Attempts at ending the War of the Triple Alliance, or the Third Anglo-Mysore War, had faltered upon mutually irreconcilable demands, and the hope on both sides that final victory might be just around the corner. The sudden recalibration of forces following the de-facto exit of the Marathas from the war, the Mysorean resurgence, and the conquest of the Carnatic by the British and the Hyderabis completely reshaped the geography of the conflict and opened up a path to peace.
Negotiations had been going on for years. In part this was the normal efforts of Indian states to attempt to break an encircling coalition: Tipu constantly was attempting to peel off surrounding states by making peace with the Hyderabis or the Marathas. These had failed however, as the Hyderabis were too dependent upon British support, and the Marathas were determined to regain their lost northern territories. Both sides now found a new urgency for peace however, Tipu hoping to capitalize on his suddenly strengthened position: for the British meanwhile, financial destitution led to an open break in the British ranks, as the EIC, upon which British finances depended, was openly pressing for peace to put an end to the ruinous and bankrupting war that threatened complete financial collapse: the Marathas meanwhile had been knocked out of the equation by the outbreak of civil war.
With the British-Hyderabad conquest of the Carnatic, the occupied city of Pondicherry was chosen as the point for negotiations. The British, vengeful after France’s conquest of Madras, had immediately annexed it following its conquest, declaring that both it and Madras were back in the British fold. Although the Mysoreans refused to recognize this, still observing them as French territory, they were desperate for peace and had to agree to the negotiating site. Both sides were eager to avoid any impression of weakness, with the Mysoreans brilliantly adorned with elephants heaped with gold and decorations, under the green banner of Tipu, while the Nizam’s new-style infantry lined the routes to the city, and British ships hung offshore. It would be a dramatic venue for the end of the War of the Triple Alliance, as both sides at last settled down to negotiate in earnest. It was the first time that there had been a summit-style diplomatic conference in India, with the British, Mysoreans, Nizam, and Travancore all represented.
Largest of any individual change made was the Mysorean cession of the Carnatic coast, now fully occupied by the allies. This was a painful and humiliating concession, but Tipu saw no way to regain the territory, and at least could comfort himself with it only being a relatively recent conquest and not his home territories. Here again, the complicated nature of governance in India entered into display: the formal controller of the Carnatic, recognized by the British, was Umdat al-Umara, the successor to Muhammad Ali (no relationship with the rebel general of the same name), the Sultan of the Carnatic. But Umdat al-Umara pledged fealty to the Nizam, and the Nizam expected to be compensated for his own expenditures in the war. The Mysoreans were resistant to giving up their northern territories claimed by Hyderabad, so the only solution was a partition of the Carnatic: Umara’s northern districts were in turn placed in fealty to the Nizam.
Second of the issues on the table was a British demand for Mysorean reparations for starting the war. Here, the Mysoreans held out stubbornly: they were in no state to pay war reparations and argued that the British intervention in the conflict was itself in illegal contradiction with the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which had forbidden British (and French) direct intervention in Indian polities. While the British denied any breaking of the treaty’s agreements the reparation demands ultimately were dropped, much to the disappointment of EIC treasurers. Similar attempts at enforcing demilitarization or naval disarmament agreements upon the Mysoreans floundered, as did British attempts at more favorable commercial access into Mysorean territory.
Perhaps the easiest resolution to the entire war was what had initially started it: the Mysorean invasion of Travancore, based on a territorial dispute over the Dutch fortresses on the Travancore lines, which the Mysoreans claimed belonged in their annexed territory of the Raja of Cochin, while Travancore disputed this and argued it was a neutral and thus legitimate sale. The Mysoreans agreed to recognize the fortresses and the lines as Travancore territory, in exchange for an indemnity payment, and to appoint a border commission to delineate the territory.
