Moreover, James was astonished by Tipu Sultan’s bravery and his spirit of resistance. Despite the Company’s successful counterattack there was no evidence that Tipu’s ‘firmness is shaken or his perseverance abated’, and although four armies were now advancing in strength towards him, ‘if he has as yet made any offers of submission it is more than I

Before he set off to Hyderabad, Shore had briefed William Kirkpatrick to stick to the existing Triple Alliance, signed four years earlier in 1790, which bound the Marathas,

who threatened to unveil herself in public if the Nizam did not take his entire zenana (harem) into the shelter of the small and half-ruined moated fort of Khardla. This lay at the very bottom of Moori Ghat, just over three miles behind the front line. During the confusion of the Nizam’s inexplicable retreat, a small party of Marathas looking for

Library. It is as if the Victorians succeeded in colonising not only India but also, more permanently, our imaginations, to the exclusion of all other images of the Indo – British encounter.

The focus of the region moved to Aurangzeb’s new Mughal headquarters town at Aurangabad, and for eighty years Hyderabad was left a melancholy shadow of its former glory, with whole quarters of the city deserted and ruined. But on the accession of Nizam Ali Khan in 1762, Hyderabad was again made the capital of the region, and this time of a domain

Between 1780 and 1784, following the disastrous British defeat by Tipu Sultan of Mysore at the Battle of Pollilur, seven thousand British men, along with an unknown number of women, were held captive by Tipu in his sophisticated fortress of Seringapatam.* Of these over three hundred were circumcised and given Muslim names and clothes.48 Even more

But the bulk of the Nizam’s army had succeeded in reaching their designated campsite on the banks of a rivulet three miles on from the slopes of Moori Ghat. There they dug in for the night, well positioned for the expected battle the following morning. No one was quite sure at the time what went wrong, but just after eleven o’clock that night, a

What in fact had happened, as Kirkpatrick later learned, was that an intermittent cannonade by the Marathas had panicked the Nizam’s women, and especially Bakshi Begum, the Nizam’s most senior wife,

the Nizam and the Company together as allies, and which isolated the Company’s great enemy Tipu Sultan, who remained outside the alliance.