At Srirangapatna After the Siege of 4 May 1799, the Lal Mahal Was Largely Demolished, the Fort's Inner Ramparts Were Levelled in 1800, and the Gumbaz and the Daria Daulat Were Kept Up and Now Stand Among Ten ASI Entries

The Archaeological Survey of India’s Bengaluru Circle lists ten protected entries at Srirangapatna, numbered 73 to 82 in the version of its list archived on 8 September 2019. They include Tipu Sultan’s summer palace, the Daria Daulat Bagh, the Gumbaz that holds the tombs of Hyder Ali and Tipu, the Jumma Masjid, the fort walls near the breach of 1799, and an entry called “Ancient Palace Site and Remains”. Its own page says that last entry is a raised mound of brick, the remains of Tipu’s palace inside the fort, which it adds was also called the Lal Mahal.

How the British stormed the island on 4 May 1799 is in the earlier tuput article on Tipu’s rocket corps and is not retold here. This piece follows the buildings. For each one it gives what the sources opened for it say about its fate, and it says so where those sources give no date or no name for a demolition.

Two palaces that get confused

The name Lal Mahal belongs to the palace inside the fort. On the Survey’s page the site lies north-east of the Ranganathaswami temple, and the 1967 Mysore State Gazetteer for Mandya district describes, within the fort walls, “remains of a palace of Tipu, known as Lal Mahal”. Another place, the Lal Bagh, was a garden at the eastern end of the island that held Hyder Ali’s mausoleum and a second palace of Tipu’s.

Francis Buchanan, who toured Mysore for the Governor-General and reached Srirangapatna in May 1800, described the fort palace as a very large building behind a massive wall of stone and mud, plain from outside. It had some handsome apartments, by then turned into barracks. Tipu’s own rooms were one side of a square whose other three sides were warehouses of goods. Major Alexander Beatson, whose history of the war was printed that year, called the palace “a magnificent building in the Asiatic style” and wrote that a high wall and many old, unfinished buildings around it spoiled its look.

According to the 1967 Gazetteer, the greater part of this palace was demolished by the British after the capture of 1799, who used it for some time as a military post. B. Lewis Rice’s revised gazetteer of 1897 says the remains had become a sandalwood store and that most of the palace had been demolished, and it names no one. Neither gives a year. Buchanan has the building standing in May 1800, the latest sighting among the sources opened here. Colonel G. B. Malleson, writing in 1876, found the walls that had enclosed the palaces of Hyder and Tipu used as a sandalwood depot and wrote that not a vestige of either palace remained.

What the Survey shows today is the base. Its page describes the remains of a brick plinth with lime pilasters, with a pillared room, a hall and part of a flight of steps from the west exposed.

The Lal Bagh palace

Major Alexander Dirom, at the siege of 1792, called the Lal Bagh palace “a superb new palace built by Tipu”, in words Rice’s gazetteer quotes. Buchanan thought it the handsomest native building he had seen, although built of mud, and wrote that the Resident, Colonel Close, had it under repair.

In the 1967 Gazetteer’s account the Lal Bagh was assigned as the Resident’s residence from 1799 to 1804, with the mint, the treasury and the court’s offices close by. About the end of 1804 those offices moved to Mysore, and the Lal Bagh was pronounced uninhabitable on account of its unhealthiness. Rice states that of Tipu’s palace in the Lal Bagh nothing remains. Neither source says who took it down or when.

The two buildings the governors chose to keep up

Tipu built the Gumbaz, a tomb and mosque, between 1782 and 1784 as a tribute to his father Hyder Ali, the Survey says, with his mother Fakr-un-Nisa interred beside her husband, and after Tipu’s death his family chose to bury him with his parents. Beatson records that Colonel Arthur Wellesley arranged an escort of four flank companies of Europeans for the funeral on 5 May 1799, with minute guns, and that at the mausoleum gate the grenadiers formed a street and presented arms.

Buchanan wrote that the tombs were covered with rich cloths at the Company’s expense and that the mullahs and the musicians who played the nobat, the ceremonial drum music, were kept up as before. Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General, wrote a minute dated 2 November 1855, after touring Mysore, naming two objects on the island as worthy of the Supreme Government’s care. First came the tomb, which he found in the charge of one of Tipu’s family, with endowments too small to keep it in repair and its inlaid doors dilapidated. He ordered the Commissioner to replace the doors and to pay for repairs whenever the endowment fell short, and wrote that he believed the Court of Directors would wish to show “an enduring respect for the last resting place of brave and fallen enemies”. Rice’s first volume records Rs 2,000 spent on the doors and other work on the tombs in 1859. A comparison in the 1967 Gazetteer sets the Gumbaz beside the Taj Mahal and calls it less profusely ornamented and of a poorer design.

Second came the house in the Daria Daulat Bagh where Wellesley had lived. Built in 1784, the Survey says, the summer palace is mostly teak, outside the fort on the Kaveri bank, with painted walls inside and out. Rice writes that Tipu had defaced the wall paintings before the siege, that Wellesley restored them, and that they faded again until Dalhousie had an artist who remembered them repaint them. Dalhousie found the house unoccupied and decaying and ordered it kept as nearly as possible as Wellesley left it. Rice gives Rs 37,000 for the work, ordered in November 1855 and finished in a little over three years. A Tipu Sultan Museum opened there on 25 December 1959, according to the 1967 Gazetteer, and the Survey now says the ground floor is its site museum.

