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This chapter examines warfare and diplomacy during Tipu Sultan’s reign as a means to understand the complex constructions of religious fidelity and infidelity in his court. The first section explores the murals of his summer palace, the Dariya Daulat Bagh, in order to demonstrate the position of warfare in his political thought from early in his reign, when his regional dominance was at its height and his sovereign authority unquestioned. These murals portray Tipu Sultan’s holistic vision of sovereignty in which diplomacy, piety, and war coexist and substantiate one another. These murals, especially the understudied portraits on the palace’s eastern wall, correlate religious fidelity with Tipu Sultan’s political allies and infidelity with his rivals. The next section interrogates Tipu Sultan’s proclamations of jihad, or holy war, in his correspondence with international political bodies during the brief armistice between the Third and Fourth Anglo-Mysore Wars.

The focus of this chapter is on two texts—the Book of Haidar (Haidar Nama) and the History of Haidar (Nishan-i Haidari)—that relate Tipu Sultan’s genealogy. Of particular interest is the incorporation of tropes from the local southern Karnataka and Kannadiga genealogical tradition that demonstrates how Tipu Sultan and his court acted as adept curators of the historical tradition, constructing a narrative of succession that placed Tipu Sultan as the pinnacle of the kings of Shrirangapattana and its divinely elected ruler. By careful and selective use of the genealogical materials from the courts of his predecessors and through the construction of genealogies of his own family, the court of Tipu Sultan created a complex view of sovereign succession in which both the biological body of the king and the body politic were united as a result of his biological uniqueness and his divine election.

This chapter examines the process of devotional continuity as a way of situating kingship within Tipu Sultan’s reign. Tipu Sultan made claims about his relationship to the divine and thereby about his sovereignty. The Mysore king enacted many of the same devotional practices as his predecessors in the region, patronizing regionally significant dargahs, temples, and mathas that had been associated with royal devotion. The primary focus of the chapter is how Tipu Sultan performed his succession as the king of Bidanuru by sponsoring goddess rituals at the Shringeri Matha and through his devotion to its jagadguru, who Tipu Sultan claimed was responsible for the agricultural and military stability of the Mysore kingdom. This is read alongside Tipu Sultan’s devotional relationship with Gisu Daraz, the Sufi saint patronized by the Bahmani kings of Gulbarga and the Adil Shahs of Bijapur, who visits Tipu Sultan in his dreams.

This chapter introduces the reader to the history of the Mysore kingdom and the courts of Tipu Sultan and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III. It investigates the kingdom’s development before and during the British colonial encounter in order to show the historical circumstances that led to the rearticulation of sovereignty in the late early modern and early colonial period. This chapter frames the period under discussion as a time in which the Mysore courts searched for their sovereign identity, which became intimately connected to religious idioms and the kings’ royal devotion. Lastly, this introduction provides an overall outline of the book and its major arguments.

This epilogue seeks to situate the histories of Tipu Sultan and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III within the contemporary representations of Tipu Sultan and the Wodeyar lineage in order to show the lasting effects of Tipu Sultan and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III in the cultural memory of Mysore and the stakes that their legacies continue to have for people today who invest part of their own identity in these kings. It examines how debates over these kings are still ongoing in public forums, such as social media, newspaper stories, and the current political climate of India, and how they influence democratic elections.

This paper enquires into Mysore’s potentialities for a proto-capitalist development and a sort of industrialization during the reigns of Haidar ‘Ali (r. 1761–82) and Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–99)—the first Muslim rulers of the sultanate of Mysore. During the second half of the eighteenth century, these two autocrats were not only among the most powerful modernizers of South India but also of the subcontinent and Asia as a whole. The threat posed by the growing power of the British East India Company lubricated the wheels of political, fiscal, and military reforms and fuelled profound efforts at centralization. In conjunction with the already existing advances in commerce, artisanry, and incipient capitalist relations of production, the changes that were set in motion suggest that Mysore found itself in an interim stage and historical conjuncture with multiple prospects of socio-economic developments, as well as the potential scope for a transition towards a type of industrial capitalism.

By the final decade of the eighteenth century, the political economy of conquest had crystalized into a distinctively recognizable modern form. Expanded scale of war-making created a need to surveil the financial operations of the colonial state. The changing valence of ‘corruption’ came to include a growing insistence on eliminating leakages from the financial flows that enabled conquest. Corruption was not merely a moral scourge but a structural flaw, which if left unresolved would drain the war-making capability of the early colonial regime. Financial accounts of the East India Company therefore had to be rendered legible to public scrutiny and parliamentary debate in the form of an annual India Budget. Colonial conquest captured the cultural imagination of metropolitan Britain – from painting and the Georgian stage to a new graphic scheme of statistical visualization – all sought to comprehend Britain’s territorial empire in South Asia. The growing appetite for war was fed by territorial conquest on an ever-expanding scale and transformed colonial warfare into the most fiscally impactful activity. An entire infrastructure of financial surveillance had to be created to organize warfare and conquest more efficiently. This edifice of control and scrutiny rested upon a growing appetite for reliable information about the financial health of the Indian empire and forecasting the dividends of territorial conquest.