seems a pity to abandon the present Water Gate as the place where the Tippoo was shot, for its gloomy dank tunnel has a certain eerie drama, but doubtless the matching gate in the inner wall was equally atmospheric.
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 tyrannical reputation was caused, above all, by his execution of thirteen British prisoners before the assault (only eight of them had been captured in the night skirmish, the others were already prisoners). It is unlikely that the executions took place at the Summer Palace, but they were carried out by the Tippoo’s jettis who did kill in the manner described in the novel. Those murders are reprehensible, yet they should not blind us to the Tippoo’s virtues. He was a very brave man, a considerable soldier, a talented administrator and an enlightened ruler and he makes a worthy foe for young Richard Sharpe, who still has a long road to march under his cold, but very clever, Sepoy General.
Sharpe’s Triumph
Bernard Cornwell
The magnificent new novel in the bestselling series, available in hardback from Harper Collins
India, 1803. It is four years since Richard Sharpe earned his sergeant’s stripes at the siege of Seringapatam, and four years in which Sharpe seems to have discovered the easiest billet in the British army. But that comfort is rudely shattered when he witnesses a murderous act of treachery by an English officer who has defected from the East India Company to join the mercenary army of the Mahratta Confederation commanded by the flamboyant Hanoverian, Anthony Pohlmann.
Sharpe is ordered to join the hunt for the renegade Englishman, a hunt that will take him deep into the enemy’s territory where he will face temptations more subtle than he has ever dreamed of. And behind him, relentlessly stalking him, comes his worst enemy, the baleful, twitching Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill who is determined to break Sharpe once and for all.