The fort walls and the gates

Beatson’s description of the fort in 1800 has a rampart 20 to 35 feet high, faced in cut granite except at the north-west bastion, and ditches cut in solid rock. Rice and the 1967 Gazetteer both say the inner ramparts were demolished to give the garrison more room and the inner ditch was filled in 1800, and that a line of tamarind trees planted along it marks the course. Otherwise Rice found the fortifications comparatively uninjured, the effects of the breaching batteries plainer than the effects of time, apart from the railway cutting through the western part of the fort. The breach is visible near the road to Mysore.

Rice describes the Elephant Gate on the south side, with a Persian inscription dating the foundation of the fort to 1219 on Tipu’s Mauludi calendar, 1791 in Rice’s conversion. It is no longer used, and the road passes through a newer gateway to its west. The archway where Tipu was wounded no longer exists, Rice adds, and a wooden door into a garden about 100 yards east of the sally-port is pointed out as the place. Quoting the Mysore Archaeological Department’s report for 1935, the 1967 Gazetteer places a gateway about 50 yards east of the water gate. On the Survey’s list, “Spot where Tipu’s Body was found” is entry 79 and the obelisk monuments and fort walls near the breach are entry 78.

Tipu took some buildings down himself. Buchanan wrote that before the siege he had removed the roofs of Shahar Ganjam, the suburb on the island, expecting the British to occupy it as they had in 1792, and the 1967 Gazetteer says the place was laid out afresh afterwards.

What the arsenals held

Beatson’s inventory of the fort lists eleven large powder magazines, 72 expense magazines, which held ammunition for immediate use, eleven armouries for small arms, two cannon foundries, three buildings with machines for boring guns and muskets, four large arsenals and seventeen other storehouses.

After 1799 the fort stayed a Company base. Malleson says Scott, a Captain in 1801 and later a Colonel and the garrison’s commandant, was put in charge of the gun-carriage manufactory in the fort in 1800, and Rice says the enclosure of the old royal palace was used for a time as a gun-carriage factory. In June 1880, the year Srirangapatna stopped being a military station, the manufactory moved to Fort St. George in Madras, according to the 1967 Gazetteer. None of the sources opened here says which arsenal, armoury or foundry buildings were taken down, or when.

The Wodeyar palace and the court at Mysore

Beatson writes that the Mysore family had lived in the old palace in the fort until about 1796, and that it had since been an armoury and military storehouse. Rice quotes Mark Wilks that Tipu, in removing the Raja’s family, had meant to destroy the palace and then changed the order. Buchanan, in May 1800, called the old palace ruinous. He wrote that Tipu had razed the palace at Mysore city and that its rebuilding began when the young Raja was installed. Rice dates the installation of Krishnaraja Wodeyar III at Mysore to 30 June 1799, and Buchanan found him in the palace there, by then a comfortable dwelling, on a throne the Company had given him.

Rice records what remained at Srirangapatna by 1897: a few mud walls and a sunken granary near the Sri Ranganatha temple. Malleson says the wall around the Hindu Raja’s palace was demolished in 1800 to supply materials for the new palace at Mysore, which Rice does not mention. A pavilion built by the Mysore government about 50 yards south-east of the temple marks the place where Krishnaraja Wodeyar III was born, the 1967 Gazetteer adds.

Purnaiya, the Dewan, put up the Wellesley Bridge over the northern branch of the Kaveri in 1804, and the Raja had a bungalow built for Scott on the river bank. After Scott left in 1817, following the sudden deaths of his wife and children, the Raja ordered that the house be left as it was. Mysore leased the island for Rs 50,000 a year, and the 1967 Gazetteer dates the lease to 1799 in one chapter and to after 1811 in another.

What the Survey protects now

Numbers 73 to 82 on the Survey’s list run from the palace site, Colonel Bailey’s Dungeon, the Daria Daulat, the Gumbaz and the Jumma Masjid, through the fort walls near the breach, the spot where Tipu’s body was found and a statue of Kanthirava in the Narasimha temple, to the Ranganathaswami temple and Thomas Inman’s Dungeon. Its page on Bailey’s Dungeon gives the size as about 30 by 15 metres, says it appears to have been used by Tipu to hold prisoners of war, and says Colonel Bailey is said to have been held there for a short time. Two dungeons of other sizes appear in the 1967 Gazetteer, which says it is said that Dhondia Wagh, a Maratha warrior, was held in one and British prisoners in the other.

On the Jumma Masjid the sources differ. The Survey reads its inscription as A.H. 1215 and converts that to 1782, while the 1967 Gazetteer says an inscription gives 1787. Citing the 1935 report, the Gazetteer also says that Tipu built the mosque on top of an Anjaneya temple after filling in the temple’s ground floor, which the Survey’s page does not mention.

In 1967 the Gazetteer put an overseer of the state horticulture department in charge of the gardens at the Daria Daulat and the Gumbaz. By the Survey’s 2019 page, the Daria Daulat garden is maintained by the Survey itself. On the Lal Mahal site, the same page says a considerable portion of the structure to the east is still buried.