As with the Treaty of Paris, a crucial objective behind the treaty, to prevent involvement in third party, neutral states, quickly proved a dead letter. With the Marathas embroiled in civil war, both sides hoped to be able to take advantage of their situation for their own advantage, and the treaty attempted to forestall a battle for influence by formally inscribing neutrality from all parties in the Maratha War. This proved to be quickly meaningless as both sides quickly chose their preferred candidates, the British backing Shinde, the Mysoreans the Peshwa, and Hyderabad claimed that the occupation of its territory since 1773 was illegal and launched an invasion against Kharda to try to regain its old land. At least in theory however, Pondicherry agreed that no power would be intervening in the Maratha war.
The greatest sticking point was a new and completely unanticipated issue: the Coorgs. They had been funded and supported by the British, auxiliaries, and had been invaluable in separating Mysorean supply lines and forming an enemy on the inside. Not only was abandoning them resisted by British administrators, but they were a strategic asset: the Coorg territories, if access was granted to British armies in wartime as allies, would provide a jumping-off point mere days from Seringapatam. For this reason, the Mysoreans were determined to prevent the Coorg question from being used against them, just as the British wished to keep them as a tool.
The solution that was offered in the end pleased no one, but at least allowed both sides some mutual ground. The Coorgs were to be offered a sort of autonomy within Mysore, with their prince to be allowed to raise his own forces, although not to make foreign alliances, and that his daughter would be formally married to one of Tipu’s sons. It was a precarious solution: from the Mysorean point of view it left a foreign salient dangerously thrust forth into their territory, while from the British side the fact that there was no real guarantee for Coorg independence meant that if Tipu did come back to crush them, there was little they could do. The other foreign element was the French: Tipu had to agree that the principal French military advisors at his court would leave, although more than a few civilians managed to hold on.
Although not a major sticking point in the negotiations, a major point of friction for years afterwards would be conflicting interpretations of the terms of returning prisoners of war. Both sides had declared that they would give up all prisoners of war that they held, returning them unharmed, safe, and with appropriate assistance to the other side. The problem however, was that Tipu had attempted to proselytize Islam among many of his British captives and viewed any British soldier as having converted to Islam as having become one of his subjects. The British did not agree, and the diplomatic disputes over this was another point of tension for years and filled Britain with lurid (and at least partially true) accounts of British soldiers being forcibly circumcised and turned into Mysorean slaves.
Much of this summed up the Treaty of Pondicherry: for both sides, there was a painful realization that the forces aligned against the party of peace were mighty ones, and that any treaty would be a precarious affair. But for both, the risks and costs of another war were so painful as to make the prospect of another war, for the present, unthinkable. It was enough to make the Mysoreans accept a humiliating defeat, the aureole of glory at the end barely disguising it, while the British had to accept that they had failed to constrain their main enemy.
And the second factor was that while there might be peace in India, there was no peace in Europe. The very title of the treaty showed the foundation that it was set upon: Pondicherry was still in the eyes of the French Republic an integral territory of France. What’s more, it was the home of the French Revolution in India. The Pondicherry and Madras revolution had been a confused event, and there was little of the grandeur of the Great Republic in Europe nor the drama of the slave revolts throughout the Caribbean. There was less fuel available for the fire, less penetration of French ideals of revolt, less scope. Nevertheless, in its brief span, less than a decade, the French Revolution in India had seen the raising of Jacobin clubs, the celebration of the Supreme Being à la Robespierre (with a strange Hindu style that would have made French observers puzzled), the elevation of the guillotine to execute enemies of the nation, the donning of Phrygian caps, at least some degree of land redistribution, a series of revolutionary festivals that matched those of France, the outfitting of privateer swarms, and above all else the raising of armies that had briefly stymied the British advance: with the resources that it had to work with, confined to a few cities, it had been a remarkable effort really. Even in defeat, the legend and the promise of the Pondicherry Revolution would survive and grow.
The treaty came as an unpleasant blow to the French, losing their only ally in the Indian Ocean, as well as their most important trading posts in India occupied, with only Mahé on the west coast remaining under Mysorean protection. There was a feeling of bitterness that the Mysoreans had chosen to opt for a separate peace, especially under such offensive conditions as being held in Pondicherry, but at the same time the French had to grudgingly admit that there was little that Mysore could have done, and secret contacts assured the French of continued Mysorean benevolence. In any case, it came at a delicate time for the French, who were facing internal upheavals in their colonies of Réunion and Île-de-France. The question, as elsewhere in the French colonial empire, was one of slavery.
