner fort, or town, by the Delhi gate, in the north face, were met in the arch by those who were driven out by the troops which had entered the place.9 As the invaders crossed the second rampart, the panic inside the city increased. Thousands were said to have thrown down their arms to flee, with some trying to escape through the Bangalore gateway. However, that gate was closed and because it opened inwards, could not be opened against the tide of people. Then, due to ‘some unknown cause’, the gate caught fire and those who tried to run back the way they had come, many of them simply the inhabitants of the city, were trapped and crushed to death.10 During the onslaught, Tipu Sultan was himself killed, and was found much later, under a pile of bodies. The ramparts breached, fierce looting began. Reports made at the time describe soldiers and their officers seizing gold coins from the palace treasury, with houses everywhere being raided. The outer gates were eventually locked in an attempt to prevent anyone escaping with their plunder, and sentinels were posted with instructions not to let any individual through without a passport. However some simply threw their new possessions over the walls to waiting friends, or lowered them down on ropes.

Plunder and prize

Finally, the young Colonel Arthur Wellesley (brother of the Governor- General, and later to become famous as the Duke of Wellington) took command of the situation, giving orders for looters to be hanged or flogged. Without this action, he wrote in a letter to General Harris seeking his authorisation, ‘it is vain to expect to stop the plunder’ and he concluded that, already, ‘the property of everyone is gone’.11 The authority given, a few men were hanged, many more were flogged, and the plundering finally ceased.12 However, the major dispersal of Tipu Sultan’s treasury was still to come. After the initial raid, guards had quickly been sent to the entrance of the chamber, thus protecting most of what was inside. The next stage was for a ‘Prize Committee’ to be set up, to organise valuation of the contents. In this Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:27:16AM context, an important distinction was made between ‘plunder’ and ‘prizevia ’free. access 153 As the American scholar Richard Davis notes, unregulated plunder transgressed 18th century Acts of Parliament (thereby justifying the calls to have plunderers so severely punished), whereas ‘prize’ was the process following victory whereby the booty was carefully assessed and distributed to the troops according to rank, and could therefore be defended as a legitimate process.13 On-site auctions were usual; at Seringapatam it is clear that local goldsmiths and jewellers quickly moved in to make shrewd purchases from individuals, whether looters or recipients of prize allotments, who were unable to distinguish between valuable precious stones and coloured glass. Major David Price, who led the committee, described the discovery and distribution of Tipu’s wealth. Price made his temporary home in the palace’s Hall of Audience, next to the treasury door. The seven agents set up their tables, and took stock. Price’s role was to register the jewels and objects in precious metals, working with a Hindu goldsmith who provided the valuation.14 First, they counted the coins, ‘twelve hundred thousand sultauny pagodas’, which were worth nearly half a million sterling.15 Then, a detailed examination was made of the loose precious stones, the jewellery and jewelled ornaments, silver and gold plate, and personal clothing, weapons and ornaments of Tipu Sultan. Other precious items were found in different apartments of the palace.16 Price wrote later that the jewels alone were worth £360,000, but no detailed list of the contents has yet been found, in marked contrast to the meticulous inventory that was taken of the military equipment and the storehouses.17

Remains of the treasury

The breaking up of the treasury was remorseless. Price noted that when the distribution process was nearly finished, it was found that ‘there was nothing left to make up the shares of a long list of subalterns, who had not yet participated in the booty.’18 However, they still had the throne, ‘overlaid with sheets of pure gold’ and ornamented with jewelled tiger heads, and with a gold canopy fringed with pearls and topped by a large jewelled bird. The decision was therefore taken to destroy it, in order to divide the gold into packages each worth one-third of a subaltern’s share.19 A very few intact swords and daggers with bejewelled jade hilts eventually made their way back to Britain, as did a small number of jewelled hardstone rings and pieces of jewellery which were soon broken up, their stones being reset into ornaments of European form. The main category of Tipu Sultan’s personal possessions to have survived is that of arms and armour. These had little cash value at the time, and were treasured as the most fitting souvenirs of such a famous military victory. In addition, they were admired for their decoration and construction, and in the case of some of the firearms, for the ingenuity of their mechanisms.20 For the art historian, these personal weapons are an important documentary source as they usually bear Persian inscriptions giving their place and date of manufacture, and often the maker. All have particular decorative features that make their provenance instantly obvious: they incorporate highly distinctive and stylized tiger heads and/or tiger stripes in their form or decoration. The tiger stripes are found on textiles, on guns, or stamped onto silver or gold in a miniature size that may initially Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:27:16AM mean they are overlooked. A pair of flintlock pistols in the Victoria andvia Albert free access 154

