Ruler of Mysore who fought the British East India Company harder, and with more modern means, than almost any Indian prince of his age. Tipu Sultan (1750–1799), the Tiger of Mysore, modernized his army, expanded Mysore's iron-cased war rockets, sought a French alliance, and died defending his capital at Seringapatam in 1799. He is remembered both as an early resister of British rule and, by critics, for documented violence and forced conversions against some Hindu and Christian communities, and he remains fiercely contested in India today.
When British soldiers stormed his island fortress in 1799, they found a ruler who had spent his reign turning Mysore into a machine for fighting them. Tipu Sultan had a mechanical wooden tiger built that showed a tiger mauling a British soldier, with a bellows inside that made the man groan. His soldiers fired iron-cased rockets in organized volleys that unsettled British troops, who later studied and copied them. He had written to the kings of France, Persia, and Ottoman Turkey, hunting allies against the Company that was swallowing India. He took the tiger as his emblem and called himself its lord. He died fighting as British-led forces stormed his capital, and the British, who had feared him, treated his fall as the end of a real enemy. Two centuries later, Indians still argue whether to remember him as an anti-colonial resister, a modernizing ruler, or a coercive conqueror.