The Battle of Pullalur and the Naturalization of the British on the Subcontinent

After the treaty of Paris in 1763, the only serious political threats to the British in the Madras area came from Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan. During the war of 1780, the prowess of Hyder Ali and his cavalry sometimes greatly intimidated the British. In no situation was this more apparent than during the battle of Pullalur, an area about ten miles north of Kanchipuram to the west of Madras. This battle was fought by a British force under the command of Colonel John Baillie against those of Hyder Ali and Tipu on 10 September 1780, shortly after the beginning of the war. Various mistakes made by the British commander-in-chief Sir Hector Munro and by Baillie himself resulted in the isolation of Baillie’s force. Hyder Ali and Tipu, aided by the French, soundly defeated Baillie’s forces: of the eighty-six officers in Baillie’s force who participated, thirty-six were killed or died of their wounds, thirty-four were wounded and taken prisoner, and sixteen were unwounded but taken prisoner.^[7]

Though the military encounter was brief, it had great consequences for the fortunes and self-esteem of the British at the time and long afterwards. Moreover, because the defeat placed in doubt the British ability to defend Madras, Hyder’s rout of Baillie greatly decreased British political and economic credibility. Writing in January 1781, the governor of Madras, Charles Smith, noted: “The consternation occasioned by this defeat, in which we lost the flower of our army, was universal. The inhabitants of the country and villages fled. The wealthiest merchants resident even at the Presidency [i.e., Madras town] sent away their [families]; and out of the vast number who have houses and property in the black town, not above one half of them remained.”^[8] Another indication of the way in which this battle affected local British fortunes is that in 1780 the authorities of the three temples in Kanchipuram or Kanchi (forty-five miles west of Madras)—Varadarajaswami (Vaishnava), Ekambarantha (Saiva), and Kamatciyamman—decided that they had to find ways to protect the idols from Hyder Ali’s armies. According to C. S. Crole, author of the Chingleput, late Madras, District (hereafter the Chingleput Manual), they took them away disguised as corpses.^[9]

Beyond these indicators of lack of confidence by both British and Indian observers, many other elements combined to construct the ideas connected with this battle. For instance, one of the participants in combat was a British cadet also by chance named Baillie. Cadet John Baillie wrote an account of the experience of the battle and his later imprisonment by Tipu and Hyder in Seringapatam on the tableland now called Karnataka. This account enjoyed some popularity as the cadet asked his father to correct his spelling and grammar mistakes and to circulate it to other people to read. This letter and many others like it spoke to a British audience in much the same way as had the Jesuit letters of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. They provided material to a particular community who sought to construct knowledge about this encounter as well as political behavior on the subcontinent.^[10]

Another important contributor to the construction of knowledge about the battle was C. S. Crole, writing in the 1870s. In his Chingleput Manual—Chingleput was the name for the area originally called the Jagir—Crole remarked that the village of Pullalur was

remarkable as the scene of the most grievous disaster which has yet befallen British arms in India. On the 10th September 1780, Colonel Baillie, who was marching from Madras to effect a junction with Sir Hector Munro at Conjeevaram [Kanchipuram], was here totally routed and his whole force either cut to pieces or captured by the united armies of Hyder Ali and his trees still bear unmistakable evidence of the fierceness of the cannonade.^[11]

Thus, marks on the trees ninety years after the battle near Pullalur could be used by Crole to argue that the ferociousness of Hyder’s cannon had been responsible for the British defeat. Crole’s account seeks also to indicate the extent to which the British had become part of the natural scenery of the area. He naturalized them to the area by picturing Colonel Baillie coming from Madras when in fact he was coming from the north. This reworking of events formed part of a creative activity.

We know that Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan collaborated in the creation of ideas about this battle. After the encounter, Tipu had a large mural of the scene commissioned for his palace in Seringapatam. He later feared that it might prompt the British to be vindictive, however, and ordered it whitewashed over in 1792 as British troops approached Seringapatam. It was restored by the British in the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, the process of creating knowledge about the battle of Pullalur has continued into our own day, as a painted cloth version of this scene was exhibited in London in 1990.^[12]