Subsidiary Alliance and the Anglo-Mysore and Anglo-Maratha Wars

Background: From Dupleix to Wellesley

Dupleix's Method: Sepoys and Indirect Rule

The method that Wellesley perfected was first tried by the French. Dupleix, Governor-General of French India from 1742 to 1754, trained Indian soldiers in European drill to create disciplined infantry known as sepoys. He also ruled indirectly through Indian rulers installed by intervening in disputes over succession. Dupleix captured Madras in 1746, but the Carnatic Wars (1746 to 1763) ended with the French colony reduced to Pondicherry and a few small enclaves.

The British took up Dupleix's method, and with greater success. Robert Clive won at Plassey in 1757 by promising the throne to the commander Mir Jafar, whose forces stood aside, and by 1765 the Company held the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Those revenues paid for a standing sepoy army, the instrument that later wars relied on.

After Buxar: Residents and Buffer States

After the Battle of Buxar (1764) the Company placed Residents at Indian courts. A Resident was a representative of the Governor-General who lived in a state not under direct British rule. Through him the Company watched, advised and, increasingly, decided who should hold office and succeed to the throne.

Before Wellesley the Company's aim was to shield its own territory by supporting friendly states on its borders. Awadh shows the idea: Under the Treaty of Benares of 1773 Shuja-ud‑Daula bought Kora and Allahabad for 50 lakh rupees and took Company military aid at a higher cost, and Warren Hastings justified the aid as a bid to strengthen Awadh as a buffer state against the Marathas. Wellesley's alliance extended the same idea but replaced occasional help with the fixed obligations of troops, payment and a Resident.

Wellesley's Aims: The French Danger and Paramountcy

Richard Wellesley, Governor-General of Bengal from 1798 to 1805, made curbing French power in India his highest priority. Soon after his arrival in India in April 1798 he learned that Tipu Sultan was negotiating an alliance with France, and one of his first orders was the disbandment of the French troops employed by the Nizam of Hyderabad.

His purpose was larger than the French. In a dispatch of 4 February 1801 he wrote that the aim of subsidiary alliances with the principal states was to place them in such dependence on British power as to deprive them of the means of forming any confederacy hazardous to the British empire, and to enable the Company to preserve the tranquillity of India by exercising a general control over them. That is paramountcy in practice: No Indian state could challenge the Company, and none could ally against it.

Subsidiary Alliance: Terms, Working and Effects

Five Obligations of an Allied Ruler

A ruler who signed the alliance accepted five obligations in return for protection from external attack; the Company also undertook to protect the ally from internal threats.

• Troops: The ruler maintained the Company's army at or near his capital.
• Payment: He provided money or territory for the upkeep of the force.
• No independent army: He was forbidden to keep an independent standing army.
• Foreign relations: He accepted the British as the supreme power in external affairs and could enter into agreements with other rulers or wage war only with their permission.
• Resident and Europeans: He kept a British Resident at his capital and expelled other Europeans from his service.

Internal administration formally stayed with the ruler, but Company agents increasingly interfered in succession and governance.

States That Accepted the Alliance and When

The Nizam of Hyderabad was among the first to accept, in 1798, and ten other rulers followed over the next 20 years.

The order follows the Company's wars: Hyderabad joined first, Mysore and the Maratha chiefs after their defeats, and the Rajput states only once the Marathas had fallen in 1818.

Awadh: How the Alliance Hollowed Out a State

Awadh shows what the alliance did to a state over time. Saadat Ali Khan II had come to the throne in 1798 with British help, and in 1801, under pressure from Wellesley, he ceded Rohilkhand, the Lower Doab and Gorakhpur in place of the annual payment. The cession halved his state and surrounded what remained with territory under direct British administration.

By the terms of the alliance imposed in 1801 the Nawab had to disband his military force, allow British troops to be placed in the kingdom and act in accordance with the advice of the British Resident attached to the court. Deprived of his armed forces, he grew dependent on the British to maintain law and order and could no longer assert control over rebellious chiefs and taluqdars. Lord Dalhousie described Awadh in 1851 as "a cherry that will drop into our mouth one day", and five years later, in 1856, the kingdom was formally annexed.

