Tipu Sultan, the monarch of the Kingdom of Mysore, died in 1799.
Tipu Sultan, also known as the Tiger of Mysore or Tippoo Sahib by the British, was an Indian prince who fought against the East India Company's takeover of southern India. Public opinion in England regarded him as a terrible despot, while modern Indian nationalists lauded him as a liberation fighter, yet both are wishful thinking. When the morning of May 4th arrived, Tipu was informed that the omens were not favourable. He sought to ward off disaster by offering a gold purse, an elephant, a black bullock and two buffalo, a black nanny goat, and a black cloak and cap to Hindu priests and Brahmins, but in vain. Troops equipped with bamboo ladders for scaling the walls commenced the attack just after one o'clock. As the defenders withdrew, a British flag was hoisted in the breach within minutes. Tipu battled valiantly, dressed to the nines and loading and shooting muskets delivered to him by his servants as if he were at a sports event, but the odds were too high. He was injured, and his attendants attempted to rush him away in a palanquin, but he was slain by an anonymous British soldier for his jewellery. As darkness fell, a British party discovered the sultan's body behind a stack of bodies. He was laid to rest in his family tomb in the city.
Related On This Day
Sean Connery marries Micheline Roquebrune in Casablanca in 1975.
Henry Cavill, an English actor, was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, in 1983.
Shahuji II, the Maharaja of Kolhapur, died in 1983.
Margaret Thatcher is the first woman to be elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979.
Guru Amar Das, the third of Sikhism's ten Gurus, was born in 1479.
Angelina Jolie married actor Billy Bob Thornton in The Little Church of The West Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2000.
Mughal Babur defeats Afghans and Bengals at the Battle of Gogra in 1529.
Motilal Nehru, an Indian lawyer and politician who served as President of the Indian National Congress, was born in 1861.
Trisha Krishnan, better known as Trisha, is an Indian actress and model who works in the Tamil and Telugu cinema industries. She was born in 1983.
Elon Musk, an entrepreneur, founded SpaceX in 2002.
Karl Marx, a German philosopher, was born in Trier, Prussia, in 1818.
Keira Knightley, a British actress, married musician James Righton in France in 2013.
Adele, a British pop-rock singer-songwriter, was born in Tottenham, London, in 1988.
The year was 1956. Gulshan Kumar Dua, the founder of the T-Series music label and an Indian businessman, was born.
Sigmund Freud, Austrian neurologist and pioneer of psychology, was born in Freiberg, Austrian Empire, in 1856.
George Clooney, an American actor, was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1961.
Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, married Sajida Talfah, a teacher, in 1963.
Maharaja Chhatrasal was born in 1649, a mediaeval Indian warrior of the Bundela dynasty who battled against the Mughal Empire to create his own kingdom in Bundelkhand.
Audrey Hepburn, a British actress, was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1929.
Naomi Scott, an English actress, was born in London, England in 1993.
Tyagaraja, a well-known Carnatic music composer, born in 1767.
Ajmal Kasab was condemned to death for the Mumbai 26/11 attack in 2010.