Apart from his love of land and love of liberty, he is known for various welfare measures he took for the well-being of his people. His encouragement of agriculture and industry, promotion of trade and commerce, novel system of administering justice, building up of a navy, opening of factories far and near, and linking of Mysore with outside world are regarded as progressive steps indicating his inexhaustible energy and fertility of mind. His reforming zeal touched almost every department of life including coinage and calendar, weights and measures, banking and finance, social ethos and cuItural affairs. His seventeen years of regime witnessed such innovative measures as to make his State a humming center of great industrial activity. Had he not been engrossed in exasperating wars, he might have ushered Mysore into a renaissance of some magnitude.

In contrast to this view, his detractors, mostly colonials like Wilks, Kirkpatrick, Beatson, Bowring, Vincent Smith and others call him a furious fanatic who perpetrated terror in an age when persecution had survived only in pages of history. He has been sketched as an ambitious despot, a blood-thirsty tyrant, an intolerant bigot, and an aggressor of insatiable greed. Few rulers have been so much maligned and misrepresented. His memory has been stereotyped into a monster, pure and simple. Although libraries were ransacked for vocabularies of vile epithets to condemn him, yet many regretted English language was not copious enough to find words of ignominy with which to vilify his image.