YOUR letter, containing an application for money to enable you to make up some clothes, has been received. You may take three hundred rupees from the Tosheh-khâneh,* and apply that sum to the purposes of furnishing yourself with apparel.
Muster returns of the whole of the troops under your command, whether cavalry, regular infantry, or other description, as well as a statement of [your] receipts and disbursements, must be sent to us.
A month has elapsed since Kumrûddeen’s batteries were established close to the fort; but you have not advanced so far from your side, although you commenced your approaches so much sooner than he did. This is what we do not understand. It is necessary, that you should be more expeditious in the prosecution of this business; and that, by properly battering the walls of the place, you should effect such a plain and practicable breach, as may enable you to storm it with success. In this affair you must be brisk and active.
Parsimony, or perhaps, more strictly speaking, a rigid economy in his general expenditure, was always known to be a prominent feature in the character of Tippoo Sultan; and we have here a curious and striking proof of the fact. One of his principal generals, and his brother-in-law, is obliged to apply to him for the means of providing himself with wearing apparel; and the Sultan, although he complies with the request, is so far from leaving any thing on the occasion to the discretion of Bûrhânûddeen, that he restricts him to the disbursement of a specific sum, in fixing of which he certainly has displayed none of the munificence of a sovereign prince.
The Tosheh-khâneh is distinguished by Tippoo himself (in one of the letters of the present collection) into two kinds, viz. the Nukdy and Jinsy. The former I take to have been the Treasury, properly so called, or office in which the current specie, and, perhaps, bullion were deposited. The latter would appear to have comprehended a great variety of articles besides the wardrobe; to which, however, the term Tosheh-khâneh is, I believe, usually restrained in the northern parts of Hindostan. Where this word occurs by itself (that is, without its being joined to the words Nukdy or Jinsy, which is in general the case) it is not easy to determine its precise sense. In some places, as in the present letter, it appears to signify the treasury in its strictest sense; in others, the wardrobe; and, occasionally, a general storehouse or magazine. The Jinsy, in some parts of Hindostan, includes ordnance and ordnance stores; but I am unable to say, whether the term was, on any occasion, applied in the same manner by Tippoo Sultan.
It would be a difficult matter to judge, how far the censure here passed on the conduct of Bûrhânûddeen before Nergûnd, was justly merited, without a much fuller knowledge of the circumstances and operations of the siege than we posses. It may be presumed, however, that it was upon such a knowledge that the judgment of the Sultan was formed; and that, consequently, there was actually some remissness manifested by Bûrhânûddeen on this occasion.