Bourbon (renamed Réunion) and Île-de-France were crucial strategic naval bases, with Île-de-France in particular being the main fleet base of the French in the Indian Ocean, whence had sortied French fleets in both the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. It also was a crucial privateer nest, with Surcouf starting his famous raids from the island. But both islands were also, like their Caribbean counterparts, defined by major slave populations, strangely resembling their West Indies counterparts despite the tremendous distance. However, distant from the metropole, without the immediate threat of British intervention, and with less internal tensions than the Caribbean colonies, the Indian Ocean colonies were largely able to weather the threat to their social system, cheerfully ignoring the Sonthanax decrees abolishing slavery. The Chinese say that the mountains are tall and the emperor far away: the Russian equivalent finishes it poetically with bend over and kiss my ass. As long as Paris was powerless in the Indian Ocean, things would stay the same.
But then France sent a battlefleet to Île-de-France. Largely this was a result of metropolitan politics, as Villaret la Joyeuse was scrambling to figure out how to prevent the Committee of Public Safety from sending his precious fleet on a suicide charge into the Atlantic winter: nobody thought about the effects upon the colonies themselves. The sudden influx of a major French fleet and attached naval infantry units led to the outbreak of a three-war political struggle in Île-de-France, between the governor representing planter interests, the Republic’s commissar who wanted to apply the Sonthenaux decree, and admiral de Galles, who held the balance between the two of them and wanted to concentrate on the task of fighting the British. The planters openly declared that if slavery was abolished, that they would raise the flag of revolt and invite in the British: the French commissar, Manuel-Peltier Vilaret was equally adamant about the necessity for abolition.
It would be a political crisis that would immobilize effective action from Ile-de-France and Réunion for the immediate future: perhaps that was the best for the French though, given the sheer odds stayed against them if they tried to venture further, other than with their privateering.
For Mysore, it was a great chastening. Tipu had been a confident, even brash man, used to victory. Years of war, the intense stress, devastation, catastrophic defeats, had worn heavily on him: still less than fifty years old, his hair had grown gray, and there was a nervous tick that had infected the left side of his face. Tipu was a devout man and gave thanks to Allah for having saved him from the clutches of the infidels, but even he could see how near he had come to absolute destruction. As much as he craved revenge on the British, Tipu would have to resign himself to bide his time and for the right moment: he turned himself to restoring Mysore’s shattered finances, devastated territory, battered army, and rickety political system whose fragility had been exposed by a cataclysm of revolts. On the British side, the division between the EIC and the British government became clear to see: the EIC itself was determined to avoid any repetition of the ruinous events of the war that had sent it into financial bankruptcy, while the British government was equally determined to prevent the reestablishment of French influence in India.
Socially, within Mysore, the war had wrought major changes. In the Mysorean highlands many of the great landlords were ruined in the passage of armies and devastating of the land, which centralized authority increasingly into the hands of the Sultan – and into religious factions, particularly with the rise of Sufiism and various mystical forms of Hinduism, which grew together under the stress of the war in an attempt to both provide spiritual succor and the need to give at least some form of local governance and institutions. By contrast, the coastal regions had seen the increase in the influence and autonomy of local power brokers, who had gained more independence and profits from the financing of the privateer wars. All of these paled compared to the single most important aspect: the sheer ruin that Mysore had been plunged into, leaving the country devastated and plundered.
Even still, as long as there was war abroad, the threat of conflagration loomed: on all sides of the Mysore plateau, all factions would watch each other warily. But for both the merchants of the EIC and the devastated Mysoreans, it gave a valuable breathing space to rebuild their fortunes and put their houses in order. And who knew? There had been miracles a plenty in India as the 18th century died: was it really too much to ask of the divine that a peace treaty might hold?