Figure 2 Pair of flintlock pistols, made at Tatan’ (Srirangapatnam) by Sayid Ma’sum, dated 1224 M./i796-7, Victoria and Albert Museum, IS.55 and 56-2005. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum

Museum illustrates the ubiquity of the motif, both in formal and in purely decorative terms, on objects that leave no doubt as to their royal ownership, place and date of manufacture. The Persian inscriptions inlaid in gold on their steel barrels record that they were made by Tipu Sultan’s leading armourer, Sayyid Ma’sum, in Patan, referring to the Capital, in ‘the workshop of His Highness’ (fig. 2). They are dated 1224, which relates not to the conventional Muslim calendar, dating from the Prophet’s flight from Mecca to Medina in 633 AD, but to Tipu Sultan’s idiosyncratic ‘Mawludi’ system dated from the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. To avoid confusion between the two calendars, Mawludi dates are written in reverse order. The verses praise the mier and eulogize the State, and the barrels are also inlaid with a gold tiger mask composed of the Arabic words assadullah al- ghalib (‘The Lion of God is Triumphant') and their mirror image. The silver mounts are chased with flower heads whose petals are in the shape of stylized tiger stripes, and the cock on each gun is in the form of a tiger stripe terminating in a tiger head. The flintlock action of the pistols reflects the latest European technology, almost certainly due to the presence of French armourers in Mysore, but the design of the tiger head on the cock is unique to Tipu Sultan’s firearms. Many other firearms and several royal swords are known; most of them have provenances linking them directly with the leading participants of the Siege of Seringapatam.21 All have the ubiquitous stylized tiger stripe and/or tiger head motif found on many other artefacts associated with the court, including textiles and Tipu Sultan’s throne. Once this feature has been recognized, it Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:27:16AM can be used to identify any artefact as a product of the royal workshopsvia of free access Figure 3 Tipu Sultan, whether or not it bears inscriptional evidence of the fact. Tipu’s Tiger, painted The most famous of all of Tipu Sultan’s commissions is his semi-automaton wood, concealing an figure of a wooden tiger mauling a prostrate European soldier, now in the organ inside the body of Victoria and Albert Museum and found by the British in the music room of the tiger, Mysore, c. 1795, Victoria and the palace in the days after the siege (fig. 3).22 Despite the difference in Albert Museum, IS.2545. materials, there is an obvious relationship between the head of the wooden tiger and those on the silver-gilt finials. The scale of the stripes in relation to the tiger head is similar, as are the circular concave irises of the eyes. The finials probably belonged to the terminals of poles of a royal palanquin or howdah, and must have been taken from the royal treasury at the Siege of Seringapatam, though they have lost any tracé of their provenance. At some point in the 20th century, the pair was given the limbo-like identification of an Tndian Provisional Number’, meaning that they had lost their original museum acquisition number and therefore any earlier history that may have been known. It is possible that they were originally in the collections of the Indian Museum, founded in 1799 as an ‘oriental repository’ for the books and miscellaneous items sent home by the servants of the Honourable East India Company to their masters in London. The collections moved several times before a large proportion of them was formally transferred in 1879 to the South Kensington Museum (later renamed the Victoria and Albert

Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:27:16AM via free access 156 Museum). In the process of these movements, most of the records and accession information was lost or destroyed. Further research may perhaps reveal their original function, and precisely how they made the journey from India to England in the aftermath of the infamous siege.

This short article is written for my friend, the consummate curator Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, who has discovered and, crucially, published many previously unknown treasures from South and South-east Asia in the collections of the Rijksmuseum and other Dutch museums.

