Periodic whitewashing of Tipu Sultan can’t undo his unflattering history

The first attempt at politically rehabilitating the scrofulous history and copiously documented misdeeds of Tipu Sultan occurred roughly about half a century ago. Quite obviously under the then Congress regime in Karnataka which released a commemorative fifty-paisa postage stamp (July 1974) hailing him as a “freedom fighter”. Not that one can place any reasonable confidence in Congress leaders’ history expertise — back then or now. Those aware of Karnataka’s post-Independence political history will testify to the fact that this Congress-sponsored overhaul of this incredible tyrant had an oblique inspiration from Bhagvan S Gidwani’s unhistorical period novel titled The Sword of Tipu Sultan.

However, that adventure subsequently landed in the cold storage and stayed there for more than three decades. And then, under the UPA-II government, the then Union Minister of Minority Affairs, Rahman Khan, floated a proposal to build an Islamic university in Srirangapattanam — capital of Tipu Sultan — named after him. Subsequently, former chief minister Siddaramaiah, in perhaps the most flagrant bid for chief ministership that the state has ever seen, began inveigling the Muslim community votes using methods that cannot be described in polite language.

Inflating Tipu Sultan to the status of a demigod was a big part of his vote-bank-wooing political soap opera.

To be sure, the ground for this had already been set years ago by a coterie of seasoned, hardcore Marxist intellectuals, novelists, and writers among others who were substantially rewarded after he became chief minister. Chief among these was the late Girish Karnad’s drama, Dreams of Tipu Sultan (originally in Kannada titled Tipuvina Kanasugalu). The play can be considered as The Sword of Tipu Sultan 2.0 in play form. As chief minister, Siddaramaiah kept his promise such as it was, and unleashed Tipu Jayanti on the state at taxpayer expense. Expectedly, it led to avoidable conflagrations and violence and death each year spread over at least three years. We can let that matter rest at that for now.

Ever since, Siddaramaiah hopefuls and imitators in other states have wasted no time in drawing lessons to retain or fatten their own electoral banks by using Tipu to vote-bait the Muslim community.

In May 2017, the then Tamil Nadu chief minister Edappadi Palaniswami inaugurated a taxpayer-funded memorial for Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan in Dindigul, the once-thriving and historical fort city, which marked a major victory in the early career of Hyder Ali, who was then a mere Faujdar in the employ of the Mysore Wodeyars. This signal victory also launched the canon of his overweening imperial ambition, and the fortunes he amassed here funded his usurpation of the throne of Mysore.

Early last year, the Jaganmohan Reddy government orbited an attempt to install a Tipu statue in Proddatur, Andhra Pradesh and dropped it following a backlash. And now, it is the turn of the super-secular Maharashtra government to propel its own version of the same stunt with a proposal to name a sports stadium in the honour of the tyrant.

Note the aforementioned states in which Tipu’s rehabilitation is occurring. The first is obviously Karnataka, the birth-state of Tipu Sultan who opened his eyes to the world at Devanahalli, the site of today’s Bangalore International Airport. The second is (undivided) Andhra Pradesh, the theatre of serial ravages conducted by Tipu. The third is Tamil Nadu, whose Dindigul connection with Hyder Ali we have already mentioned. The fourth is Maharashtra, the state then ruled by the formidable Peshwas who became a source of recurring nightmares to both Hyder and Tipu. Curiously enough, the Kerala government, the state which witnessed the most colossal and appalling savagery inflicted by Tipu, has not gone the way of these other states.

By itself, these contemporary political attempts at whitewashing Tipu’s sordid legacy of bigotry and senseless genocides of Hindus inspired by zealotry are direct, revelatory links to history.

The phenomenon of industrial-scale distortions of Muslim rule in medieval India deserves an independent study in its own right. This is its summary: Clothing Muslim despots and tyrants as benevolent rulers, and painting the Hindu resistance to all such tyrannies as “rebellion”. For over half a century, if a declared bigot and a self-proclaimed “cleanser” of the “infidel” Hindus like Aurangzeb could be elevated as a compassionate and tolerant monarch, there is much truth in the ironic saying that “it happens only in India”.

Tipu Sultan is in many ways the Aurangzeb of South India. As the author of a book on Tipu Sultan (Tipu Sultan: The Tyrant of Mysore, Rare Publications, Chennai), I am both amused and amazed at the continuing efforts to paint him as a hero, patriot, and more hilariously, a freedom fighter.