Effects on Indian Rulers

For a ruler the bargain looked like safety and turned into dependence. The system appeared to preserve the sovereignty of princely states while transferring real power to the British and burdening rulers with the costs of their own subjugation. Once a state entered the system, leaving it was virtually impossible, because any attempt to break free faced an overwhelming British military response.

Four effects followed:

• Loss of military power: Without an army of his own the ruler could neither defend himself nor resist the Company.
• Loss of foreign policy: Treaties and wars needed the Company's permission, which ended Indian confederacies against it.
• Financial strain: The subsidy often could not be met, and territory was taken in its place, as the cessions of Hyderabad and Awadh show.
• Misgovernment and unrest: A ruler who could not be removed by his own chiefs governed carelessly, and the Company later used misgovernment as the reason to annex, as it did in Awadh in 1856.

Effects on the Company

For the Company, the system gave control over vast territories without the administrative costs of direct rule. The result has been called "an empire on the cheap". It kept the French out of the courts of the major Indian states, placed Company troops at the centre of each, and gave the Company a Resident to read every court's politics.

The expansion also had a cost for Wellesley himself. His commercial policy and his projects, such as Fort William College, brought him into hostility with the Court of Directors of the Company; he more than once tendered his resignation and left India in 1805. Cornwallis was sent out again that year to curb his expansionism, and died in India in October.

Subsidiary Alliance and the Doctrine of Lapse: A Short Contrast

The Doctrine of Lapse is a different instrument and belongs to a later Governor-General. Under it a princely state under Company suzerainty could be annexed if its ruler died without a male heir or was judged manifestly incompetent. The Court of Directors had stated the idea as early as 1834, but it is associated with Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General from 1848 to 1856.

Awadh in 1856 is often listed with lapse, but it was annexed on the plea of misgovernment, not for want of an heir. The doctrine deliberately disregarded the Hindu tradition of adoption, a legitimate means of succession in Indian royal houses.

The Anglo-Mysore Wars, 1767 to 1799

Rise of Mysore Under Haidar Ali

Mysore grew into the strongest southern power under Haidar Ali. Haidar rose to the post of Dalavayi, the commander-in-chief of Krishnaraja Wodeyar II, dominated the titular monarch and by 1761 was the de facto ruler as Sarvadhikari, or chief minister. The Third Battle of Panipat (14 January 1761) helped him by weakening the Marathas, who withdrew their forces from Mysore. The Wodeyar dynasty had ruled before him; Haidar ruled in their name without taking the title of king.

Three circumstances shaped the wars that followed. He and Tipu used a French-trained army and a French alliance. Mysore fought on four fronts, with the British attacking from the west, south and east and the Nizam's forces from the north. And in 1769 Haidar wanted an alliance of mutual defence and offence, but the Company agreed only to mutual help if either was attacked.

Tipu Sultan: Administration, Rockets and Navy

Tipu Sultan, born on 1 December 1751, became Sultan of Mysore in 1782 and held the throne until his death in 1799. He is remembered as Sher-e-Mysore, the Tiger of Mysore, and as an administrator as much as a soldier. He introduced a new calendar, a new coinage and seven new government departments, as well as a new land revenue system, and he encouraged the growth of Mysore's silk industry.

His military innovations were rocket artillery and a planned navy. The Mysorean rockets used iron tubes to hold the propellant, which gave them higher thrust and a range of up to 2 kilometres; captured specimens inspired William Congreve's rockets, used in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1786 Tipu decided to build a navy of 20 battleships with 72 guns and 20 frigates with 65 guns, and in 1790 established dockyards at Jamalabad and Majidabad. In 1787 he sent an embassy to the Ottoman Sultan at Constantinople asking for troops and military experts against the Company.

Tipu Sultan and the French

Tipu's links with France were the strategic reason the Company wanted him removed. Haidar and Tipu used a French-trained army, and when France declared war on Britain in 1778 the Company began capturing French posts in India. The French-controlled port of Mahe on the Malabar coast fell in 1779, although Haidar had placed it under his protection and received French arms through it. That capture opened the Second Anglo-Mysore War.

The link took a new form in 1798. Napoleon Bonaparte landed in Egypt, and the French Governor of Mauritius, General Malartic, issued a proclamation seeking volunteers for Tipu; some 500 men were sent to India under Brigadier Louis Auguste Chapuis. A letter from Napoleon to Tipu was seized by a British spy in Muscat and never reached him, and Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile ended the hope of a French army. Wellesley acted anyway.

