Diverge and Conquer (Look to the West Book 1)

by Tom Anderson

  Ahmad Shah was occupied for some years as the rebellious Sikhs of the Punjab rose up against his forces, ejecting them from Lahore briefly before Ahmad Shah returned with the bulk of the army to reconquer the city. In 1756, he attacked the Mughals once again and besieged Delhi, overthrowing Ahmad Shah Bahadur and installing a puppet emperor, Alamgir II. He married his second son Nadir to Alamgir’s daughter[248] to cement his control, and Nadir mostly remained in Delhi while his father continued to campaign with his elder son Timur.

  Ahmad Shah and Timur returned to Afghanistan in 1757, pausing on the way back to sack the Sikh holy city of Amritsar and defile its Golden Temple, increasing the bitterness between Sikh and Afghan. Ahmad Shah did not remain in Afghanistan for long; the Indian situation soon began to fall apart, as the vigorous Maratha Empire continued to attack the cowed Mughals and drove the Afghans out of the Punjab. Ahmad Shah returned and led his army to a crushing, epic victory at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, which saw the Marathas smashed so utterly that their empire broke apart into a loose, disunited confederacy. This bought time for the Mughals to reform and regroup; Ahmad Shah assisted his son Nadir in seizing control of the once-great empire on the death of Alamgir. Nadir’s son Ibrahim Shah, out of Alamgir’s daughter, would have a legitimacy to rule the empire afterwards.

  The Durranis controlled northern India, and the Marathas were too disunited to pose a serious threat again, but the Sikhs continued to stubbornly rebel every year or two, forcing Ahmad Shah to continuously return to India to put down their rebellions. The constant travel weakened his health and he died of cancer in 1773. Upon his death, his first son Timur brought most of the Durrani army back to Afghanistan and called a Loya Jirga which elected him new leader, while Nadir remained in Delhi and successfully put down an attempted rebellion led by the brilliant Mughal general Mirza Najaf Khan. After Nadir held on, Mirza Najaf retreated to Oudh, whose Nawab was married to his sister, and focused on reforming the Oudhi army. In doing so, he extensively studied the infantry tactics and technology of the British East India Company, which held Bengal and made Oudh a protectorate.[249]

  After a hesitation that could have turned into yet another civil war, the sons of Ahmad Shah Durrani came to an agreement to divide their father’s empire. Both agreed that the sheer size of the Durrani legacy was too large and needed too much attention for any one man to rule, as their father’s fate had shown. Timur took the Afghan territories – which were presently too threatened by a newly resurgent Zand Persia for him to worry about India anyway – and Nadir, of course, continued to rule from Delhi. Sindh and Rajputana went to Nadir, Kashmir to Timur. Neither could agree about the Punjab; in any case, the situation was taken out of their hands when the Sikhs rebelled once more in 1781 and neither Nadir nor Timur could spare the forces to put down the rebellion. An independent Sikh Confederacy sandwiched between the two halves of the Durrani Empire was thus quietly allowed to remain for the present, so long as it did not attempt to expand.

  The Durranis of Afghanistan lost some lands to the Zands, including Mashhad and Nishapur, but successfully retained Herat. However, Timur did subdue Kafiristan, an area which proved to be at least as troublesome as the Sikhs had been. Timur’s son Ahmad Shah (II) went on to conquer the northern part of Baluchistan.

  But in India, the Durranis of Delhi (often known as the Neo-Mughals or Neo-Moguls to European writers) began to reform and centralise the old empire, assisted by the fact that most of the Empire’s enemies were too busy fighting each other to threaten Nadir’s throne. His reign was focused on strengthening the power of centralised imperial institutions, knowing that new threats would soon arise.

  And this was the situation in northern India that now felt the distant impact of the War of the Ferengi Alliance in the south. For the combined forces of Britain, Royal France and Haidarabad marched upon Tippoo Sultan’s Mysore…

  Chapter 44: I Really Love Your Tiger Light

  “Tippoo Sultan…a perfect exemplar for demonstrating the fact that any atrocity is excusable by intellectual society, if it be hidden beneath a veneer of progressive thought.”