But what is truly amazing is the manner in which the blaze of this myth continues to be oxygenated despite the availability of copious amounts of primary sources regarding Tipu Sultan which prove the exact opposite of what these Tipu myth-makers claim. These include and are not limited his correspondence with various officials in his administration and military, and letters he wrote to himself in his private journal or diary. Other primary sources include eyewitness accounts about him written by his contemporaries: French, British, Marathas, Nawabs, and the Nizam of Hyderabad. In fact, we can construct a detailed and accurate picture of the life, times, character and legacy of Tipu Sultan using these primary sources even if we don’t want to rely on any history textbook about him — both that glorify him or otherwise. And that accurate picture is not pretty.

The most charitable description of Tipu Sultan after a survey of these sources is to call him the tyrant of Mysore. His 17-year-long regime was a single panorama of military, economic and religious terror as far as Hindus (and Christians to an extent) were concerned. He razed entire cities literally to the ground and depopulated them.

As representative samples, we can cite his devastating raids in Kodagu (Coorg) and the Malabar for the extent and scale of sheer barbarism and large-scale destruction.

In 1788, Tipu marched into Kodagu and scorched entire towns and villages. Mir Hussein Kirmani, Tipu’s courtier-cum-biographer describes how the raid resulted in the smouldering of scores of villages in Kushalapura (today’s Kushalnagar), Talakaveri, Madikeri, and other places. In a letter to Runmust Khan, the Nawab of Kurnool, Tipu gloats how he took 40,000 Coorgis as prisoners and forcibly converted them to Islam and “incorporated them with our Ahmadi corps.” Already a thinly-populated country, Tipu’s brutal raid followed by this large-scale prisoner-taking depopulated Coorg of its original inhabitants to a severe extent. To Islamise Coorg, he forcibly transported about 7,000 Muslim families belonging to the Shaikh and Sayyid sects to Coorg from elsewhere.

The intensity of Tipu’s raid was so terrifying that hundreds of temple pujaris fled to Mangalore along with their families. Worship came to a permanent halt in hundreds of temples. Some were covered with leaves in order to conceal their presence. The Maletirike Bhagavati temple at Virajpet is a good example of this. Similarly, when the ruler of Madikeri heard news of Tipu’s marauding approach, he realised that the renowned Omkareshwara temple would meet the same fate. Overnight, he removed its tower and replaced it with a dome so that it resembled a mosque from afar. The temple retains this appearance till date. In his raid of Napoklu near Madikeri, Tipu razed the temples in the surrounding villages of Betu and Kolakeri.

Remnants of Tipu Sultan’s savage raid of Kodagu survive even today — the forcibly converted Kodava Hindus are today known as Kodava Mapilas (Mapila: Muslim). Their ancestral family names are still Hindu — some representative examples include surnames like Kuvalera, Italtanda, Mitaltanda, Kuppodanda, Kappanjeera, Kalera, Chekkera, Charmakaranda, Maniyanda, Balasojikaranda, and Mandeyanda. To the Kodavas, Tipu’s fanatical dance of death in their homeland remains a wound that will never heal.

When we turn to the Malabar, the record is gorier. Indeed, Tipu’s barbaric incursions into the Malabar can form the subject of an independent book. Like in Kodagu, residues of Tipu’s deadly campaigns in the Malabar can be seen even today in the region. The city that bore the brunt of his excesses in the Malabar is Kozhikode (Calicut). William Logan’s Malabar Manual, the Malabar Gazetter, the Portuguese missionary Fr Bartholomew’s Voyage to East Indies, the German missionary Guntest and chronicles by various contemporary British military officers contain first-hand accounts of how Tipu razed the city to the ground.

An excerpt from Bartholomew provides us a prototypical glimpse: “First a corps of 30,000 barbarians who butchered everybody on the way… followed by the field-gun unit… Tipu was riding on an elephant behind which another army of 30,000 soldiers followed. Most of the men and women were hanged in Calicut, first mothers were hanged with their children tied to their necks. That barbarian Tipu Sultan tied the naked Christians and Hindus to the legs of elephants and made the elephants move around till the bodies of the helpless victims were torn to pieces. Temples and churches were ordered to be burned down, desecrated and destroyed. Christian and Hindu women were forced to marry Mohammadans and similarly their men were forced to marry Mohammadan women. Those Christians who refused to be honoured with Islam, were ordered to be killed by hanging immediately. These atrocities were told to me by the victims of Tipu Sultan who escaped from the clutches of his army and reached Varappuzha, which is the centre of Carmichael Christian Mission. I myself helped many victims to cross the Varappuzha River by boats.”

