- Lived:
- birth year genuinely uncertain — historians propose anywhere from 1717 to 1722 — at Budikote, in the Kolar country east of Bangalore; the life happened in the saddle, across Mysore, the Carnatic and Malabar, and ended in a war-camp near Chittoor in December 1782
- Field:
- soldier, then state-builder — commander of the Mysore army by 1759, effective ruler of Mysore from 1761 to 1782 while a Wodeyar king sat nominally on the throne
- The Big Idea:
- A man who could not read or write rose from the rank of a petty officer to run the best-drilled, best-audited army in eighteenth-century India, put iron-cased war rockets into mass production, and twice forced the East India Company to accept terms it did not want.
- In their words:
- "I can ruin their resources by land, but I cannot dry up the sea" — his verdict on fighting the English, as contemporaries reported it; an illiterate man's words survive only through other men's pens
- If you remember one thing:
- The "rockets' red glare" in the American national anthem descends from British Congreve rockets, and the Congreve rocket was reverse-engineered from iron rockets captured in Mysore — the weapon of an Indian ruler who could not write his own name.