Yet the thirty-foot-long mural of Pollilur that glows still from the walls of Tipu’s elegant wooden summer palace just outside Seringapatam is more than a commemoration of Mysore victory. Looked at closely, this piece of courtly propaganda by an unknown artist in the service of Tipu is also a meditation on warrior masculinity and its absence. Without exception, Tipu and his turbaned armies are shown all sporting beards or moustaches. Even their French allies fighting alongside them bristle with facial hair. But their British opponents have been portrayed very differently. In reality, some of Baillie’s men would have struggled and died that day wearing tartan kilts and motley colours. Here, though, his white soldiers all appear in uniform jackets of red, a colour associated with blood, fertility and power, but also in India with eunuchs and with women. Baillie’s men are also conspicuously and invariably clean-shaven. Neatly side-burned, with doe-like eyes, raised eyebrows, and pretty pink lips, they have been painted to look like girls, or at least creatures who are not fully male. This was not an atypical form of mockery in the subcontinent at this stage. The British were ‘worse than women’, another Indian ruler wrote in 1780, sly, fox-like traders who had been foolish enough to challenge tigers. And now the time for their destruction was come.
British reactions at the time were not very different. When news of Pollilur, and other military reversals against Mysore’s legions, reached London in 1781, it provoked ‘universal consternation’. In rival European capitals, and in Revolutionary America, there was both astonishment and schadenfreude. This, after all, was the year of Yorktown, and the end of all of Britain’s hopes of retaining the oldest, richest sector of its transatlantic empire. Now it seemed that Britain’s newer, eastern empire was also coming under acute pressure. ‘India and America are alike escaping,’ predicted Horace Walpole, an anti-imperial English Whig. This was over-euphoric: but it was the case, as the prime minister, Lord North, admitted, that defeat at Pollilur: ‘had engaged the attention of the world . . . and had given rise to so much public clamour and uneasiness’. And although some subsequent successes in southern India allowed this phase of conflict between the East India Company and Mysore to end in a draw, imperial confidence had been severely dented, and remained so for some time. In 1784, Parliament passed new legislation regulating the affairs of the Company, and explicitly renouncing any prospect of future British expansion in India: ‘schemes of conquest and extent of dominion . . . [were] repugnant to the wish, the honour and the policy of this nation.’ Doubts about the feasibility – and desirability – of further advances in the subcontinent were still in evidence when war with Mysore resumed in 1790. Political prints published in London at that time predicted almost without exception that British forces would be defeated and humiliated there.
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Just how many British captives were taken by Mysore in its successive wars with the Company will never be known. Pollilur alone resulted in over 200 Britons being seized (some 3000 ‘British’ troops, white and Indian, were killed there). But there were many other defeats and skirmishes productive of captives. In 1782, for instance, the French handed over to Haidar 400 British sailors and more than sixty Royal Navy officers that their naval vessels had captured at sea. Many British captives in Mysore (there were far greater numbers of Company sepoy captives) did not survive to be freed, dying from disease, harsh treatment, or because they were already severely wounded when taken. But we know that over 1300 British troops and at least 2000 Company sepoys remained alive to be handed over when peace was signed in 1784. We also know that an additional 400 British-born captives stayed on in Mysore until the 1790s, some of them voluntarily as Muslim converts.
In comparison with more recent captivity panics in Asia, with the 130,000 British soldiers seized by Japan after the fall of Singapore in 1942 for instance, these Mysore captives seem conspicuously modest in point of numbers. But they must be viewed in the light both of the smallness of the British-born military presence in India at this stage – no more than 10,000 men – and of earlier complacent notions that such paltry numbers of whites, plus a few regiments of Indian auxiliaries, were all that was necessary to carve a swathe through the subcontinent. At Plassey in 1757, the ‘British’ force of 600 white troops and 2400 Eurasian and Indian soldiers had routed a force some fifteen times larger in number. More dramatically than anything else could have done, the number of white as well as Indian captives seized by Mysore after 1779 – at least one in five of all Britons in arms in the subcontinent – signalled that the days of clear European supremacy in India in terms of military technology, tactics and discipline were well and truly over. As one captive British officer wrote in 1784 of his comrades seized by Mysore: ‘Such a force as this twenty years ago would have marched through all India.’ But no longer. In Britain, too, the number of Mysore captives was of less importance than what their existence was viewed as signifying. A belief that Mysore was somehow ‘teeming with British captives’ had an impact similar to post-Vietnam American anxieties about the fate of unknown but wildly inflated numbers of GIs captured by the Vietcong or missing in action. In both cases, the real and rumoured scale of captivity deepened the humiliation of an unsatisfactory imperial war and fostered hatred and apprehension of an insidious, too efficient non-Western enemy.
~~Captives: Britain, Empire And The World 1600-1850 -by- Linda Colley
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