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REDISCOVERING TIPU SULTAN'S TREASURY
Susan Stronge
REDISCOVERING TIPU SULTAN’S TREASURY
Few stories in the annals of British involvement in India are as dramatic as
their storming of the citadel of the mier of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, in 1799. The
legacy of the event as preserved in the arts of British India, and even more so
in those of Britain itself, is very marked. Western artists in India produced
paintings and drawings of the key sites in the campaign, the monuments and
fortifications of the region, and portraits of its leading characters,
reproductions of which were disseminated widely in Britain as engravings.1
At home, artists used their imagination to depict the discovery of the body of
Tipu Sultan in the immediate aftermath of the siege, and the siege itself was
re-enacted in London as an entertainment by Astley’s, the precursor of the
modern circus.2 A huge panorama of the Siege of Seringapatam was created
by the young Scottish artist Robert Ker Porter in 1800, its details taken Trom
the most authentic and correct Information relative to the Scenery of the
Place, the Costume of the Soldiery, and the various Circumstances of the
Attack.’ It was exhibited in London to enthusiastic crowds.3
Yet these events, which produced such a range of artistic responses from the
side of the victors, were responsible for the almost complete obliteration of
evidence of the ruler’s own much more varied artistic patronage during his
brief reign, which had begun in 1782. Over the last decades, scholars have
systematically tracked down material dispersed from the royal treasury at
Tipu Sultan’s Capital known to him as Srirangapatan, or simply ‘Patan’, and
to the British as Seringapatam, but discoveries are still to be made.4 One such
is a pair of finials in the Victoria and Albert Museum made of heavily cast
silver, thickly gilded and with chased decoration (fig. 1). Never previously
associated with Tipu Sultan, their distinctive form and ornamentation leave
no doubt as to their provenance, as will be seen.
Tipu Sultan
Tipu Sultan was the son of a Muslim military adventurer, Haidar Ali, whose
outstanding talents soon made him indispensable to the Hindu mier of
Mysore, a kingdom that had been independent since its foundation in 1578, in
the wake of the disintegration of the great Vijayanagar empire. Haidar was one
of the first military commanders in the subcontinent to employ Europeans to
serve in his army and, more crucially, experts who brought the latest, very
advanced, Western weapons technology and techniques of army discipline.
In the confused political conditions of the mid-18th century, when regional
boundaries and alliances were constantly changing due to the disintegration of
the Mughal empire, military engagements were frequent and the opportunities
to expand, or lose, territory were many. When Haidar Ali successfully led the
Mysore army to repel an attack by the Marathas in 1758, he was regarded as
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the saviour of the state and by 1761 had become mier in all but name.5 via free access
151
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
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Governor-General. His expansionist aims for his country's presence in via thefree 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
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context, an important distinction was made between ‘plunder’ and ‘prize’. via 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
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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
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can be used to identify any artefact as a product of the royal workshopsviaoffree 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
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via free access156 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.com10/18/2021 07:10:28PM
via free access157 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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