Notes

1. For the works done in India, see for example A. Buddle et al, The Tiger and the Thistle; Tipu Sultan and the Scots in India, 1760-1800, Edinburgh, 1999, passim; for the prints, see for example the images in ‘Madras and Southern India’ in: P. Godrej and P. Rohatgi, Scenic Splendours; India through the printed image, London/New Delhi, 1989, pp. 100-122. 2. See Buddle, Opxit. (note 1), cat.nos. 96 and 127. 3. The 2,550 square foot canvas was ultimately destroyed by fire, but engravings of the key to the panorama’s details survive (see A. Buddle, Tigers round the Throne; the court of Tipu Sultan, London, 1990, p. 70. 4. One of the first authors to begin the process was Mildred Archer, in her monograph Tippoo’s r/ger.(Victoria and Albert Museum, 1959). A list of ‘Relics of Tipu Sultan’ was compiled by Denys Forrest in Tiger of Mysore; the life and death of Tipu Sultan (1970), Appendix V, pp. 354-361. Anne Buddle added to these in her exhibition catalogues Tigers round the Throne (1990) and The Tiger and the Thistle (1999), while Robin Wigington produced an important monograph on the ruler’s firearms in his book The Firearms of Tipu Sultan 1783-1799, Hatfield, 1992. The corpus of material was considerably extended by Mohammad Moienuddin in Sunset at Srirangapatam; after the death of Tipu Sultan (Hyderabad, 2000). Moienuddin in particular makes significant corrections to Mrs. Archer’s often misleading, or erroneous interpretations. I add a few additional pieces in T/pu's Tigers, to be published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2009. 5. Mohibbul Hasan, History of Tipu Sultan, Delhi, 2005, 2nd rev. edn., pp. 5-6. 6. Hasan, Op.cit. (note 5), pp. 7-8. The library was taken by the British captors of the palace in 1799. A portion of it was sent to London, and it still remains in the British Library; another section was sent to Fort William, Calcutta. The ruler’s own Koran was a major attraction of the East India Company’s display in the 19th century and is now in the British Royal Collection. See Ch. Stewart, Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental Library of the Late Tippoo Sultan, Cambridge, 1809 for the initial assessment of the library. Further details, and some corrections, are to be found in W. Miles (trans.), Hussain Ali Khan Kermani, History of Tipu Sultan, Calcutta, 1958 (reprint of 1864 edition), pp. 173-186. 7. See Hasan, Op.cit. (note 5), pp. 286-291. 8. General Harris’s letter to Lord Mornington, quoted in W. S. Seton-Karr (ed.), Selections from the Calcutta Gazettes of the years 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801 [-1805] showing the political and social condition of the English in India Sixty Years Ago. Vol. III, Calcutta, 1868, p. 29. 9. H.M. Vibart, ‘Royal (Late Madras) Engineers’, The Military History of the Madras Engineers and Pioneers from 1743 up to the Present Time, London, 1881, Vol. I, pp. 318-9. 10. Vibart, Op.cit. (note 9) Hasan, Op.cit. (note 5), p. 317 suggests that the fire was

started deliberately by the attackers. Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:27:16AM via free access 157 11. SJ. Owen (ed.), A Selection from the Despatches, Memoranda, and other Papers, relating to India of Field-Marshall the Duke of Wellington, K.G., Oxford, 1880, p. 66. 12. J. Weller, Wellington in India, London, 2000, p. 84. 13. R.H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images, Princeton, 1997, p. 154. 14. D. Price, Memoirs of a Field Officer on the Retired List of the Indian Army, London, 1839, p. 438. 15. Price, Op.cit (note 14), p. 434. 16. Asiatic Annual Register, or, A View of the History of Hindustan, and of the politics, commerce and literature of Asia for the year 1799, London, 1800, pp. 24102, quoted in Moienuddin, Op.cit. (note 4), p. 29. 17. Price, Op.cit. (note 14), p. 455. See also Moienuddin, Op.cit. (note 4), pp. 24-34. The only itemised list to have been identified so far is that of the share of General, later Lord, Harris who gained l/8th of the total Prize in his role as Commander in Chief. This is preserved in Kent County Archives. Moienuddin reproduces the official memorandum giving broad categories of material, with their valuations (pp. 27-28). 18. Price, Op.cit. (note 14), p. 444. 19. Price, Op.cit. (note 14), p. 444. 20. See Wiginton, Op.cit. (note 4), especially pp. 14-35. 21. See for example, M. Archer et al., Treasures from India; the Clive collection at Powis Castle, London, 1987, cat.nos. 33, 34 and 35 for personal swords and cat.no. 68 for a pair of cannon from the foundry at ‘Patan’; firearms are published in the seminal work by Robin Wigington, Op.cit. (note 4); Moienuddin, Op.cit. (note 4) incorporated these and others into his survey of Tipu Sultan’s possessions. 22. See Archer, Op.cit. (note 4), p. 1, for the memorandum describing the discovery.

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