Cornwell, Bernard 01 Sharpe’s Tiger-Serigapatam-Apr-May 1799

exquisite little palace while he governed Mysore. It is now a museum. The Tippoo’s mosque still stands, there is another small palace in the city of Bangalore, and, perhaps most moving of all, the Gumbaz, the elegant mausoleum where the Tippoo lies with his parents. To this day his tomb is covered with a cloth patterned with tiger stripes.

The Tippoo revered the tiger, and used tiger motifs wherever he could. His fabulous tiger throne existed, but it was broken up at his death, though large parts of it can still be seen, notably in Windsor Castle. His dreadful toy, the tiger organ, is now in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The organ was sadly damaged during the Blitz, but it has been superbly restored, though, alas, its voice is not what it was. The Tippoo did keep six tigers in his palace courtyard (Wellesley ordered them shot).

Sriringapatna’s outer wall still stands. The town, which has fewer inhabitants now than it did in 1799, is an attractive place and the site of the assault, overlooking the South Cauvery, is marked by an obelisk that stands immediately to the north of the repaired breach. Just behind the breach, and filling the whole north-western corner of the defences, is an enormous earthen bastion – all that remains of the inner wall. The rest of the inner wall has disappeared completely, probably demolished by Wellesley shortly after the siege. Later, during the high noon of the Raj, various sites were identified in Sriringapatna as historically significant locations, but I believe the absence of the inner wall caused some confusion. Modern visitors to Sriringapatna will discover plaques or memorials displayed at the Tippoo’s dungeons, at the Water Gate where he was supposedly killed and, much farther east, at the place where his body was found, but of the three I suspect only the last is accurate.

The so-called dungeons are beneath the Sultan Battery, and while it is quite possible they were used as cells in the 17805 (and thus the place where Baird spent his uncomfortable

forty-four months) they were not so employed in 1799. By then the inner wall had been built (it was hastily constructed after Cornwallis’s 1792 siege), and it is much more likely that the ‘dungeons’ were thereafter employed as a magazine (a use for which they were obviously intended). The Tippoo’s surviving prisoners all attested that they were held inside the inner wall during the siege, so that is where I placed Sharpe, Lawford, McCandless and Hakeswill.

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 inner wall’s Water Gate into the city itself. That second Water Gate has since vanished, but I suspect it was there that he died and not at the existing gate. It might seem logical that he should have attempted to flee the city, but the remaining Water Gate led, and still leads, to the flooded ditch inside the glacis, and even if he had negotiated those obstacles (under fire from the attackers on the wall above him), he would only have reached the southern bank of the Cauvery which was under the guns of the British forces north of the river. By cutting through the city he could have reached (he Bangalore Gate which offered a much greater chance of successful escape. Indeed, after the Tippoo’s death, or perhaps while he was still dying, some of his loyal retainers found him, placed him in the palanquin, and carried him eastwards, presumably in an attempt to reach the Bangalore Gate. They were intercepted, the palanquin was overturned and the Tippoo’s body lay undiscovered for several hours. It

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