Tipu Sultan
Tipu Sultan fought the East India Company in four wars, beat it in the field more than once, fired rockets at it that the British copied, wrote to Napoleon and the Directory for help against it, and died sword in hand at a gate of his own capital in May 1799, the last Indian ruler who could have stopped the Company and the one it feared most. He was born in 1751, the son of Haidar Ali, the soldier who had taken Mysore from its rajas, and was fighting the Company at fifteen. In the second war, in 1780, he destroyed a British column at Pollilur, and when Haidar died in December 1782 he took the state and finished the war on even terms at Mangalore in 1784. What he ruled he changed. There was a new calendar and coinage, a state trading company with factories in Muscat, sericulture brought from Bengal, land revenue collected by salaried officers rather than farmed, an army in uniform drilled on the French model and, at Seringapatam, iron-cased rockets with a range of a mile, whose descendants are in the American anthem. He was a devout Muslim ruling a Hindu majority who endowed temples and, in Malabar and Coorg, converted and deported by force, which both sides of the modern argument about him can cite. Cornwallis came against him in 1790 with the Marathas and the Nizam, and in 1792 at the walls of Seringapatam he gave up half his kingdom, thirty million rupees and two sons as hostages. He spent the seven years rebuilding and writing. He wrote to the French at Mauritius, to Zaman Shah of Afghanistan, to the Ottoman sultan, and in 1798 the Jacobin club at Seringapatam planted a liberty tree with Citizen Tipu present. Wellesley used the letters as the case for war. The Company's army was at the walls in April 1799, the breach was stormed on 4 May, and he was found that evening under a heap of bodies at the Water Gate, having refused his officers' advice to escape; the British took his tiger-organ, his throne and his sword, and put a boy of the old dynasty on the throne.
- Lived: 1751 CE – 1799 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: sultan, monarch, general