One famous episode is disputed. Tipu is said to have helped found a Jacobin Club of Mysore in 1794 and called himself Citizen Tipoo. Some historians doubt this: One view holds that the club, and Tipu's part in it, was invented by the East India Company to justify British intervention against him.

First Anglo-Mysore War and the Treaty of Madras

The First Anglo-Mysore War (1767 to 1769) began in a tangle of Deccan alliances. The Company had gained four of the five Northern Circars from the Nizam by a treaty of November 1766. In January 1767 the Marathas invaded northern Mysore, and Haidar bought them off with 30 lakh rupees; by May he and the Nizam had agreed to join against the British.

The Company recovered. The Nizam soon made a separate treaty with it, and Haidar faced a Bombay army from the west and a Madras army from the north-east. His attack toward Madras still brought the Madras government to sue for peace. The war ended in the Treaty of Madras, signed on 29 March 1769, by which each party would support the other if attacked.

The treaty mattered mainly for what followed. When Haidar fought the Marathas in 1770 and asked for British help, none came, even though the Company was itself drawn into conflict with the Marathas in the 1770s. Haidar regarded the treaty as broken, and that grievance, together with the seizure of Mahe, led him to join a confederacy with the Marathas and the Nizam against the Company.

Second Anglo-Mysore War and the Treaty of Mangalore

The Second Anglo-Mysore War (1780 to 1784) was the hardest fought. In July 1780 Haidar Ali invaded the Carnatic with an army of 80,000. On 10 September 1780 his force, with Tipu leading a detachment, destroyed Colonel William Baillie's column near Pollilur, the East India Company's most crushing loss in India up to that time. Sir Eyre Coote then defeated Haidar at Porto Novo and Sholinghur.

The war also showed the limits of Mysore. The Company captured the Dutch port of Negapatam in November 1781, and the capture showed Haidar that he could never completely defeat a power that had command of the sea. Haidar died on 7 December 1782, and Tipu continued the war. In 1783 news of a preliminary peace between France and Britain reached India, and French support for Mysore was withdrawn.

The war ended with the Treaty of Mangalore, signed on 11 March 1784, which restored the position before the war. It was the last treaty between the Company and an Indian ruler on equal footing. The Company's commissioner had to travel to Mangalore, a town Tipu had just retaken, to sign it; the humiliation made the British determined to defeat Tipu.

Third Anglo-Mysore War and the Treaty of Seringapatam

The Third Anglo-Mysore War (1790 to 1792) grew out of Tipu's attack in late 1789 on Travancore, an ally of the Company. Lord Cornwallis, Governor-General from 1786, led the Company's forces, with the Marathas and the Nizam as allies. Tipu's attempt to win French support at Pondicherry failed, because France was then in the early stages of its revolution.

The allied forces laid siege to the capital, Seringapatam, in February 1792. Rather than storm the works at great cost, Cornwallis negotiated, and the Treaty of Seringapatam was signed on 18 March 1792. Mysore ceded about half its territory.

The Peshwa received land up to the Tungabhadra, the Nizam the land from the Krishna to the Penner, and the Company a large part of the Malabar coast between Travancore and the Kali River together with the Baramahal and Dindigul districts; Coorg was granted independence. Tipu owed an indemnity of 330 lakh rupees and surrendered two of his three sons as hostages until it was paid; he paid it in two instalments and got his sons back from Madras.

The treaty weakened Tipu without removing him, and it showed the pattern of the 1790s, in which the Company and Indian powers combined against a single rival.

Fourth Anglo-Mysore War and the Fall of Seringapatam

Tipu Sultan died on 4 May 1799, killed while defending his capital Seringapatam against the final British assault, and his death ended the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1798 to 1799). Wellesley had moved to prevent any alliance between Tipu and France after Napoleon's landing in Egypt. An army from Bombay and the main force under General George Harris marched into Mysore in 1799, and Colonel Arthur Wellesley commanded a division in one of them. Harris's force had two columns, one of over 26,000 Company troops and one of ten battalions and over 16,000 cavalry supplied by the Nizam of Hyderabad. The Marathas, who had promised Uttara Kannada to Mysore, sided with the Company at the last moment.

