Battle of Pollilur (1780)

Battle of Pollilur
	Part of the Second Anglo-Mysore War
	; Illustration of the battle
Date	10 September 1780
Location	Pullalur, Kanchipuram
Result	Mysorean victory
Belligerents
Sultanate of Mysore	East India Company
Commanders and leaders
Tipu Sultan ; Sultan Hyder Ali	William Baille
Strength
11,000 in total 6,000 Cavalry 12 Light guns, 6 Heavy guns	3,853
Casualties and losses
Unknown	2,016 killed ; 1,000 captured

The Battle of Pollilur (a.k.a. Pullalur), also known as the Battle of Polilore or Battle of Perambakam, took place on 10 September 1780 at Pollilur near Conjeevaram, the city of Kanchipuram in present-day Tamil Nadu state, India, as part of the Second Anglo-Mysore War. It was fought between an army commanded by King Tipu Sultan of the Kingdom of Mysore, and a British East India Company force led by William Baillie. The EIC force suffered a high number of casualties before surrendering. It was the worst loss the East India Company suffered on the subcontinent until Chillianwala. Benoît de Boigne, a French officer in the service of 6th Regiment of Madras Native Infantry, wrote, "There is not in India an example of a similar defeat".^[4]

^ Jaim, H M Iftekhar; Jaim, Jasmine (1 October 2011). "The Decisive Nature of the Indian War Rocket in the Anglo-Mysore Wars of the Eighteenth Century". Arms & Armour. 8 (2): 131–138. doi:10.1179/174962611X13097916223244. S2CID 161374846. Captain Munro noted: 'Around two or three thousand horse and rocket-men kept hovering round our main army, in order to conceal his enterprise from us'.
^ Dalrymple, William (1 October 2005). "ASSIMILATION AND TRANSCULTURATION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INDIA: A Response to Pankaj Mishra". Common Knowledge. 11 (3): 445–485. doi:10.1215/0961754X-11-3-445. As late as 1780, following the disastrous British defeat by King Tipu Sultan of Mysore at the Battle of Pollilur, 7,000 British men, along with an unknown number of women, were held captive by King Tipu in his sophisticated fortress of Seringapatam.
^ Jasanoff, Maya (2005). Edge of empire: lives, culture, and conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (1. ed.). New York: Knopf. p. 157. ISBN 1-4000-4167-8. Some three thousand Company soldiers were killed, while Baillie and two hundred Europeans, fifty of them officers, were carried off to Seringapatam in chains.
^ Ramaswami, N.S. (1984). Political History of Carnatic under the Nawabs. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications. p. 225.