  – George Spencer-Churchill

  *

  From: “India in the Age of Revolution” by Dr Anders Ohlmarks (English translation)–

  The scene in Mysore was set for a confrontation. The Tippoo Sultan, aided and abbetted by a Republican French mission led by René Leclerc, saw an opportunity in Travancore. The old king had died and was succeeded by his young son Balarama Varma. The Tippoo claimed the succession was illegitimate and invaded, ignoring the French East India Company’s treaty with the Kingdom of Travancore. On October 15th 1799 the Mysorean army, headed by the Tippoo’s new Cugnot-wagons (carrying his famed rockets) crossed over from Dindigool – which the Tippoo had conquered during one of the Mysore-Haidarabad Wars of the 1770s – and into Travancore.

  Travancore was a small state, which had no real chance of defeating Mysore in the long run, but nonetheless had a capable army made up mostly of Hindoos of the Nayar martial caste. Unfortunately for the Travancoreans, the state was in such turmoil at the time that this army suffered from the lack of an effective chain of command, and thus did not delay the Mysorean onslaught as much as it might have done. Balarama Varma might be young, but he had already learned the ruthlessness any ruler in chaotic Kerala needed to control his fractious, divided subjects. Almost as soon as he had succeeded to the throne, he had his father’s old Dalawa,[250] Raja Kesavadas, assassinated. He then elevated his corrupt favourite, Jayanthan Sankaran Nampoothiri, to the position of Dalawa. Nampoothiri soon proved to be an unpopular minister, ordering the tahsildars[251] to exact excessive levels of taxes, most of which went into his own pocket. By extension, Balarama Varma himself became seen as ineffective and despotic in the eyes of the Travancorean people.

  Thus there was plenty of division for Tippoo Sultan to exploit. Two powerful relatives of the murdered Raja Kesavadas, Chempakaraman Kumaran Pillai and Erayiman Pillai, had a grudge against both Balarama Varma and Nampoothiri. In addition to this, one of Nampoothiri’s own tahsildar, Velu Thampi, went rogue and fancied himself as a better Dalawa than his master. Travancore was already struggling with these internal problems even before the Mysoreans crossed the border.

  The conquest of Travancore was thus brief. The panicky Balarama Varma sent his entire Nayar army out of the capital Trivandrum.[252] They were to to meet the Mysoreans at Colachel, site of a famous Travancorean victory over the Dutch East India Company in the 1740s—which had kept European influence out of Kerala for another two generations. This time, though, the Travancoreans were routed. The Tippoo’s army, swelled by levies from the lands acquired in the Mysore-Haidarabad wars, was large enough to defeat the Travancoreans by conventional combat alone. However, the screaming Mysorean rocket barrages, fired from carriages that moved without horses and belched clouds of steam, were enough to put the fear of God (or Allah) into even the most hardened Nayars. The remnants of the army, led by Krishna Pillai, withdrew to Nagercoil in the south, which had been bypassed by the Mysorean invasion, and fortified their position.

  Meanwhile, the rebel tahsildar Velu Thampi had attacked undefended Trivandrum, sufficiently intimidating Balarama Varma into forcing him to order the execution of Nampoothiri. Velu Thampi then became the new Dalawa, but did not have long to savour his position. The Mysoreans attacked Trivandrum on December 3rd 1799, and the undefended city was swiftly surrendered by Velu Thampi, always quick to look after number one. Tippoo Sultan, who led his army personally, had Balarama Varma beheaded by a portable chirurgien that had been brought on campaign by René Leclerc. “It is gratifying to see the instrument of liberty dispose of tyrants so far from home,” Leclerc wrote in his diary, apparently without irony.

  Although the Tippoo did not trust Velu Thampi, he left him as regional governor of Travancore, which was now directly annexed to Mysore as a province. The Tippoo’s ideas were indeed revolutionary; usually even the European trading companies tr
ied to work within the established Mughal system, subverting rather than overturning it. But with one stroke, Tippoo Sultan abolished the long-standing Kingdom of Travancore, just as he had done to Cochin in 1789.