The siege of Seringapatam lasted from 5 April to 4 May 1799. On 2 May a British shot struck a magazine of rockets inside the fort, and on 4 May the final attack was led by Sir David Baird. His French advisers urged Tipu to escape through secret passages, and he is said to have refused, saying that it was better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep.

The settlement was a subsidiary alliance. Mysore became a princely state under the restored Wodeyar dynasty, with Krishnaraja Wodeyar III on the throne; the Company took Coimbatore and Dakshina Kannada, and Tipu's heir Fateh Ali was sent into exile. The Wodeyars ruled the remaining Mysore until 1947.

The Four Anglo-Mysore Wars Compared

Three Governors-General presided over the later wars: Warren Hastings (in office in Bengal from 1772 to 1785) over the second, Cornwallis over the third and Wellesley over the fourth.

The Anglo-Maratha Wars, 1775 to 1818

The Maratha Confederacy on the Eve of the Wars

The Marathas were the main rivals of the British in the latter half of the eighteenth century. After the disaster at Panipat in 1761 they recovered quickly under Peshwa Madhavrao I, and under Mahadji Shinde (also known as Mahadji Scindia) they recaptured Delhi in 1771. The empire was a confederacy of five major chiefs, namely the Peshwa at Poona, the Gaekwad of Baroda, the Scindia of Gwalior, the Holkar of Indore and the Bhonsle of Nagpur.

The weakness was the confederacy itself. The Marathas lost because of their increased internal disunity and the superior organisational and technological abilities of the British, and in effect the British took India from the Marathas more than from the Mughals or any other power.

The statesman who held the confederacy together for many years was Nana Phadnavis. He is credited with organising the first pan-Indian anti-British alliance, uniting even with old adversaries such as Haidar Ali of Mysore and the Nizam of Hyderabad.

First Anglo-Maratha War: Surat, Purandar and Salbai

The First Anglo-Maratha War (1775 to 1782) began over the Peshwaship. After the murder of Peshwa Narayanrao in 1773, his uncle Raghunathrao became Peshwa, while Narayanrao's posthumous son, Sawai Madhavrao (Madhavrao II), was the legal heir. A council of 12 chiefs led by Nana Phadnavis installed the infant and ruled in his name. Raghunathrao turned to the British at Bombay and signed the Treaty of Surat on 6 March 1775, ceding Salsette and Bassein and part of the revenues of Surat and Bharuch in return for 2,500 soldiers.

The Calcutta Council condemned the treaty and replaced it by the Treaty of Purandar of 1 March 1776, which pensioned off Raghunathrao; Bombay ignored it and sheltered him. The Company's Bombay force was surrounded and forced to sign the Treaty of Wadgaon on 16 January 1779, which Warren Hastings rejected. The fighting that followed was mostly inconclusive, because the Company could not decisively defeat the highly mobile Marathas.

The war ended with the Treaty of Salbai of 17 May 1782. Concluded between Warren Hastings and Mahadji Shinde, who was made the mutual guarantor, it left the Company in control of Salsette, pensioned off Raghunathrao and recognised Sawai Madhavrao as Peshwa. It bought 20 years of peace and broke up the Triple Alliance of the Marathas, Mysore and the Nizam.

Treaty of Bassein, 1802

The peace ended in the confusion that followed Nana Phadnavis's death in 1800. Daulat Rao Scindia took control of the Peshwa's administration, and Baji Rao II feared for his safety. The immediate cause was a quarrel among the Maratha chiefs. On 25 October 1802 Yashwantrao Holkar defeated the combined forces of Scindia and the Peshwa at the Battle of Hadapsar near Poona, and Baji Rao fled to Bassein (Vasai) and sought British help.

The Treaty of Bassein was signed on 31 December 1802. It was the Subsidiary Alliance in its most important application, because it brought the head of the Maratha confederacy into the system.

• Garrison: About 6,000 Company troops were stationed permanently with the Peshwa.
• Upkeep of the force: Territory yielding 26 lakh rupees was to be ceded for their upkeep.
• Treaties and war: The Peshwa could neither enter any other treaty nor declare war without consulting the Company.
• Outside contacts: He had to exclude all Europeans from his service and conduct foreign relations in consultation with the British.

Baji Rao was restored as Peshwa on 13 May 1803 under Company protection, a British client ruler. The treaty has been called the death knell of the Maratha Empire. The other Maratha chiefs were horrified that the Peshwa, their nominal overlord, had accepted it.

