Tipu Sultan's Rocket Corps as British Officers Recorded It in 1780, 1792 and 1799, and the Argument Over the Man Who Led It

The number usually given for Tipu Sultan’s rocket corps is about 5,000 men, up from about 1,200 under his father Hyder Ali. It comes from Roddam Narasimha, of the National Aeronautical Laboratory and the Indian Institute of Science, in a lecture he gave in Bangalore on 2 April 1985, and the printed lecture names no British officer as its source. British officers did write about the rocketmen, in 1789, 1793 and 1800, and none of the three says 5,000.

How the weapon ended up in the American anthem is told in an earlier tuput article and is not repeated here. This piece looks at what British officers counted, what Congreve wrote, what museums and NASA can show, and how historians read Tipu himself.

Where the 5,000 comes from

Narasimha’s lecture was issued in May 1985 as a National Aeronautical Laboratory project document. It says the Mysore army had a regular rocket corps, that it began with about 1,200 men under Hyder and reached about 5,000 under Tipu, and that rockets were in use in the Carnatic before Hyder. His father was commanding 50 rocketmen for the Nawab of Arcot. Mohibbul Hasan’s 1951 History of Tipu Sultan gives the same detail for Fath Muhammad, who rose in the Nawab’s service to lead 600 foot soldiers, 500 horse and 50 rocket men.

Hasan also describes how Tipu organised the arm. His infantry stood in four brigades of six cushoons each, and a cushoon, which Hasan translates as regiment, carried an establishment of rocketmen under a captain called a juqdar. That makes 24 cushoons, each with a rocket company. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam’s autobiography Wings of Fire gives a different count, 27 brigades, and cites no source for it. Neither Hasan nor Kalam says how many men a rocket company held, so neither can be used to check the 5,000.

What British officers put on paper

Captain Innes Munro of the 73rd Highlanders wrote about the war in the Carnatic from 1780 to 1784 and published his letters in 1789. He wrote that Hyder employed “some thousands of men for throwing rockets”. He described an iron tube on a bamboo eight or ten feet long. In wet or marshy ground the rockets flew through the air for a mile and a half, he said, and on dry ground they bounded along “in a very uncertain direction”, doing “great damage, particularly amongst cavalry and ammunition tumbrils”.

Major Alexander Dirom, deputy adjutant general of the King’s forces in India, met the weapon in the war of 1792. His 1793 narrative says that in early February 1792 the Sultan sent parties with rockets to disturb the British camps at night, and he calls them “useless weapons, creating more alarm than damage”. His glossary defines the rocket as an iron tube about a foot long and an inch across, on a bamboo rod ten or twelve feet long, flying “upwards of a thousand yards”. It says rockets exceedingly annoy native cavalry but are easily avoided by troops “formed in lines of great extent, and no great depth”.

Major Alexander Beatson’s 1800 history of the war of 1799 prints a return of Tipu’s army for 4 May 1799, the day of the final assault. It is a count of men and totals 36,131 in the field, and Beatson adds that the state registers showed about 48,000. The return names rocket-men on two lines only. Under Qamar-ud-din Khan, a line headed “Geesh, Rocket Boys, Infantry, &c.” stands at 120. Under Purnaiah, a line headed “Geesh, Rockets, &c.” stands at 131.

Narasimha places two rocket units under those same two commanders, with those same 120 and 131 men, in the war of 1792. The figures and commanders match Beatson’s 1799 table, and no 1792 source for them turned up in the sources checked here. The table does not break out rocketmen inside the infantry regiments, so it can neither confirm nor refute 5,000. It does agree with Dirom on one point. Dirom saw a body of cavalry coming with “rocket boys” to disturb his camp, and the return lists its rocket-men inside two commands made up mostly of horse.

Another dispute concerns Pollilur, on 10 September 1780. Narasimha reports that Forrest’s 1970 Tiger of Mysore and others hold that Mysore rockets set one of Colonel Baillie’s ammunition wagons on fire, while Rao’s 1943 History of Mysore suggests French cannon did it.

Srirangapatna, April and May 1799

Beatson’s day-by-day account has rockets in several stages of the siege of Srirangapatna, which he spells Seringapatam. On the night of 5 April, Colonel Arthur Wellesley led a night attack on the Sultanpet grove, was “assailed on every side by a hot fire of musquetry and rockets”, and put the attack off. At half past two on the morning of 22 April, rocket-men got into the rear of General Stuart’s camp and “threw a great number of rockets at the same instant”, the signal for an attack by about 6,000 infantry. On 2 May, soon after the British batteries opened, a shot struck “a magazine of rockets in the fort” and caused “a dreadful explosion”.

The assault went in on 4 May. According to the account Beatson printed, Tipu was shot that day at a gateway as he tried to reach his palace, and General Baird’s party found his body at dusk under a heap of the dead.

Kalam writes that when Tipu was killed the British captured more than 700 rockets and parts for 900 more, and his passage cites no source. Beatson’s list of what was found in the fort counts 929 pieces of ordnance and gives no rocket total.

What Congreve’s own pages say

Congreve’s 1827 treatise gives his own start date. “In the year 1804,” he wrote, “it first occurred to me” that a rocket’s force could be used without recoil. The Royal Artillery Museum says he designed his rocket in 1801, and Narasimha has him buying the biggest sky-rockets in London in 1801 or 1802, so the dates do not agree.

The next paragraphs of the treatise give numbers that bear on Mysore. The largest rockets he could buy in London reached only 500 or 600 yards. After changes he made, a same-sized rocket reached 1,500 yards, and rockets built at Woolwich reached 2,000. He put the range of the Indian rocket at no more than 1,000 yards. By his own figures, then, the Indian weapon outranged what London’s makers could produce when he began. His figure is the lowest of the accounts. Dirom says upwards of a thousand yards, Munro a mile and a half in wet ground, and Narasimha one to two kilometres.

His 1814 manual was written for the Rocket Corps that the Prince Regent ordered formed on 1 January 1814. Congreve calls the weapon “this new branch of our naval and military means” and says the volume was “not in any way for publication”. Right after the passage about his 1817 manufactory, the 1827 treatise adds that an officer of the East India Company had imitated his rockets in outward appearance, and that the Government of India had set up a factory under that officer. Congreve said he had received no pay for his work for the Company and was “a considerable loser by the establishment I have erected”.

Where the rockets are now, and the painting at Wallops

Narasimha, citing von Braun and Ordway’s 1966 History of Rocketry and Space Travel, lists two Mysore specimens kept at the Royal Artillery Museum at Woolwich. The larger is an iron casing 10 inches long, tied with strips of hide to a sword blade 3 feet 4 inches long, and the smaller is 7.8 inches long on a bamboo pole 6 feet 3 inches long. The museum’s own online page today describes a Congreve rocket and says it was inspired by those of Mysore. The Science Museum Group’s catalogue lists Congreve material, including a bombarding frame dated 1806, and a search of it on 8 October 2026 found no Tipu or Mysore rocket.

A separate claim concerns NASA. Kalam trained at three NASA centres in the early 1960s. In Wings of Fire he describes a painting in the reception lobby at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, which showed a battle with a few rockets flying in the background, launched by soldiers who were not white but dark-skinned. It turned out to be Tipu Sultan’s army fighting the British. “I was happy to see an Indian glorified by NASA as a hero of warfare rocketry,” he wrote.

NASA’s own History Division repeated the account in its newsletter for the second quarter of 2009, citing Kalam’s book, and added that his NASA training led to the first sounding rocket launch from Thumba on 21 November 1963. Neither text says who painted the picture, when it was hung or whether it is still there, and no photograph of it turned up in the sources checked here. The newsletter reports Kalam’s recollection. It does not say NASA chose the painting as a tribute. India’s later rocket record is in the ISRO article.

What Tipu built

Kaveh Yazdani’s 2014 survey in Itinerario, based on English, French and German sources, describes an educated autocrat interested in administrative, economic, military and technical innovation, and says the literature either idealises him as enlightened or condemns him as a pre-modern despot.

