Sharpe's Tiger

The so-called dungeons are beneath the Sultan Battery, and while it is quite possible they were used as cells in the 1780s (and thus the place where Baird spent his uncomfortable forty-four months) they were not so employed in 1799. By then the i

A plaque marks the Water Gate through the outer wall as the site of the Tippoo's death, but again this seems wrong. The evidence of Mysorean survivors, some of whom were close to the Tippoo at the end, clearly states that the Tippoo was trying to get inside the city when he was killed. We know he had been fighting on the outer wall and that when he broke off that fight he came down to the space between the walls, and there the story becomes muddled. British sources claim he tried to escape the city through the outer wall's Water Gate, but the Indian testimonies all agree that he tried to go through the i

The Tippoo's body was treated with honour, and next day, as the novel describes, he was buried beside his parents in the Gumbaz mausoleum. Wellesley, meanwhile, stamped out the looting in the city (he hung four looters, a remedy he would employ in the wake of future sieges), but what the common soldier could not take, the senior officers happily plundered for themselves. The East India Company's Prize Agents tallied the Tippoo's treasures at a value of two million pounds (1799 pounds) and half of that fabulous fortune was declared to be prize money, so that many senior officers became rich men through that single day's work. Most of the treasures returned to Britain, where they remain, some on public view, but many still in private hands.

Today the Tippoo is a hero to many Indians who regard him as a proto-independence fighter. This seems a perverse judgement. Most of the Tippoo's enemies were other Indian states, though admittedly his fiercest fights were against the British (and their Indian allies), but he could never entirely rely on his Hindu subjects. No one is certain that he was betrayed on the day of his death, but it seems more than likely that several Hindu officers, like the fictional Appah Rao, were deliberately lukewarm in their support. The Tippoo's Muslim religion and his preference for the Persian language mark him as being outside the mainstream of modern Indian tradition, which is perhaps why I was assured by one educated Indian that the Tippoo had, in truth, been a Hindu. He was not, and no amount of wishful thinking can make him into a more acceptably 'Indian' hero. Nor does his story need embellishment, for he was a hero anyway, even if he never did fight for Indian independence. He fought for Mysorean domination over India, which was a quite different thing.

I would like to thank Elizabeth Cartmale-Freedman who ransacked the files of London's India House and did much other research for Sharpe's Tiger, and for all the useful things she discovered and which I left out, I apologize. I must also thank my agent, Toby Eady, who went above and beyond the call of duty by accompanying me to Sriringapatna. Research has rarely been more enjoyable. As usual, when writing Sharpe, I owe gratitude to Lady Elizabeth Longford for her superb book Wellington, the Tears of the Sword, and to the late Jac Weller for his indispensable Wellington in India.

Sriringapatna is still dominated by the Tippoo's memory. He was an efficient ruler whom Indians revere and the British consider a callous tyrant. That tyra