his elegant structure, standing just inside the entrance to the Darya Daulat garden, is pierced with holes for pigeon rests, in the same way as the elegant minarets of Tipu's Masjid e'Ala. Pigeons have an elegant literature associated with them in India. They appear in illustrations of the Kamoda Ragini, and of popular fables. Miniature paintings in the British Library, Oriental and India Office Collection, illustrate the story of two pigeons who initially refuse to heed the advice of the ring dove, and are snared in a net by the fowler. However, the ring dove eventually persuades the birds to act together, and with the aid of a mouse who nibbles a hole in the net, the pigeons fly off, taking the fowler's net with them.

Pigeons also played a very practical role, as couriers for messages. These pigeoncotes are thus the equivalent of the vehicle depot of a modern Post Office. For this reason, the Darya Daulat pigeoncote is the focal point in one of four dioramas at the Birla Museum of Science and Technology in Calcutta, illustrating the history and development of modern Communications. Bringing the subject right up to date, Tipu's second city, Bangalore, is now the 'capital' of a thriving 'Silicon Valley' for international computer technology.

Tipu was certainly not the first or the only ruler to employ birds as messengers. He did, however, fully exploit the system first established in the state under Chick Deo Raj. As Wilks notes, this system operated rather differently from our postal system today. 'The post was not only, as in England, the passive instrument for conveying intelligence, but the active agent for obtaining it… all the inferior servants of the department were professed spies, who made regular reports of the secret transactions of the district, which were as readily transmitted to court.' Wilks concludes that the system was 'improved and actually organised under the celebrated Hyder to a degree which scarcely admitted of further rigour.'