 The first explicit History of Mysore in English is Historical Sketches of the South of India , in an attempt to trace the History of <unk> ( Wilks 1811 ) , by Mark Wilks . Wilks claimed to have based his history on various Kannada language documents , many of which have not survived . According to Subrahmanyam 1989 , p . 206 , all subsequent histories of Mysore have borrowed heavily from Wilks 's book for their pre @-@ 1760 content . These include , Rice 1897 , Lewis Rice 's well @-@ known Gazetteer and Rao 1948 , C. <unk> Rao 's major revision of the Gazetteer half a century later , and many modern spin @-@ offs of these two works . In Subrahmanyam 's words , " Wilks 's work is an important one therefore , not only for its own sake , but for its having been regurgitated and reproduced time and again with minor variations . " 