  With the capture of Trivandrum, the emissaries from the FEIC there – around fifty French factors led by Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne[253] – were turned over by Velu Thampi to the Tippoo. Leclerc, still smarting from his humiliation at Rochambeau’s hands, insisted that the FEIC men should be immediately chirurgiened as traitors. Instead, the Tippoo left them unharmed at first, but brought them back to Mysore and had them paraded triumphantly through the streets of Mysore city. The factors were then interrogated and some were indeed executed, mostly by being thrown to the Tippoo’s menagerie of tigers rather than by the chirurgien, a practice which Leclerc thought barbaric. The aristocratic d’Auvergne, to Leclerc’s outrage, was allowed to survive. After gleaning all he could from the defiant Company men, the Tippoo had them thrown in the dungeons of his fortress at Seringapatam, where several more died of ill-treatment.

  Southern India now held its breath. The Tippoo, knowing that the FEIC could expect no help from home, had gambled with his audacious move. He hoped either to force Rochambeau to back down, or else to trigger a war which Mysore would win. The FEIC had plenty of firepower and sepoys in its Carnatic heartland, but Mysore’s expansion since the 1750s had eclipsed this, and the Tippoo’s enthusiasm for adopting European weapons had more than erased the technological disparity. He waited to see which way Rochambeau would jump, while readying his army for a second invasion if it came to war.

  What did emerge was nothing that the Tippoo could have predicted. More emissaries than Leclerc had come from Europe, and not all of them served Republican France. Louis XVII realised that he had to ensure the loyalty of all his colonies lest they be subverted by Jacobins – which would be all the excuse Britain needed to move in and grab them for herself. A joint British and Royal French mission had thus been sent to Madras at about the same time as Leclerc and L’Épurateur. This mission, consisting of the three ships of the line Toulon, Fougueux and HMS Majestic, arrived at Madras barely a month after Leclerc was sent away, and later called in at Calcutta. They brought news of the formal alliance between Britain and the Bourbons (at this point, the situation was still confused enough that many thought the alliance really had been engineered by Captain Leo Bone).

  Sir John Pitt, the Governor-General of British India, was in a quandary. His instincts told him that now was the time to hit the (Royal) French colonies and factories with everything he had, taking advantage of their weakness, isolation, and the Mysorean aggression. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” had always been the modus operandi in India, both among the European trading companies and the native country powers.

  On the other hand…ever since Dupleix, the FEIC had long been forced by necessity to fight on its own, with little support from an introverted Versailles disinterested in knowing where the money paying for its balls and banquets was coming from. The Tippoo’s subversion of the pattern of native alliances had undone some of the FEIC’s fighting strength, but not all. Even an isolated FEIC was not entirely helpless before a treacherous BEIC strike. Pitt knew he could only get away with such a bald defiance of orders if he delivered an indubitable triumph, and that was far from certain.

  The Royal French would be an ally, then, but a decidedly subordinate one. Here was a chance for Britain to overturn the pattern of French dominance in southern India, not by outright conflict but by the same manipulation both had used for generations to work within the decaying Mughal imperial system.

  The “Pitt-Rochambeau Accord” is often cited (inaccurately) as the name of the general Anglo-Royal French alliance, demonstrating how significant it was. The meeting of the old French veteran and the young, vigorous Englishman at Cuddalore produced a general agreement. The British and French would cooperate against Mysore, with the resulting booty being divvied up between them. Haidarabad also entered the war, albeit unenthusiastically, based on the promise of the return of Mysorean-conquered territories such as Carnool and Guntoor. The Nizam of Haidarabad’s main contribution to the war effort was from his celebrated heavy artillery, ‘the Nizam’s beautiful daughters’.

  When the Tippoo heard the news, he had the first three messengers thrown to his tigers, convinced they could only be enemy agents spreading amateurish fear-mongering. It was not until the British portion of the ‘Ferengi Alliance’ moved into Carnool that he realised the reports had been true. Meanwhile, French sepoys led by Rochambeau’s deputy, Colonel Julien de Champard, attacked Baba Maha. This was another region which had only been recently conquered by Mysore during the late wars. The French at first enjoyed remarkable success against the cursory levels of Mysorean troops stationed there, but the Tippoo then readied his main army and shifted east into the country, meeting the French at Jalarpet. Once more the Tippoo’s blazing rockets worked their terrifying magic, backed up by his cavalry and sharpshooting riflemen, and the French retreated – though they were not routed.

