Tipu Sultan: Iron Rockets, Napoleon's Letter and the Fall of Seringapatam

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Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, was born in 1751 in Devanahalli, in present-day Karnataka, son of Hyder Ali, an illiterate officer who rose to become de facto ruler of Mysore. Hyder gave his son the education he lacked: Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Kannada, Islamic jurisprudence, and riding, shooting and fencing. Tipu rode into battle against the British at 15, commanded cavalry at 16, and took the throne in 1782 during the Second Anglo-Mysore War after his father died of cancer. He made the state the main merchant, set up state trading depots, traded directly with Muscat and Jeddah, and sent emissaries to Bengal to learn mulberry growing and silkworm rearing, founding the Mysore silk industry. Sources say Mysore overtook Bengal as the subcontinent's leading economy.

His engineers cased rockets in hammered iron, extending range to about two kilometers and fixing blades to them; at Pollilur in 1780 they caused panic among British troops, and he built a rocket corps of 5,000. He courted the Ottomans, the Durrani Empire and France, and Napoleon's 1798 letter proposing an alliance was intercepted. He endowed over 150 Hindu temples and employed a Hindu finance minister, Purnaiah, while imposing harsh policies, forced conversions and executions in Malabar. The 1792 Treaty of Seringapatam cost him half his kingdom, over 30 million rupees and two sons held as hostages. In 1799, with ministers bribed, he died fighting in the breach at Seringapatam at 47.

• Tipu's Tiger, a near life-size automaton of a tiger mauling a European soldier that growls when cranked, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
• He laid the groundwork for the Kannambadi dam on the Kaveri River.
• French officers in Mysore set up a Jacobin club and reportedly called him Citizen Tipu.
• He reportedly said it was better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep.
• Britain reverse engineered his rockets into the Congreve rocket, later fired at Fort McHenry in the War of 1812.