In South India, the emergence of Mysore as a significant power in the mid-eighteenth century was most spectacular. Originally a vice-royalty under the Vijayanagara Empire in the sixteenth century, Mysore was gradually transformed into an autonomous principality by the Wodeyar dynasty. Its centralized military power began to increase in the late seventeenth century under Chikkadevaraja Wodeyar (1672-1704), but it reached its actual period of glory under Haidar Ali.
A man of humble origin, Haidar had started his career as a junior officer in the Mysore army and gradually rose to prominence. By 1761 he took over political power in Mysore by ousting the corrupt Dalwai (prime minister) Nanjraj, who had, in the meanwhile, usurped real power in the kingdom by reducing the Wodeyar king into a mere titular head. Haidar modernized his army with French experts, who trained an efficient infantry and artillery and infused European discipline into the Mysore army. It was organized on a European model through the “Risalas,” with a transparent chain of command going up to the ruler.
Each Risala had a fixed number of soldiers, with provision for weaponry and modes of transport and a commander appointed directly by Haidar. His power was further consolidated by the subjugation of the local warrior chiefs or hereditary overlords like Deshmukhs and Pategars (poligars), who had, until then, complete mastery over the countryside through their control over agricultural surpluses and local temples. Haidar and later his son Tipu Sultan introduced the system of imposing land taxes directly on the peasants and collecting them through salaried officials and in cash, thus enormously enhancing the state’s resource base. This land revenue system was based on detailed surveys and land classification; sometimes fixed rents and sometimes a share of the products were collected from different categories of land, such as wet or dry lands; the rent rate varying according to the productivity of the soil.
It did not wholly dispense with the Mughal institution of Jagir but restricted it to a tiny proportion of the available land. Burton stein has called Tipu’s revenue system a form of “military fiscalism” where state officials collected taxes directly from a broad base to mobilize resources to build up and maintain a large army. This was, therefore, part of a political project to establish centralized military hegemony by eliminating the intermediaries who were co-sharers of power in a previous segmentary state under the Vijayanagara Empire.
In order to expand its resource base, Tipu’s state-provided encouragement for the development of agriculture, such as tax remission for the reclamation of wasteland, and tried to promote the peasants from the rapacity of tax collectors. As a result, even his arch-enemies had to concede that “his country was the best cultivated and its populations the most flourishing in India.
Tipu was also interested in modernizing the agricultural economy by repairing old irrigation systems and constructing new ones, promoting agricultural manufacturing, and introducing sericulture in Mysore. He sent ambassadors to France to bring in European technology and went on to build a navy with the ambition to participate in maritime trade. Finally, he launched 1793 what can be described as a “state commercial corporation” with plans to set up factories outside Mysore.
Over time, Mysore state began to participate in a lucrative trade in valuable goods like sandalwood, rice, silk, coconut, sulfur, etc., and established thirty trading centers in and outside Mysore in other parts of western India and overseas like Muscat. However, his modernization plans went far beyond his resources, and therefore, Mysore remained, as Irfan Habib argues, “far away from a real opening to modern civilization.” The state of Mysore under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan was involved in establishing a centralized military hegemony.
Its territorial ambition and trading interests got it engaged in constant warfare, overshadowing all other aspects of its history during this period. Haidar Ali invaded and annexed Malabar and Calicut in 1766, thus expanding the frontiers of Mysore significantly. On the other hand, the Maratha Kingdom’s boundaries extended over the Konkan and Malabar’s coastal arrears, which made conflict with Mysore inevitable.
There was also conflict with the other regional powers, like Hyderabad and then the English, on whom Haidar Ali inflicted a heavy defeat near Madras in 1769. After he died in 1782, his son Tipu Sultan followed his father’s policies. His rule ended with a defeat at the hands of the English in 1799-he died defending his capital Srirangapatnam. It is important to remember that in a significant way, Tipu’s reign represented a discontinuity in eighteenth-century Indian politics, as his kingship, argues Kate Brittlebank, was rooted firmly in a solid regional tradition.
Unlike other eighteenth-century states, which did not challenge the political legitimacy of the Mughal emperor, in a symbolic gesture to proclaim his independence, Tipu issued coins without any reference to the Mughal emperor, and instead of Shah Alam’s name, he inserted his name in the Khutba (Friday sermons at the mosques); finally, he sought a sanad from the ottoman Khalif to legitimize his rule. However, he, too, “did not completely sever links.” with the Mughal monarch, who still commanded respect in the subcontinent. Being a ‘realist’ as he was, Tipu recognized Mughal authority when it suited him and defied it when it did not.