Rogue History

- All of Congress listened with rapt attention to a letter written by John Adams.

His message provided a play by play of how the British were holding up in the war, but not the war in America.

The conflict that Congress desperately wanted news of was happening in Southern India.

The Americans understood that they couldn't beat the British in the Revolutionary War without international support.

And when the founding fathers needed to close the deal against the most powerful empire on the planet, they got an unexpected assist from Tipu Sultan, the legendary Tiger of Mysore.

I'm Joel Cook, and this is Rogue History.

So what exactly would unite a group of American rebels with a Muslim ruler on the other side of the world?

The same thing that unites millions of people to this very day- British imperialism.

But more specifically, British tea.

Let me spill a little for you.

Most of us know about the Boston Tea Party where Americans dressed in highly problematic disguises tossed 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor.

The colonists were furious about the Tea Act, a piece of legislation intended to rescue the struggling British East India Company by selling its massive stock of tea at much cheaper rates than anything else on the American market.

The only problem was that this monopoly risked putting American tea sellers out of business, hence the whole throwing company tea into the harbor situation.

But what was the British East India Company and where did they get all this tea from?

The company was founded in December 1600 and served as the merchant arm of British imperialism in Asia.

Imagine Amazon being in charge of America's economy and you'd have the right idea.

The company's dealings with India, China, Persia, and Indonesia provided Britain with tea, textiles, and piles of unused spices.

But all those deals they managed to pull off were because of a unique negotiating tool most corporations didn't have, a private army.

If the company couldn't talk Asian powers into negotiating with them, they were all too willing to march troops in to change their minds.

That is until they ran into the Kingdom of Mysore.

You see, Mysore wasn't some young upstart like the Americans.

When the company started probing Mysore's borders in the 1760s, they were met by a brilliant Muslim leader named Hyder Ali.

Hyder had recently taken control of the South Indian Kingdom from a Hindu dynasty established around 1399.

As the newly crown sultan of Mysore, Hyder led a sophisticated economy and an army numbering in the tens of thousands.

The Mysoreans were one of the biggest obstacles the British faced in South Asia.

And Hyder was smart enough to amplify his kingdom's power by forming an alliance with the French.

But his most effective weapon against the British wasn't his army or his alliances.

It was his tiger-obsessed son Tipu.

(tiger roaring) The story behind the whole Tiger of Mysore thing isn't completely locked down.

Oral traditions and a heck of a lot of murals commissioned by Tipu say that he was on a wartime mission for his dad when he fought and killed an attacking Bengal tiger with just a dagger.

Now, I wasn't there, so I can't say whether Tipu exaggerated the situation or not, but for a 15-year-old trying to build street cred with his dad's veteran army, a tiger fighting story is awfully convenient.

Either way, Hyder's leadership and Tipu's eye of the tiger mentality on the battlefield were catching the eye of a suitor on the other side of the world.

By 1777, that little tea incident in Boston had spiraled into an all-out war against the mighty British Empire.

The Americans knew they needed allies in order to win, and they sent diplomats across the map in search of assistance.

The French, of course, were ready to support anything that stuck it to the British, so they offered the Americans an intimate correspondence with a tall, dark, and handsome friend from South Asia.

Though the Americans were excited about building a relationship with the Mysoreans, things didn't exactly take off.

We all know how long distance relationships are.

You're both busy.

You can't agree on date night.

There's a massive empire trying to destroy you both.

And to be honest, America didn't have much to bring to the table anyway.

Sure, they were keeping a large portion of the British military occupied in North America, which definitely helped Mysore, but nobody, not even the American rebels themselves, was sure they'd be able to keep it up.

Prior to their victory at Trenton, New Jersey in December 1776, the Americans hadn't won a single major battle against the British.

They thought about sending their troops to help Mysore, but they realized they didn't even have enough troops to fight their own war.

The best they could do was instruct their privateers and tiny Navy to attack East India Company shipping out of solidarity.

As much as I hate to admit it, for Mysore, Revolutionary America truly was the guy sitting on the passenger side of his best friend's ride.

But for the time being, Tipu and Hyder didn't really need them.

Throughout the 1770s, father and son built an army nearly a hundred thousand strong.

And when the British threatened their French homies in India, the Tiger of Mysore showed everyone what a ride or die really looks like.

On September 10th, 1780, Tipu wiped out one of the East India Company's private armies at the Battle of Pollilur, killing 3,000 men and capturing hundreds of British officers.

It was an incredible victory for Mysore, but it also showed a side of Tipu that would cause problems for him.

Many of the hired guns in the East India Company's army were natives of rival kingdoms in India.