  A secondary, southern French army led by Jean-Paul du Tourd was more successful. Du Tourd’s force crossed from Tinnevelly into southern Travancore and attacked Nagercoil, defeating the besieging Mysorean army and allowing the remnants of the Travancorean army, led by Krishna Pillai, to escape. After securing their supply trains – armies in India were dependent on oxen above all else – the French and their new Travancorean allies then moved north in June and July of 1800. The Tippoo had left only a small force garrisoning Trivandrum, not expecting such a turnaround, and Trivandrum fell once again in August 1800. Velu Thampi attempted to flee but was cut down by a mob before any soldiers could reach him. Du Tourd and Krishna Pillai installed Chempakaraman Kumaran Pillai, a relative of the executed Raja Kesavedas, as Dalawa. The throne, however, remained empty – no-one from the former royal line had survived but distant cousins, and this prove an increasingly knotty problem.

  The Royal French had engaged the Tippoo and neatly undone his provocative invasion – thus fulfilling their defensive pact with Travancore and increasing their popularity in southern India. It was the British, however, who delivered the real hammer blow. After reclaiming Carnool and Guntoor for the Nizam – Carnool went back to Haidarabad proper, while Guntoor was rejoined to the Circars that were Haidarabadi in name but administered by the BEIC – the British and Haidarabadi army moved into northern Mysore itself. Following the conquest of Kolar, the British met their first serious challenge with a Mysorean army led by Yaar Mohammed at Bangalore in August. Although the Tippoo had the majority of his kingdom’s forces with himself facing the French, Mysore was large enough to field enough troops to at least stand on the defensive against multiple enemies at once. The battle at Bangalore at first went badly for the British, with the Tippoo’s rockets wreaking as much havoc on the experienced veterans of the BEIC as they did on anyone else.

  What saved the day was that the Mysorean army included portions of unreliable infantry recruited from Malabar, which had only been conquered by Mysore a few years ago, and these broke when the British tried a desperate cavalry charge led by Major Henry Paget. This small victory sufficiently rallied the morale of the British army in the face of the screaming rockets, and the loud booms of the Nizam’s artillery replying served to strengthen the hearts of both regular and sepoy troopers. Brilliantly executing a moving square in the face of the rocket bombardment – their commanders correctly calculating that the inaccurate rockets would be less effective against the tightly-packed square formation than conventional artillery was – the 77th Highlanders led the attack on the Mysorean lines. The Mysorean army crumbled in the face of the assault, Yaar Mohammed withdrew with his remaining troops, and Bangalore fell to the BEIC.

  Recognising that the British were now a more direct threat to his centre of power than the Royal French, the Tippoo decided to cut his losses and retreat to Mysore city. His hope was to withstand a siege at his fortress city of Seringapata
m, while the strange bedfellows of the Ferengi Alliance quarrelled with each other and their alignment crumbled. Furthermore, a long siege could weaken the besiegers as much as it did the besieged, and Seringapatam was well equipped to withstand even the strongest assault.

  However, the Tippoo had reckoned without the British and French having access to the Nizam’s beautiful daughters. The Mysorean army remained strong enough to turn north and engage the British at Charmapatna in September, forcing them back briefly, as Champard’s northern French army pushed westward in the face of retreating Mysorean opposition.

  By the 14th of November 1800, the stage was set; the Mysoreans had abandoned the field, save for occasional raids, in favour of digging in at Seringapatam. The French successfully took Mysore city almost unopposed, while the British opened up the siege of Seringapatam. Rockets and rifles from the walls cut bloodily into the British ranks, but those were swelled when they were joined by more Royal French troops out of the Carnatic on 13th January. The Tippoo attempted to lure the allies into a trap, leaking information through spies that part of Seringapatam’s walls was weak and required rebuilding. In fact a second, stronger wall had already been built behind the visible wall, and the killing field between the two had been mined with gunpowder and more rockets, which would bounce around in the confined space and burn any Forlorn Hope to a crisp. A bloody nose, the Tippoo hoped, might weaken the Allies enough to force a retreat, or at least leave them more vulnerable to a sally from the gates.