Second Anglo-Maratha War, 1803 to 1805

The Scindia and the Bhonsle of Nagpur rejected the treaty, and the Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803 to 1805) followed. The British ordered two main thrusts: Major General Arthur Wellesley was to secure the Deccan, and Lieutenant General Gerard Lake to take the Doab and Delhi. Ahmednagar fort surrendered on 12 August 1803. Lake defeated the Scindia's army at Delhi on 11 September 1803, and on 23 September Arthur Wellesley won the Battle of Assaye against Scindia and Raghoji II Bhonsle although his army was outnumbered. Lake won at Laswari on 1 November, and Wellesley defeated the Bhonsle forces at Argaon on 29 November.

Two treaties ended the Scindia-Bhonsle war. On 17 December 1803 Raghoji II Bhonsle signed the Treaty of Deogaon and gave up the province of Cuttack. On 30 December 1803 Daulat Rao Scindia signed the Treaty of Surji-Anjangaon, ceding the Ganges-Jumna Doab, the Delhi-Agra region, parts of Bundelkhand, Broach, some districts of Gujarat and the fort of Ahmednagar.

Holkar fought on. The British began hostilities against Yashwantrao Holkar on 6 April 1804 and he harassed them by guerrilla war, but lack of resources and the failure of Scindia to help forced him to terms; the Treaty of Rajghat, signed on 24 December 1805, made him give up Tonk, Rampura and Bundi.

Third Anglo-Maratha War and the End of the Peshwaship

The third and final war began in 1817. The Gaekwad's envoy Gangadhar Shastri, who was under British protection, was murdered, and the Peshwa's minister Trimbak Dengle was suspected. The British used the murder to force the Treaty of Poona on the Peshwa on 13 June 1817: He admitted Dengle's guilt, renounced his claims on the Gaekwad, surrendered large territories and was barred from contact with any other Indian power. The British Resident was Mountstuart Elphinstone.

The war began as a campaign against the Pindaris, raiders who had entered the Madras Presidency in 1815 and destroyed over 300 villages. The British assembled the largest army they had put in the field in India, roughly 1,20,000 men, and a treaty of 5 November 1817 kept Scindia out of the war. The Peshwa attacked the Poona cantonment, and the battles followed one another:

• Khadki, 5 November 1817: The Peshwa's attack on the British cantonment failed, and the Company took Shaniwar Wada, his seat, on 17 November.
• Sitabuldi, 26 November 1817: The Bhonsle was defeated.
• Mahidpur, 21 December 1817: Holkar was defeated; the Treaty of Mandeswar of 6 January 1818 made the Holkar state subsidiary.
• Koregaon, 1 January 1818: A small Company force held off the Peshwa's army on the banks of the Bhima.
• Ashti, 19 February 1818: The Peshwa's commander Bapu Gokhale died.

Baji Rao II surrendered to Sir John Malcolm and, under the terms signed on 3 June 1818, was sent to Bithur near Kanpur on a pension. The Peshwaship was abolished. Most of the Peshwa's territory became part of the Bombay Presidency, and the Maharaja of Satara was restored as the ruler of a small princely state, which was annexed in 1848 under the Doctrine of Lapse. The war left the Company in control of virtually all of India south of the Sutlej, directly or through princely states. NCERT ends the war in 1818, while other accounts extend it to 1819.

The Three Anglo-Maratha Wars Compared

The first war ended in a stalemate, the second began with the Treaty of Bassein and ended with large cessions of territory, and the third ended the Peshwaship.

Why Mysore and the Marathas Failed

The East India Company's Military and Financial Advantages

The Company's soldiers were mostly Indian, yet it won consistently. Four advantages, of money and organisation more than of numbers, explain the result.

• Revenue: After Buxar the Company held the right to collect revenue from Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, the base for a standing army.
• A professional army: At Buxar in 1764 the Company's force numbered 7,072, of whom about 5,300 were sepoys, against over 40,000 on the other side. Discipline and organisation, rather than numbers, decided the battle.
• Sea power: The Company held command of the sea, which Mysore could not contest; the capture of Negapatam in 1781 was one result.
• Intelligence and supply: Elphinstone knew of the Peshwa's plans in 1817 through the espionage work of Balaji Pant Natu and Jaswant Rao Ghorpade, and the 1817 army had highly organised supply lines.