Hasan’s chapter on trade lists what the Sultan did. Tipu opened a factory at Muscat and, in 1789, two in Cutch. He took state monopolies in sandalwood, black pepper, tobacco, gold ore, elephants, coconut and teak. He set up a trading company that small investors could join, and he issued regulations on 25 March 1793 and 2 April 1794 that called for 17 factories abroad and 30 at home. Irfan Habib, who edited two books on Tipu, was reported by PTI in October 2017 as crediting him with building a modern army, making modern weapons and giving economic development priority. The longer story of what Company rule did to Indian trade after 1799 is in how Britain drained India.

The French connection is in the British record too. Beatson counts about 120 Frenchmen at Srirangapatna when it fell, 20 of them officers, under a M. Chapuy. His first chapter turns on a proclamation by the governor of Mauritius, issued on 30 January 1798 according to Hasan, saying that envoys from Tipu had proposed an alliance and offered to pay for any French troops sent. Hasan argued in 1951 that the account told around that mission was mostly a fabrication.

Conversion, temples and the historians

Hasan summarises the older British verdict. Kirkpatrick called Tipu an intolerant bigot and a furious fanatic, and Wilks described forcible conversions, mass circumcisions, destroyed temples and confiscated temple lands. Later compilations of the records give specific cases. Logan’s Malabar Manual, which follows the East India Company’s Tellicherry factors, says news reached them in 1788 that 200 Brahmans at Calicut had been “made Mussulmen, and forced to eat beef”. It quotes Wilks that 2,000 Nayars and their families, besieged at Kuttippuram in early 1789, were offered “a forcible conversion with deportation from their native land”. Francis Buchanan, who surveyed Canara for the Company after Tipu’s fall, wrote that Tipu “threw the priests into dungeons, forcibly converted to Islamism the laity, and destroyed all the churches”. Buchanan said 15,000 of the converts had returned to Mangalore by then and 10,000 had escaped to Malabar.

Hasan’s 1951 chapter on religious policy takes the opposite view. It says Tipu never persecuted Hindus, and it cites his letters to the Sringeri monastery from 1791 to 1798. After Maratha horsemen raided Sringeri in 1791, killing and wounding many people there, Tipu ordered 200 fanams in cash and 200 fanams’ worth of grain for reconsecrating the image of the goddess Sharada. Tipu did sometimes ill-treat non-Muslims, Hasan grants, but the cause was disloyalty, not religion. Hindu officers served him, among them Purnaiah, and the Christians of Canara were exiled for treason, not for their faith. Hasan reports estimates of those exiled of 20,000, 40,000 and 30,000, and calls Wilks’s figure of 60,000 “grossly exaggerated”. Evidence of forced conversion of Christians he finds unreliable, and in his telling those who accepted Islam did so voluntarily, to escape prison life. Buchanan’s account says the opposite. For Coorg, the chronicle Sultan-ut-Tawarikh puts the converts at 70,000. Hasan calls that absurd, since Coorg’s whole population barely reached it, and cites a figure of 500 from Ram Chandra Rao Punganuri.

Habib, speaking to PTI, said it would be “unfair” to call Tipu a tyrant. He also said that “in suppressing two rebellions in Coorg and in Malabar, when he took prisoners, he converted them to Islam rather than killing them”, and that Tipu made grants to Hindu temples and had a Hindu prime minister in Purnaiah. Kanika Datta’s review in Business Standard of Kate Brittlebank’s Tiger summarises Brittlebank’s reading. Destroying religious sites was a political act of conquest whoever the owners were. Tipu pulled down the Varahaswami temple tied to the Wodeyars, the dynasty his father had displaced, yet let the Sri Ranganatha temple stand within sight of his palace and endowed the Jain temple at Sravanabelgola and the Sringeri monastery. The forced conversion and transfer of Christians, in Datta’s account of Brittlebank, formed part of a policy of chastisement against groups seen as allies of the British, as were the Nairs and Kodavas.

Nonica Datta of Jawaharlal Nehru University, quoted in the same PTI report, said Tipu was neither a nationalist hero nor a tyrant. “The images are constructed respectively by secular and Hindutva nationalisms,” she said.