Battles & Battlefields

Wars fought over our land

Come with us as we visit the bloodiest battlefields in our archives and find stories both inspiring and hair-raising. There are heroes here and villains too. But there’s a little bit of truth in both their accounts. While the British may have over-stretched their imagination while documenting the Uprising of 1857, they were grudging in their respect for Hyder Ali and his young son Tipu Sultan while recording the behind-the-scenes action of the Anglo-Mysore Wars—the battle-plans we showcase tell a story all their own. In the case of the Anglo-Sikh War, our colonisers didn’t so much distort the truth as they cleverly hid it under masterful strokes of paint. And then we have the Mughals. These gentlemen weren’t going to trust some scribe to tell their story; they would inscribe it themselves in metal and let the money do the talking. Find different perspectives on war, drawn from our collection of rare books, numismatics and engravings, and see India’s history on the battlefield in a new light

Mighty Mysore

Snapshots of Tipu’s territory, as seen through the Sarmaya collection