And when a British officer tried to surrender to save them, Tipu took scattered gunfire from a few holdouts as an excuse to massacre those who had already surrendered.

Sometimes a tiger can become a man-eater.

And the Tiger of Mysore was showing early signs of that behavior when it came to his political rivals.

Still, the victory at Pollilur convinced the French to send major military assistance to help Mysore, and that, along with wins Tipu and Hyder kept delivering, had the domino effect of forcing the British to send Royal Army and Navy units to help the East India Company.

But more troops in India meant less fighting the Americans.

And that was a problem for the British because that scrub we talked about earlier was looking a lot more genuine.

The glow up started in 1778 when the American Army fought the British to a draw at the Battle of Monmouth.

The following year, a little known American officer named John Paul Jones put the US Navy on the map when he defeated HMS Serapis in British waters.

If you'd like to know more about that, check out our episode on Jones.

By July of 1780, French troops arrived in the colonies and the Americans' chances of winning the war were looking pretty good.

But the Founding Fathers still wanted to know what was happening in Mysore.

John Adams' letter to Congress regaled the Founders with the exploits of the famous Hyder Ali in September 1780.

All throughout the following year of the Revolutionary War, a who's who of famous Americans chattered back and forth across the Atlantic about the second Anglo-Mysore war.

Even in 1782, when American diplomats traveled to the Hague for peace negotiations, they were still checking the Britain versus Mysore scoreboard, the way we check Carolina Panthers scores in church.

The Americans understood that though their war was over, their negotiating leverage relied on Mysore continuing to wear the British down.

But for the brave and sometimes brutal Tiger of Mysore, things were about to change in a major way.

In December 1782, the French reinforcements finally arrived in Mysore to assist Hyder and Tipu in defeating the British.

But by the time they got there, the dynamic duo was down to one.

Hyder Ali died just six days after Tipu's 31st birthday.

For the newly crowned Tipu Sultan, it seems that his method for processing involved leaning very heavily into his special interest.

That is to say Tipu got way more tigery.

After taking over his father's palace, Tipu upgraded the home decor by adding a tiger throne with a life-sized tiger head, pillars capped with engraved tigers, oh, and how could I forget, actual Bengal tigers.

And it didn't stop there.

The new Sultan ordered tiger stripes added to the Mysorean military uniform and engraved tigers on his guns, swords, and other possessions, but Tipu's best work as an interior designer was a clear warning to the British that things weren't gonna get any easier for them.

Sometime after becoming Sultan, Tipu commissioned a nearly life-sized automaton of a tiger eating a British soldier.

The automaton included a crank attached to a mechanism inside the tiger's body that simultaneously lifted the dying man's arm and produced noises imitating his final cries.

Help me!

Help me!

Talk about committing to the bit.

But fulfilling his special interests didn't distract Tipu from the war.

He continued to attack the British and their native allies in Southern India, but with less success against the British and more brutal suppression of his Indian rivals.

And just when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, France and America hit Mysore with the it's not you, it's me.

In early 1783, both France and the United States signed peace treaties with Britain.

But for Tipu and Mysore, it was a harbinger of doom.

Without the Americans distracting the British and the French sending troops, Mysore now stood alone against the most powerful empire in the world.

Lord Charles Cornwallis, the very General George Washington defeated to win the Revolutionary War, was reassigned to India with instructions to destroy the Tiger and his kingdom once and for all.

Now, before you get upset, you have to remember, America was a young country at this point.

It managed to stand up to the British and win absolutely, but holding onto their freedom wasn't a guarantee.

The revolutionaries who won the war were now the government officials nearly three million people we're looking to for safety.

Still, Tipu had to have been a little hurt when Washington's administration opened two consulates in India to foster goodwill and trade with the British.

Tipu once said that he would rather live two days as a tiger than two centuries as a sheep.

And when the British stormed the Mysorean capital in May 1799, he stayed true to his word, standing and fighting until the very end.

The Kingdom of Mysore survived, but remained under British control until India gained its independence nearly 150 years later.

Though the American Revolution is often told as a story of plucky colonists standing on their own against the mighty British empire, that's only a fraction of the story.

All across the world, various peoples worked together as best they could to stop an imperial juggernaut from destroying their way of life.

For some, like the Americans, this global revolution brought them the time they needed to strengthen their resistance and earn their freedom.

And for others, like Tipu Sultan and the Kingdom of Mysore, their revolution continued on for over a century.

When we think about the American Revolution, what it means and who contributed, it's good to remember more than just the big names like George Washington and famous allies like the French.

Beyond those icons stand many lesser known, but equally impactful contributors, like the tiger-obsessed Sultan who gave America a chance to win its freedom.