faizal shaikh, highly decorated war heroine, was the great-great-great-grandaugh ter of Tippu Sultan, 'The tiger of Mysore',

last Moghul emperor of Southern Indi a; the story of her antecedents is this. In the eighteenth century, a weak and internally disrupting Hindu dynasty, in th e state of Mysore, found itself briefly displaced by a Muslim rule. If the star of this Muslim dynasty burned for only a short time, yet it was with a bright li ght. The two rulers, a father, and after him a son, left names which are still meanin gful in history - less happily resonant in England than elsewhere, since it was their warfare against the British that they were mainly distinguished. Haidar Ali Khan (1722-82), a warrior chieftain who, in 1761, usurped the supreme power, was a man of able brain and vigorous temperament. The Hindu in Mysore ha d been a quiet neighbour to the East India Company, politically and militarily s omewhat negligible. The usurpation of Haidar brought into being, quickly, a very different situation . By a historical process which it is not the purpose of this book to examine, H aidar and the British came long to be engaged in armed hostilities. (Haidar had at his back some support from the French). At first the advantage was with Haidar. In 1780, he swept through the carnatic w ith 20,000 men, scoring over Colonels Braithwaite and Baillie victories so annih ilating as to imperil the existence of the East India Company. Subsequently the British recuperated, stood, and after about a year's defensive warfare, advanced under Sir Eyre Coote, and secured two signal victories over Haidar, at Porto No vo, on the Madras coast, and at Pollilore. Haidar always felt that the sea had been his worst Braithwaites and Baillies will not destroy them," can ruin their resources by land, but I cannot dry queathed the conduct of the war to Tippu, his son, enemy. "The defeat of my many he said on his death-bed. "I up the sea." So saying, he be and died.

Tippu Sultan (1749-99) was a genius rather different in nature from his father. Whereas, according to the British, Haidar's attitude was frankly secular, and he cared not at all what a man's religion might be, so long as he were a good sold ier, Tippu was before everything, devout. It has, however been claimed that Haidar was of the Sunni or Orthodox Islamic fa ith, in which case the difference between them may rather have been that where h is religion was of the conventional order, Tippu was a mystic, with a mystic's f ervour. Traces of the Sh'ite, intensely individualistic, thinking (or to the Sunnis, her esy) are evident in many of his pronouncements; he regarded himself as a defende r of the faith. More especially, he believed himself to be inspired by the direc t tutelage of Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed. His mother, Fakhr-un-nisa, the beautiful and pious sister of Abdul-ul-Hakim, the Nawab of Kalapa, had been, on the eve of his birth, to visit the ascetic, Tipu Mastan Aulia, to ask for his blessing on her first-born, and some indication con cerning his future. That he ascribed some spiritual character to the child appea rs in that he told the Begum Fakhr-un-nisa she should give it his own name. Concerning the origin of the name Tippu, there is some controversy, but on the g rounds other than linguistic, the thesis which would make it a deviation from th e Kanarese word for 'tiger' recommends itself.

From the first, Tippu took this beast as his personal symbol, and upon his acces sion to the throne in 1782, he made it the official emblem of the state of Mysor e. The tiger's head figured as his armorial bearing, and the word 'sher' (tiger) or it's initial letter, appeared stamped, embroidered or engraved upon every ar ticle of his use. Throughout India, he was known as 'The Tiger of Mysore'. Even the stripes upon h is clothing, and upon the upholstery of his throne and the cushions of his chamb er, represented the stripes of the tiger. His throne had eight corners, surmount ed by eight tiger heads, and the whole was set as though across the back of a ti ger, whose huge gold head projected in front. Live tigers upon chains guarded the great doors of his palace on the fortified i sland of Seringapatam, and inside the palace more tigers were kept, some in cage s, and some upon chains - and it is said that two of his ministers, having incur red his gross displeasure, were thrown to them alive. The proud words for which he was best known were, 'Better two days as a tiger, than two hundred years as a sheep' Tippu Sultan inherited the war with England in an hour when it was going badly. He was unable ever to make up his father's losses, and in 1792, the eleventh yea r of his reign, he was obliged to sign a treaty with Britain by which he lost ne arly half his dominions. He signed with a bad will, and never ceased to scheme f or their recovery. His dearest ambition, however, was not merely the restoration of the former boun daries of the Sultanate, but nothing less than the total expulsion of the Britis h from India. For its accomplishment, he knew that he must be dependant upon a F rench alliance, and he was content to bide his time. His first embassy to France, in 1778, had been dissapointing in its results. His delegates had been, indeed, courteously and lavishly entertained by the king, L ouis XVI, but had returned without concrete guarantees. Under the growing shadow of popular discontent, Louis hesitated, understandably, in sending to Tippu, ar ms and supplies which he might need at home. The French Revolution coming in the same year that Tippu lost half his dominions , was a source of peculiar embarrassment to the Sultan. A monarch himself, profo undly convinced of the divine consecration, inspiration and right of kings, he c ould not feel sympathy toward a popular government which had arrived by the deca pitation of the consecrated head. Nevertheless, France and Mysore were natural allies. He did nothing precipitate. A little time passed. The Republic, when it took time to considering affairs in the East, expressed itself desirous of maintaining those relations of amity whi ch had always obtained between France and Mysore. Tippu broached the question of a supply of men and arms. Gradually both began to find their way into the Sultanate. On May 14, 1797, the Tricolor was formally hoisted in the city of Mysore, and Fracois Ripaud proposed a toast to 'Citizen Tippu !" The presence of French troops on his soil, though very welcome, was not entirely without embarassment to the Sultan. A devout observer of the prescriptions of t he Koran, he had early in his reign issued an edict forbidding the sale and cons umption of spirituous liquors in his dominions, and had followed this up by send ing his officials out to require from every previous distiller or vendor an enga gement to turn to another occupation. To a minister who had represented to him t he loss of revenue which must be consequent, he had retorted that 'a king should