Weaknesses of Mysore and the Maratha Confederacy

Indian rulers lost for reasons that were partly their own. Mysore was isolated: The Marathas and the Nizam joined the Company against Tipu in 1792, and in 1799 the Nizam marched with the Company while the Marathas, who had promised Uttara Kannada to Mysore, sided with it at the last moment. Tipu's rockets, though effective, could not offset the loss of allies.

The Marathas' weaknesses were structural. Their artillery was outdated and imported, and foreign officers rather than Maratha gunners handled it; their infantry, praised by Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington), was poorly led and relied on Arab and Pindari mercenaries. There was no efficient spy system and diplomacy was weak next to the Company's. The confederate structure meant the chiefs would not act together: Holkar fought the Peshwa and Scindia in 1802, Scindia stayed neutral in 1817, and the Bassein treaty broke the confederacy's unity.

Equipment alone did not decide the outcome. The British had superior equipment in several critical areas, but the Mysorean rockets were much more advanced than any the Company had seen, and Mysore still lost. What decided it was the combination of money, a disciplined army, diplomacy and Indian divisions.

Consolidation After 1818: Hastings and Paramountcy

The years after the Third Anglo-Maratha War mark the shift from alliances to paramountcy. Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Governor-General from 1813 to 1823, oversaw the victory in the Gurkha War (1814 to 1816), the final conquest of the Marathas in 1818 and the purchase of Singapore in 1819. The Company no longer bargained with Indian states as equals; it now held that its authority was supreme. The Rajput states of Jaipur and Jodhpur accepted subsidiary alliances in 1818.

The Company then turned to Burma (the First Anglo-Burmese War, 5 March 1824 to 24 February 1826), to Afghanistan (1838 to 1842), and to the Sikhs of the Punjab, annexed after the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848 to 1849.

The Company also began to refuse adoptions by Indian rulers. At Kittur, Rani Chennamma adopted Shivalingappa as heir after her son died in 1824; the Company refused to accept the adoption, anticipating the later Doctrine of Lapse.

Sources

• NCERT: Exploring Society: India and Beyond, Part I (Class 8), Chapter 3, The Rise of the Marathas
• NCERT: Exploring Society: India and Beyond, Part I (Class 8), Chapter 4, The Colonial Era in India
• NCERT: Themes in Indian History, Part III (Class 12), Chapter 2, Rebels and the Raj
• Wikipedia: Afonso de Albuquerque
• Wikipedia: Anglo-Mysore Wars
• Wikipedia: Baji Rao II
• Wikipedia: Battle of Assaye
• Wikipedia: Battle of Buxar
• Wikipedia: Battle of Delhi (1803)
• Wikipedia: Battle of Khadki
• Wikipedia: Battle of Laswari
• Wikipedia: Battle of Mahidpur
• Wikipedia: Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis
• Wikipedia: Doctrine of lapse
• Wikipedia: First Anglo-Afghan War
• Wikipedia: First Anglo-Burmese War
• Wikipedia: First Anglo-Maratha War
• Wikipedia: First Anglo-Mysore War
• Wikipedia: First Anglo-Sikh War
• Wikipedia: Fourth Anglo-Mysore War
• Wikipedia: Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings
• Wikipedia: Hyder Ali
• Wikipedia: Hyderabad State
• Wikipedia: Joseph François Dupleix
• Wikipedia: Oudh State
• Wikipedia: Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley
• Wikipedia: Second Anglo-Maratha War
• Wikipedia: Second Anglo-Mysore War
• Wikipedia: Second Anglo-Sikh War
• Wikipedia: Siege of Seringapatam (1799)
• Wikipedia: Subsidiary alliance
• Wikipedia: Third Anglo-Maratha War
• Wikipedia: Third Anglo-Mysore War
• Wikipedia: Tipu Sultan
• Wikipedia: Treaty of Bassein (1802)
• Wikipedia: Treaty of Mangalore
• Wikipedia: Treaty of Salbai
• Wikipedia: Treaty of Seringapatam
• Wikipedia: Warren Hastings
• Tumakuru District, Government of Karnataka: History
• Dharmapuri District, Government of Tamil Nadu: History
• Press Information Bureau: Rani Chennamma of Kitturu
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers