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Buy/gift a digital subscription Login to the Digital EditionTipu Sultan, the incomparably wealthy ‘Tiger of Mysore’, was a military and diplomatic innovator well ahead of his time
When an embassy from Mysore reached the court of Louis XVI in 1788, it was the biggest diplomatic event of the decade. The Southern Indian envoys were the talk of Paris and Versailles, especially among fashion enthusiasts. When a larger group of ambassadors had visited the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid I a year earlier, it had been barely noticed.
Timing was not on Mysore’s side with either of these missions. The French Revolution of 1789 wrecked their plans with Louis, while every other calamity had struck the Mysoreans en route to the Caliph. The spectacle at Versailles was at least recorded in one of the most important portraits in the history of diplomacy. Marie Antoinette’s favourite artist was, unusually, a woman. Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun’s painting shows a proud ambassador attired in fine Mysore muslin. There are no such souvenirs of the ambassadors to Abdülhamid I. There are, however, written records of the encounter, which turned out to be less of a failure than the much-fêted mission to France.
The ruler with a passion for overseas encounters was Tipu Sultan of Mysore. More than two centuries ago in Southern India, he was the last member of a Muslim dynasty that existed for less than 40 years but still changed the world. Tipu Sultan and his father, Haider Ali, the founder of the short-lived sultanate, are mostly forgotten now, except in India, where they are no longer considered to be the heroes they were at the time of Independence in 1947. There aren’t even any official portraits of the two rulers who dominate the exhibition More than a Day as a Tiger: The Legacy of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1761-1799), at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM).
The legacy of the two dynasts is being revived by showing their creative output and the many contacts they tried to form with the rest of the world. Their links to the Ottoman Empire were especially significant.
Tim Stanley delves into an exhibition about a vanished treasure once believed to have been owned by Henry VIII
The dazzling work of the Şakir Pasha family
Caroline Finkel reviews Painters of the Ottoman World: British, Maltese and Levantine Artists in the Ömer Koç Collection and pays tribute to the art historian Briony Llewellyn
The Istanbul Research Institute celebrates the life and work of Arif Hikmet Koyunoğlu
The wondrous cornelian cherry, by Berrin Torolsan
The ceramic secrets of a 16th-century bath house
When two exiled Ottoman princesses married into the family of the richest man in the world, the match made headlines around the globe. Cosmo Brockway describes the opulence that awaited them in Hyderabad. Palace photographs by Monica Fritz
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