Following the Treaty of Mangalore in 1784, Tipu Sultan ordered the seizure of the Catholic population of South Kanara, whom he regarded as having sided with the British and the Portuguese, and their march inland to Seringapatam, where they were held, put to labour and in many cases forcibly converted; church records describe the episode as the Captivity, lasting until Tipu's death at Seringapatam in 1799. A parallel deportation removed Kodavas from Coorg in 1785 after a revolt, again with forced conversion. The scale is disputed: the surviving figures come from missionary and British sources with strong reasons to indict Tipu, and Indian historians have argued that the deportations were punitive and political rather than religious, and smaller than the church accounts claim. Tipu is a politically charged figure in present-day India, celebrated as an anti-colonial ruler in some accounts and denounced as a persecutor in others, and this episode is central to that argument. The atlas records it as a documented mass deportation whose numbers rest on contested sources.
Tipu Sultan's Mysore state deported the Catholic population of the Kanara coast and the Kodavas of Coorg to Seringapatam
Estimates rest on Mysore court chronicles, contemporary Portuguese and British East India Company reports, and later Catholic parish reconstructions; they put the Kanara Catholic community at roughly 60,000-80,000, of whom about 60,000 were marched to Seringapatam and perhaps 15,000-20,000 returned after 1799. The parallel deportation of Kodavas from Coorg is reported in Mysore sources at figures - up to 85,000 - that most historians regard as inflated.
Catholic accounts state that about 20,000 of those deported died on the march or in captivity at Seringapatam; there is no independent corroboration and no lower-bound figure from any source that accepts the deportation occurred. Deaths among the deported Kodavas were not counted.
Church registers, missionary correspondence and later British accounts describe forced conversion, destruction of churches and forced labour at Seringapatam; Mysore's own records do not survive.
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