The devastation of Kozhikode was so thorough that it changed the character of the place forever. The city was home to more than 7,000 Brahmin families. Thanks to Tipu, more than 2,000 of these were wiped out, and the remaining fled to the forests. In the words of the German missionary Guntest: “[A>ccompanied by an army of 60,000, Tipu Sultan came to Kozhikode [Calicut> in 1788 and razed it to the ground. It is not possible even to describe the brutalities committed by that Islamic barbarian from Mysore.”

In Tipu’s exultory words, these genocides were pious deeds in the service of Islam. Here is his letter to Budruz Zaman Khan, a military official in his service: “With the grace of Prophet Mohammed and Allah, almost all Hindus in Calicut are converted to Islam. Only on the borders of Cochin State a few are still not converted. I am determined to convert them also very soon. I consider this as Jehad to achieve that object. Your two letters, with the enclosed memorandums of the Naimar (or Nair) captives, have been received. You did right in ordering a hundred and thirty-five of them to be circumcised, and in putting eleven of the youngest of these into the Usud Ilhye band (or class) and the remaining ninety-four into the Ahmedy Troop… I have achieved a great victory recently in Malabar and over four lakh Hindus were converted to Islam.”

Pakistan has a tradition of naming its missiles in the honour of Islamic invaders and tyrants of India whose devastation of Hindus is counted as an act of piety. Thus, we have missiles named Ghazni, Ghur, and Tipu. However, a 1964 publication of the Pakistan Administrative Staff College, Lahore says the following about Tipu Sultan: “Tipu imprisoned and forcibly converted more than a lakh Hindus and over 70,000 Christians in the Malabar region (they were forcibly circumcised and made to eat beef). Although these conversions were unethical and disgraceful, they served Tipu’s purpose. Once all these people had been cut off from their original faith, they were left with no option but to accept the very faith to which their ravager belonged, and they began to educate their children in Islam. They were later enlisted in the army and received good positions. Most of them morphed into religious zealots, and enhanced the ranks of the faithful in Tipu’s kingdom. Tipu’s zeal for conversion was not limited only to the Malabar region. He had spread it all the way up to Coimbatore.”

These chronicles are voluminous and all of them only bolster the evidence of Tipu sultan’s bigotry and tyranny. In passing, it must be said that until his aggression, the Malabar region was a flourishing global hub of pepper and spice trade. However, when Tipu burnt and destroyed several cities and towns in one feral sweep, this trade was killed almost overnight. Pepper cultivation was completely stopped.

Even today, the Malabar people retain the deadly memory of his invasion in the form of just one Malayalam word: padayottam.

A prime contention of the contemporary apologists of Tipu Sultan is the gifts he gave to the Sringeri Matha and other random acts of occasional generosity towards the Hindus. These are held up as proofs that Tipu was a tolerant (code word for secular) ruler. In reality, all these are classic cases of one swallow maketh not a summer.

An entire chapter in my book debunks this myth in detail, but here’s the short version.

William Logan’s Malabar Manual gives detailed lists of the temples Tipu had destroyed in Kerala, and Lewis Rice in his Mysore Gazetteer writes that “in the vast empire of Tipu Sultan on the eve of his death, there were only two Hindu temples having daily pujas.” He further estimates that Tipu had destroyed eight thousand temples in South India, a number which Colonel RD Palsokar also confirms in his study on Tipu Sultan.

The gifts to the Sringeri Matha were an act of realpolitik. By then, Tipu had been badly clobbered and weakened during the Third Anglo Mysore war of 1791. He was also smarting from a recent raid by the Marathas who had once again become all-powerful. It was to placate the Hindus in his dominion that Tipu offered the said gifts.

The true portrait unveils itself when we observe that the source of much of Tipu’s cruelty and sprees of savagery owes to his religious fanaticism. Tipu Sultan regarded himself as the protector of Islam in India and went to extreme lengths to make the world aware of this fact.

Consider these: One major sweeping change that Tipu enforced after taking over the Mysore throne in 1782 was to rename cities and towns with Hindu names to Muslim ones. He styled his kingdom Khudaadad Sarkar (Realm of Allah).

