This vividly illustrated monumental painting depicts the Battle of Pollilur, which took place on 10 September 1780, as part of the Second Anglo-Mysore War. It represents the great victory of the Mysore armies led by Haidar Ali, the ruler of Mysore, and his son Tipu, against the British troops of the East India Company. As a visual record of the battle, and to commemorate his victory, Tipu Sultan commissioned a painting of the Battle of Pollilur as part of a large mural for the newly built Daria Daulat Bagh in Seringapatam in 1784. Three existing copies of the original Pollilur painting are known, three details in a miniature in Baroda Museum; twenty-four preparatory paintings depicting sections of the series, sold in these rooms, 6 October 2010, lot 60, and the present complete panorama.

THE BATTLE OF POLLILUR - WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

The Battle of Pollilur is undoubtedly one of the great masterpieces of the period: a panorama of one of the crucial turning points of Indian history, realised with extraordinary vivacity and energy that has few rivals in the art of the period. The painting extends over ten large sheets of paper, nearly thirty-two feet (978.5cm) long, and focuses in on the moment when the Company’s ammunition tumbril explodes, breaking the British square, while Tipu’s cavalry advances from left and right, “like waves of an angry sea,” according to the contemporary Mughal historian Ghulam Husain Khan. The pink-cheeked and rather effeminate-looking Company troops wait fearfully for the impact of the Mysore charge, as the gallant and thickly moustachioed Mysore lancers close in for the kill. To the right, the French commander Lally peers triumphantly through his telescope; but Haidar and Tipu look on majestically and impassively at their triumph, while Tipu, with magnificent sang-froid sniffs a single red rose as if on a pleasure outing to a garden to inspect his flowers.

At dawn on 7 September 1780, a Scottish soldier named Colonel William Baillie could be seen leading a column of four thousand Indian sepoys and a few hundred Highland Scots through flooded paddy fields about thirty-five miles south of Madras. Baillie knew he was surrounded on all sides by the troops of Tipu Sultan, the much-feared 'Tiger of Mysore', but he hoped to make it over the nine miles that separated him from nearby walls of Kanchipuram. There another Highlander, Sir Hector Munro, was anxiously awaiting his arrival.

At around 5.30 a.m., while marching over an ascent that led down towards the plain below, Baillie found his way blocked by a small fortified village named Pollilur. It was full of Tipu’s troops and artillery, with more artillery dug in to their left. They had been waiting in ambush for several hours since being informed of Baillie’s timing and route by Tipu’s spies the night before. Both now began a fierce artillery barrage onto Baillie’s exposed column. Baillie’s troops were strung out along an avenue, raised up and exposed upon an embankment, with muddy paddy fields on both sides and a river at some distance to their right.

Unable to advance, and with no real option of retreat, Baillie ordered his troops to form a hollow square, "huddled one on the top of the other, three corps deep", with their baggage and ammunition in the middle. There they stopped “to refresh the men with a dram and biscuit.” Within half an hour, Tipu’s troops had fanned out to block all the different paths to Kanchipuram.

The cannonade continued with growing intensity, with the front ranks of Baillie’s square taking fire from around thirty of Tipu’s guns. Baillie was among those wounded, hit in the leg by a cannon ball; but he continued to give orders from a palanquin. There was then a lull when an eerie silence fell.

Thirty minutes later, troops in the front ranks reported hearing the distant sound of beating kettledrums. As the Company troops watched, a great cloud of dust rose up in the distance. This soon resolved into several long lines of scarlet columns advancing steadily towards them. The Scots assumed it was Munro coming to save them and gave out a loud cheer. It was only when the columns grew closer that they realised it was actually Tipu Sultan’s father, Haidar Ali, bringing with him the main Mysore army – some 25,000 cavalry, accompanied by thirty battalions of sepoys – closing in to seal their fate. "We were quickly surrounded by Haidar’s horse," wrote one Highland officer. "They were followed by his guns which joined a kind of semicircle round us, the number of about 50 at least, which opened upon us by degree."[i]

Under Baillie’s direction, the Scottish square repulsed thirteen successive charges from the Mysore cavalry. Failing to break the line, Haidar ordered a pause, and brought forward his biggest guns. Around 8 a.m., the heaviest cannonade of all began from close range, with grapeshot scything down the ranks of redcoats. "Our fate was for above an hour to be exposed to the hottest cannonade that ever was known in India," wrote Baillie’s younger brother John. "We were mowed down by scores."[ii] Then two ammunition tumbrils were hit and both blew up simultaneously, making "large openings in both lines, on which their Cavalry made the first impression. They were followed by the Elephants, which completed our overthrow."[iii]

After expending all the remaining gunpowder, Baillie tried to surrender and tied his handkerchief to his sword which he held aloft. He and his deputy, David Baird, both ordered their men to ground their arms; but straggling fire from some of his sepoys who had not heard the order meant that the Mysore cavalry disregarded the surrender and refused to give quarter. Instead the horsemen rode in and began to cut down the disarmed and defenceless troops; "a most shocking massacre ensued."[iv]

According to a lieutenant in the 73rd Highland Regiment, "The last and most awful struggle was marked by the clashing of arms and shields, the snorting and kicking of horses, the snapping of spears, the glistening of bloody swords, oaths and imprecations; concluded with the groans and cries of mutilated men, wounded horses tumbling to the ground amid dying soldiers, the hideous roaring of elephants as they trampled about and wielded their dreadful chains amongst both friends and foes."

Such as were saved from immediate death were so crowded together that it was only with difficulty they could stand; several were in a state of suffocation, while others from the weight of the dead bodies that had fallen upon them were fixed to the spot and therefore at the mercy of the enemy … Some were trampled under the feet of elephants, camels and horses, and those who were stripped of their clothing lay exposed to the scorching sun, without water and died a lingering and miserable death, becoming the prey to ravenous wild animals.[v]

Out of 86 officers, 36 were killed, 34 were wounded and taken prisoner; only 16 captured were unwounded. Baillie received a back and head wound, in addition to losing a leg. Baird received two sabre cuts on the head and a pike wound in the arm. His ADC and young cousin, James Dalrymple, received a severe back wound and "two cuts in my head". Around two hundred prisoners were taken. Most of the rest of the force of 3,800 was annihilated. When Sir David Baird’s Scottish mother heard that her son had been captured by Tipu, and that the prisoners had been led away handcuffed two by two, she remarked, "I pity the man who was chained to poor Davie."

In all, Tipu eventually captured one in five of all the British soldiers in India: no less than seven thousand British men, along with an unknown number of women, were held captive by Tipu at one t.mes or another in his sophisticated fortress of Seringapatam. Many were circumcised and forcibly converted to Islam. Even more humiliatingly, several British regimental drummer boys were made to wear ghagra cholis and entertain the court as nautch girls.

At Pollilur, Tipu Sultan inflicted on the East India Company the most crushing defeat the Company would ever receive, and one which nearly ended British rule in India. One early analysis of the defeat expressed surprise that the different Indian rivals of the Company did not take more advantage of the crucial opportunity Pollilur presented: "Had the French sent t.mes ly assistance to the enemy," he wrote, "as there was every reason to expect, and had the Mahratta states, instead of remaining quiet spectators … joined their confederate forces and acted with unanimity, there could not have been a doubt but the British must have been dispossessed of almost every settlement on the Peninsula. Had Haidar pursued his success after the defeat of Baillie considering the shattered and dispirited state of the rest of the army, there could scarcely have been a hope of it not falling, together with Fort St George, almost a defenceless prey into the hands of the enemy." [vi] Fortunately for the Company, Haidar was determined to avoided any further decisive engagements. The Company kept its toehold in the south only by the lack of confidence shown by its adversaries.

Tipu was understandably proud of his victory, and was quick to commemorate it with a mural which still remains, albeit faded and much repainted, on the side wall of his pleasure palace at Darya Daulat Bagh, which lies above the banks of Cavery River on the north side of his great fortified island fortress of Srirangapatnam. It is a slightly later copy of the lower central-right section of that mural, painted at some point between 1799 and around 1820, that Replica Shoes ’s now brings to auction.

Tipu stands apart from almost all his contemporaries in his prescience about the intentions of the British, his profound alarm at the power of their East India Company, and his determination to attempt to root it out of India. He tried to warn other Indian rulers of the dangers of the increasingly arrogant and aggressive Company: “Know you not the custom of the English?” he wrote in vain to the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1796. “Wherever they fix their talons they contrive little by little to work themselves into the whole management of affairs.”

It was these British enemies of Tipu who did most to create the image of Tipu so widely held today. In 1799, before sending into the field the largest army the East India Company ever gathered together, the Governor General, Lord Wellesley, began a campaign of vilification against Tipu, portraying him as an aggressive Muslim Monster who divided his t.mes between oppressing his subjects and planning to drive the British into the sea. This essay in imperial villain-making opened the way for a lucrative conquest and the installation of a more pliable regime.

It is, however, a truth universally acknowledged that a politician in search of a war is not over-scrupulous with matters of fact. Until recently, the British propaganda offensive against Tipu has determined the way that most people in India remember him. But as with more recent dossiers produced to justify pre-emptive military action against Muslim states, the evidence presented reveals far more about the desires of the attacker than it does about the reality of the attacked. For recent work by a succession of modern scholars has succeeded in reconstructing a very different Tipu to the one-dimensional fanatic invented by Company propaganda. Tipu, it is now clear, was in fact one of the most innovative and far-sighted rulers of the pre-Colonial period.

What really worried the British was less that Tipu was a Muslim fanatic, something strange and alien, but that he was in fact frighteningly familiar: a modernising technocrat who used the weapons of the West against their own inventors. Indeed in many ways he beat them at their own game. Tactically the Mysore forces were fully the match of those of the East India Company; indeed the steely discipline of the Mysore infantry amazed many British observers and the Mysore light cavalry was “the best in the world,” according to Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington.

Moreover the sepoys’ rifles and canon were based on the latest French designs, and their artillery had a heavier bore and longer range than anything possessed by the Company. Indeed in many respects the Mysore troops were more innovative and tactically well ahead of the Company armies: firing rockets from their camel cavalry to disperse hostile cavalry, for example, long before William Congreve’s rocket system was adopted by the British army. More worrying still for Wellesley, the defences of the island fortress of Seringapatam were state of the art and designed by French engineers, following Sébastian de Vauban’s research into artillery-resistant fortifications. [vii]

Tipu was just as innovative in peace as he was in war. He tried to import industrial technology through French engineers and experimented with harnessing water-power to drive his machinery. He sent envoys to Southern China to bring back silkworm eggs and established sericulture in Mysore, something that still enriches the region today. He introduced irrigation and built dams so that even his British enemies had to admit that his kingdom was “well cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants, cities [including Bangalore] newly founded and commerce extended.”

More remarkably still, he created what amounted to a State Trading Company with its own ships and factories dotted across the Persian Gulf. He even asked his ambassadors to Istanbul to secure for him the ijara—farm—of Basra so that, like the Europeans, he could establish an overseas settlement which would be both a base and a safe haven for his vessels. [viii] No wonder the British were terrified when they discovered that ‘Citizen Tippoo’ was in communication with Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he formally invited to visit India to expel the British.

As Christopher Bayly nicely put it, Tipu attempted to fight “European mercantilist power with its own weapons: state monopoly and an aggressive ideology of expansion.” He failed only because the resources of the Company were expanding faster than those of Mysore. British propaganda might like to portray Tipu as a savage barbarian, but he was in fact something of a connoisseur and an intellectual, with a library containing some 2,000 volumes in several languages, and a large collects ion of modern scientific instruments including thermometers and barometers.[ix] The culture of innovation Tipu fostered in Mysore stands record to a man very different from that imagined by the Islamophobic propaganda of the British and the startling inaccuracy of Lord Wellesley’s “dodgy dossier” of 1799.

Tipu knew what he was risking when he took on the British, but as he said himself, “I would rather live a day as a tiger than a lifet.mes as a sheep.” [x] He duly went down fighting: when Wellesley’s army finally closed in for the kill and surrounded Srirangapatnam in mid-April 1799, Tipu resisted with characteristic ingenuity and tenacity. His skillful defence ended with Tipu falling, sword in hand, at the breach in his defences near the water gate.

Tipu was certainly a complex figure with a strong streak of cruelty in his character. His was an Islamic state, albeit one run with a Hindu administration and a partially Hindu army, and led by a man who firmly believed in the power of Hindu deities. It is perfectly reasonable for the descendants of his victims – and I can count myself among them – to remember his horrible savagery in victory: in Coorg, Malabar and Mangalore he was responsible for what we today would call war crimes.

But he was clearly beloved by his own people, as the British discovered to their surprise when they seized his state: “numbers of his confidential Hindoo servants acknowledged him to be a lenient and indulgent master.” [xi] At his funeral, people lined the streets “many of whom prostrated themselves before the body, and expressed their grief by loud lamentations.” So it is not far-fetched to see him as a brave proto-nationalist. For while it is true that modern ideas of nationalism and patriotism were only in their infancy, he identified the British as dangerous outsiders and with his defeat of the Company at Pollilur did more than any other ruler of the t.mes to stop them taking over the country.

William Dalrymple is the author of The Company Quartet, four multi-award winning books on the East India Company- The Anarchy, White Mughals, Return of a King and The Last Mughal- which tells the story of the Company from its founding in 1600 to its nationalisation in 1858. The books have won, among many other honours, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Hemingway, the Kapuscinski, the President’s Medal of the British Academy and the Arthur Ross Medal of the US Council for Foreign Relations.

[i] John Baillie’s Account of Pollilur. BL, IOR, HM 223, pp. 160-66.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Captain Wood’s Account of Pollilur, BL, IOR, HM 211, f246.

[iv] Captain Muat’s Account of the the Defeat at Pollilur. BL, IOR, HM 223, pp. 83-5.[v] A lieutenant of the 73rd Highland Regiment, in Alan Tritton, When the Tiger Fought the Thistle, London, 2013, pp.271-2.

[vi] ‘Incomplete Draft (1785) of an account of the Mysore War (1780-84)’, BL, OIOC, Mss Eur K 116, f.84. Quoted in Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and collects ing in the East, 1750-1850, London, 2005, p.158.

[vii] Jean-Marie Lafont., Indika: Essays in Indo-French Relations 1630-1976 Delhi, 2000, p.186.

[viii] Irfan Habib, (ed), Resistance and Modernisation under Haidar Ali & Tipu Sultan New Delhi 1999, Introduction xxxi.

[ix] Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and collects ing in the East, 1750-1850, op.cit., p184-5; Irfan Habib, (ed), Resistance and Modernisation under Haidar Ali & Tipu Sultan New Delhi, 1999, Introduction xxxiv.

[x] Quoted by Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, p.285; C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, Cambridge, 1988, p.97.

[xi] Edward Moore, 1794, cited in A. Sen, A Pre-British Economic Formation in India of the Late Eighteenth Century, in Barun De (ed.), Perspectives in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 1977, I, Historical Dimensions, p.46.