179

The Muslim Rulers in Mysore (Mahisur, Maysūr)

1173–1213/1760–99

South India

Mysore had been within the Hindu state of Vijayanagar, traditional foe of the Muslim sultanates of South India, in the extreme south of the Deccan, until the sultanates’ victory over Vijayanagar in 972/1565 at Tālīkot́a. Descendants of the Rājās of Vijayanagar established themselves in Mysore as the Rama Rājā dynasty, managing to withstand the power of the ‘Ādil Shāhīs (see above, no. 170) and coming to a modus vivendi with the Mughal Awrangzīb. In the mid-eighteenth century, their Muslim general Ḥaydar ‘Alī, who claimed noble Arab descent, achieved fame for repelling the Marāt́hās and then seized real power in the state, retaining the Rājās only as figureheads. His hostility to the British and to the Niẓāms of Hyderabad drew him closer to the French, and this policy was continued by his son and successor Tīpū, who eventually dispensed with the Rājās, received French envoys at his capital Seringapatam and was admitted as ‘Citizen Tipu’ to membership of the French Republic. The forces of Britain and Hyderabad defeated Tīpū in 1213/1799, and he died in the fighting at Seringapatam. He had been a zealous enforcer of Islam on the Hindu majority of his subjects, including forcible conversions and circumcisions, and in the modern hagiography of Pakistan is revered as ‘the Martyr Sultan’. On his death, the old line of Hindu Rājās was restored in Mysore under British protection.

EI² ‘Tīpū Sulṭān’(T. W. Haig), EI² ‘Ḥaydar Alī Khan Bahādur’ (Mohibbul Hasan), ‘Mahisur, Maysūr. 1. Geography and history’ (C. E. Bosworth).

R. C. Majumdar (ed.), The History and Culture of the Indian People. VIII. The Maratha Supremacy, chs 12–13.