He also changed weights and measures to be consistent with the tenets of Islam. Thus, he altered the kos (unit of measuring distance) from two miles as “consisting of so many yards of twice twenty-four thumb-breadths, because the creed (Kalmah) contains twenty-four letters,” to quote Lewin B Bowring. Likewise, he changed the calendar to force-fit it to Islamic tenets. In Bowring’s words again: “Tipu founded a new calendar…giving fantastic names to the years, and equally strange ones to the lunar months. The year, according to his arrangement, only contained 354 days, and each month was called by some name in alphabetical order.”

Thus, Tipu’s pious calendar began with the year of the birth of Prophet Muhammad, and the years were named as Ahand, Ab, Jha, Baab, and so on.

Actually, Tipu made no secret of his hatred for infidels: Hindus and Christians. After his death in 1799 in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War and the fall of his capital Srirangapattana to the British, Colonel William Kirkpatrick discovered more than 2000 letters in his palace written in Farsi in Tipu’s own handwriting. In these letters, Tipu refers to Hindus as “kaffirs and infidels,” and to the British as “Christians” who needed to be “cleansed (or converted) if the rule of Islam is to be firmly established in India.”

Until Tipu took over, official administrative records were written in Kannada and translated to Marathi. Tipu got rid of both languages and enforced Farsi as the administrative language of the Mysore state. The vestiges of this change are visible in the administrative language used by the present day Karnataka Government: “Khata,” “Khirdi,” “Pahani,” “Khanisumari,” “Gudasta,” “Takhte,” “Tari,” “Khushki,” “Bagaaytu,” “Banjaru,” “Jamabandi,” “Ahalvalu,” “Khavand,” “Amaldaar,” and “Shirastedaar” and so on.

Tipu appointed only Muslim officers to key posts in both the military and administration irrespective of merit. M.H. Gopal, in his Tipu Sultan’s Mysore: An Economic History gives us the picture: “Mussulmans were exempted from paying the housetax and taxes on grain and other goods meant for their personal use and not for trade. Christians were seized and deported to the capital, and their property confiscated. Converts to Islam were given concessions such as exemption from taxes… [Tipu> removed Hindus from all administrative posts and replaced them with Mussulmans with the exception of Diwan Purnaiah…”

Finally, we can examine the greatest myth about Tipu Sultan: That he was a freedom fighter and patriot who sought to liberate India from British rule. The easiest way to deflate this myth is to look at the timeline of both Tipu Sultan and world history.

The notion of nation states and the rhetoric of patriotism became prominent mostly in the latter half of the 19th Century in Europe. Until the British Crown took full control of India in 1858, European concepts such as nation states, nationalism, patriotism, democracy, etc, were alien to the Indian civilisational experience. Until then, India was conceived variously as Jambudvipa, Bharatavarsha and so on, and was united by a common cultural strand rooted in the Vedic civilisation and its various offshoots and streams.

Thus, when we examine Tipu Sultan’s timeline beginning with his birth in 1753 up to his death in 1799, it becomes clear that the British East India Company, a business enterprise, was fighting for the economic and military supremacy of India. The French were the only other major contender. The Marathas posed the most powerful threat to the British and to Tipu. Like the Marathas, Tipu Sultan too, was engaged in constant wars to expand his empire in order to bring the “infidel land under the sword of Islam”.

Therefore, to claim that Tipu fought against the British for India’s freedom ignores historical truths and rebels against reason. Even if we accept this claim to be true, we also need to accept the fact that Siraj-ud-Daula was also a freedom fighter who fought for the “freedom” of India. But Siraj-ud-Daula is not even a footnote of history today.

In fact, the opposite is true. Tipu Sultan’s various correspondences with the French, preserved at the India Office in London indicate how he conspired with them to drive out the British and divide India between them. Tipu also invited the Afghan ruler Zaman Shah to invade India and help the cause of Islam. His letters to the Ottoman Sultan of Turkey indicate the same.

This then is the capsuled history and legacy of Tipu Sultan which leaves no doubt as to the kind of ruler he was or as to the nature and extent of his barbarism and religious bigotry.

As the popular saying goes, naming a road in India after Aurangzeb is akin to naming a road in Israel in Hitler’s honour. The same thing applies in toto in the case of Tipu Sultan, the tyrant of Mysore.

Sandeep Balakrishna is a Tipu Sultan biographer. Views expressed are personal.

Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .