Siege of Srirangapatna (1799)

01The breach

Srirangapatna sits on an island in the Kaveri, around the old Ranganathaswamy temple that gives it its name. In April 1799 Harris’s army and the Nizam’s contingent closed on it from the north and west, while a Bombay column came from the coast. Batteries on the north bank opened a breach in the western wall. At about one in the afternoon of 4 May, in the heat when the garrison rested, Baird led the storming parties across the shallow river and into the breach. Tipu came to the walls to fight and was killed in the press near the water gate; his body was found under a heap of the dead that evening.

02The Wodeyars return

The Company and the Nizam divided much of Tipu’s land. The core of Mysore was handed back to the Hindu Wodeyar family, whose rule Hyder Ali had pushed aside in the 1760s. On 30 June 1799 the boy Krishnaraja Wodeyar III was installed, with Purnaiah, Tipu’s former minister, as his dewan, under a subsidiary treaty that kept Company troops in the state. The Wodeyars ruled Mysore until 1947 and made it one of the best-governed princely states of Bharat.

Dynasty · 1399 (traditional)–1950 CEWodeyars of MysoreThe Wodeyars began as chiefs around Mysore under Vijayanagara and became kings when Raja Wodeyar took Srirangapatna in 1610. Apart from the decades of Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan, they ruled Mysore until Indian independence, and kept the Vijayanagara Navaratri alive as the Mysore Dasara.Read →