Beschreibung:

A gilt-copper hilted steel sword from the armoury of Tipu Sultan
Mysore, Seringapatam, late 18th Centurythe single-edged Persian watered-steel blade of curved form with central fuller and further paired channels interspersed by groups of four punched circle motifs, yelman and armour piercing tip, the flattened spine chiselled with further channels and circle motifs, a flower and an indistinct maker's stamp, gold-overlaid inscription-filled cartouche to one side, further gold overlaid decoration to the spine, the hilt of gilt-bronze, the multifaceted grips chiselled with bubri motifs on a stippled ground, the pommel in the form of a parrot head, the forte and quillons in the form of tiger heads, curving knuckle guard, all with further stippled decoration and bubri motifs
97.3 cm. longFootnotesProvenance
Private German collection, acquired in the 1980s.
Private UK collection.
Inscriptions: traces of a maker's name.
Of all the related swords from the armoury at Seringapatam with tiger head langets and quillons, this sword is unique in that the hilt is surmounted by a parakeet pommel. Comparable examples with tiger head pommels are in the National War Museum, Edinburgh (M.2004.53); on display at Powys Castle, Wales (no. 33); further examples are published in Robert Hales, Islamic and Oriental Arms and Armour: A Lifetime's Passion, London, 2013, p. 185, cats. 439 and 440.
Tipu, who famously uttered: "I would rather live a day as a tiger than a lifetime as a sheep" adopted the royal tiger as his personal emblem. The association of a tiger with a dynasty was not unique to him, but he took the use of this to new heights and customised everything that might be associated with him, including his throne, ornamentation on his buildings, arms and armour, textiles such as tent panels, the uniforms of his courtiers and soldiers, and was even said to have a tiger-stripe or bubri motif as the watermark on the paper he used for official edicts. When travelling outside his court, he was known to wear a red coat emblazoned with bubris. The tiger was symbolic of power and Tipu objects are easily identified by this decoration. Tipu even dreamed of tigers and recorded such an incident in his notebook, which was discovered by Col. William Kirkpatrick after the fall of Seringapatam (William Kirkpatrick (transl.), Select Letters of Tippoo Sultan, London, 1811). He saw himself as the royal tiger, the instrument of God, appointed to devour God's enemies, in particular the British. He even went so far as to order the walls of houses in the city to be painted with scenes of tigers mauling Europeans and there were stories of enemies being thrown into the tiger-pit within the palace.
Tipu Sultan was the East India Company's most tenacious enemy and the Company badly wanted to take over Mysore and seize its considerable mineral riches. Tipu was a tough and brilliant general: in the course of five wars against the Company, he inflicted on them the most humiliating defeat ever suffered by the British at Indian hands - the Battle of Pollilur in 1780. This was a tactically brilliant victory by Tipu, and led to the capture of no less than one in five of all British soldiers in India. In total, more than 7,000 British men, along with an unknown number of women, were held captive by Tipu.
Tipu, it is now clear, was one of the most creative, innovative and capable rulers of the pre-colonial period. Tactically, the Mysore forces were fully the match of those of the East India Company and their weapons, which were based on the latest French designs, were much superior to the Company's old matchlocks. He studied European economic methods and put in place a number of extremely imaginative measures which quickly transformed the economy of Mysore. He imported French technology and welcomed French artisans to train the craftsmen of Mysore. Tipu sent envoys to southern China to bring back silkworm eggs and established sericulture in Mysore - an innovation of his that still enriches the region today. He set up a department of animal husbandry to breed superior strains of draught cattle and horses, and he built a network of new roads. More remarkably still, he created what amounted to a large State Trading Company with its own ships and factories dotted across the Persian Gulf, through which he began to open up a profitable trade with the Middle East.
His substantial library, which contained some 2,000 volumes in several languages, was full of books not only about theology, ethics, Sufism, cosmology and Islamic jurisprudence, but also on history, poetry, the sciences, mathematics and astronomy and "was a library to do a Mughal prince proud", as one scholar later commented, although the greatest of all the arts of the court of Tipu are the metalwork and jewellery. Tipu clearly loved the beautiful objects which filled his carefully amassed treasury and, as one observer described, he "passed the greatest part of his leisure hours in reviewing this various and splendid assemblage of his riches".