be inflexible in his orders, and God had forbidden the use of wine'. It was not until the news of Lord Nelson's victory in the Nile reached Calcutta on October 31st, that the Governor-General felt in a position strong enough to r eveal to Tipu his knowledge of his relations with the French and evident intent to violate the terms of his treaty of 1792. On February 3rd, 1799, the Governor-General signified that he now considered Eng land to be at war with Tippu Sultan. In March, Colonel Wellesley was apponted to the command of the British forces serving wioth the Nizam of Hyderabad; and in the same month, the army marched. After some manoeuvres and skirmishing, the Sultan found himself obliged to a def ensive action, and fell back upon his island fortress of Seringapatam, in the Ca uvery river, a few miles to the north of the city of Mysore. On the evening of May 3rd, British guns breached the ramparts, and at half past one on the following afternoon, General Baird led the forward storming party. The fighting was fierce. The Sultan himself stood with those who were attempting to hold the breach, firing with his own hand. When it became evident they could not stem the invasion, he turned abruptly, and attempted to force his way throu gh the press on horseback, toward the Zenana. According to Rajah Khan, the only person to have been at his side the whole afternoon, the thought of the ladies o f the household had been in his mind since the moment when he realised the fort was going to fall, and he had considered it his duty to put them to the sword wi th his own hand, lest they be exposed to outrage in the tumult. The great gateway, when the Sultan and Rajah Khan reached it, presented already a scene of carnage. Trying to push his way through a melee, in which British sol diers and his own were closely mingled, the Sultan was wounded, first in his bre ast, then in his right side. Rajah Khan, seeing how heavily he was afflicted, cr ied out to him that he should make his identity known to the British soldiers, w ho would surely treat his person with respect. "Are you mad?" shouted Tippu. "Be silent!" Rajah Khan attempted to disengage him from the saddle and they both fell to the earth together. Rajah Khan, wounded i n the leg himself, was yet able to drag the Sultan a little to one side, and so prop him up under the relative shelter of a the arch of the great gate. An English soldier, catching sight of the rich gold buckle with which the Sultan 's belt was fastened, stooped and tried to take it off him. Tippu, however, was not dead yet. So many bodies had fallen across his own that he could not get to his feet, being pinned amongst the dead and dying; but he reached out with his h and, laterally, plucked a sword from one of those who had fallen, and struck upw ards, slashing the grenadier across the knee. The grenadier, incensed, raised hi s musket, put it straight to the Sultan's temple, not knowing who he was, and sh ot him. Even in death, wrote one present, he carried such a vivacity of hatred that Arth ur Wellesley, standing over him in the flickering torchlight, could not believe him dead till he had felt the heart and pulse. He was dressed in a white linen jacket, and loose drawers of flowered chintz, wi th a crimson cloth of silk and cotton round the waist. He was of small stature, a trifle corpulent, very dark of complexion, with aqualine nose, bold eyes and p rominent chin. His brows were finely arched, and his hands and feet remarkably s mall and delicately shaped. The following day, four companies of Europeans marched with his bier. It was bor

ne by his personal attendants, and accompanied by the Kazi, chanting verses from the Koran. Thousands of the faithful prostrated themselves as the Sultan passed on his last journey through the streets toward Lal Bang, where they laid him wi th his father; the occasion of the last obsequies being rendered more awful by t he bursting of an almighty thunderstorm.