"An appropriate concluding assessment of Haidar Ali, his stormy life and his legacy is in the words of historian Hayavadana Rao: Haidar may have been illiterate but he was not unintelligent. On the other hand, he was shrewd, carefully calculating, hard thinking, always with an eye to turning transactions to his own profit. He was also deep-seated, cunning, with a thorough understanding of mundane matters, never yielding to mere sentiment, appeal or importunity. He could be in turn kind, friendly, dissimulating and cruel. He could enjoy a joke and indulge in one too. He was, in a word, perfectly human, with an understanding of men and things that surprised those around him and made them fear him and his artful ways and sudden turns of disposition. To describe him either in uniform black paint as a hard, rapacious person bent on plundering his neighbours or to represent him in so dazzling a light that he becomes almost indistinguishable is hardly correct. He was extraordinary in the sense that history, ancient or modern, affords no exact parallel to him. If to the people of the eighteenth century he was a terror and his name was associated always with war—indicated popularly throughout the whole of Southern India by such phrases as Haidarana Haavali [the terro of Haidar] and Haidar Kalaapam [Haidar’s exploits]—to the people of the twentieth- century, he is still continuing to be something of a marvel. That is where he is interesting, yet as a unique historical personage.58"