What Happened to Tipu Sultan's Treasure After the British Took Seringapatam?

Tipu Sultan's sword sold for £14 million in 2023. Ten years earlier, one of his descendants was pulling a rickshaw in Kolkata. On 4 May 1799, the East India Company stormed Seringapatam and Tipu Sultan was killed at one of his own gates. What followed was not only looting. A prize committee counted the treasury, cut up the golden tiger throne, and shared Tipu Sultan's treasure out by rank, while his sons were sent to Vellore on a pension. This film follows the objects rather than the battle: the bedchamber sword presented to David Baird, a man once held prisoner in the same fortress; Tipu's Tiger, now at the V&A; a tiger's head from the throne that sits at Windsor Castle; and a gold finial that the British government tried to keep in the country in 2021. It ends at Bonhams in London, where Tipu Sultan's sword set an auction record. Alongside the objects runs the story of Tipu's family, from the Vellore mutiny of 1806 to the land of Tollygunge in Calcutta, and to the different branches of his descendants in Kolkata today.