Two-faced Tipu Sultan: Political double trouble

There are at least two ways in which history gets rewritten. One is when new facts are uncovered. The other is when a more plausible and persuasive explanation is offered to understand the existing evidence. These, at any rate, are the desirable ways of creating alternate histories.

The unscrupulous ways are many but boil down to propaganda, distortion, and outright lies. Of course, history is not the only way we understand our past. Cultural memory, which is often contrary to history is, at times, more powerful. 

Even more complex is the manner in which people who are not historically oriented, with a different sense of time and chronology, make sense of what happened earlier. Myths and legends for such people are more meaningful than history; “real” dates, events, and people don’t really matter that much.

All these issues need to be borne in mind if we wish to make sense of the controversy that dogs the Tipu Sultan. 

Was Tipu a Hindu-hating bigot or a revolutionary anti-colonialist? Should he be celebrated or condemned? Unfortunately, these fights are no longer about history. They are current-day political battles. Tipu is just an excuse or pretext; the real tussle is electoral, over vote banks and constituencies.

The imposition of his anniversary celebrations upon the people of Karnataka may be understood in this light. The aim is to garner Muslim and “secular” votes by raising Tipu to the status of a national hero and freedom fighter. But local communities remember him as a cruel tyrant who forcibly converted Hindus and Christians to Islam.

Freedom fighter Tipu certainly was not. As the Karnataka High Court observed on November 2, 2016, “Tipu was not a freedom fighter, but a monarch who fought the opponents to safeguard his interests.” 

A desperate warlord trying to save his principality from the onslaught of British imperialism, he died much before our freedom struggle began, in fact over half a century prior to the so-called Sepoy Mutiny, Great Revolt, of First Indian War of Independence of 1857. The different ways in which this event is commemorated illustrates how deeply implicated history is with ideology.

If Tipu was neither a nationalist nor a freedom fighter, what is his singular achievement? He was an inveterate adversary of the British, refusing to be bought or bullied into submission. 

Also a brave man, almost visionary in his understanding of international politics, he sought alliances not only with the French but also with the Ottoman Caliphate in Istanbul against the British. In addition, he understood that technology and discipline were the keys to military success, not the size of armies.

Given how spiritedly he fought the British, he was bound to become a local legend. Matters might have rested there had not the Leftist historians made him out to be a secular sentinel and forerunner of progressive forces.

This was clearly an exaggeration. His father, Haider Ali, had seized Mysore from the Hindu Wodeyars, whom he had served. Along with Bhopal, Mysore was among the last of the Muslim conquests of India, ruled not by established dynasties, but ambitious adventurers who grabbed power, taking advantage of disorder and uncertainty following the break-up of the Moghul empire. 

As such, an appeal to puritanical Islam was one of the means to legitmise and justify their usurpations. As an embarrassment to Leftist historians, the Muslim leading chroniclers of Tipu speak glowingly of his destruction of temples and large-scale forced conversions not only in Mysore, but Coorg, Kannur, Calicut, Wynad, Malabar, and Palaghat. 

Mir Hussein Kirmani in Nishan-e-Haideri, for instance, avers that “the Sultan had a great aversion to Brahm [sic], Hindus and other tribes.” In his letter to the commander of his forces in Calicat, Tipu ordered: “You should capture and kill all Hindus. Those below 20 years may be kept in prison and 5000 from the rest should be killed by hanging from tree tops.” 

After two years of his rule, he boasted, “With the grace of Prophet Mohammad and Allah, almost all the Hindus in Calicut have been converted to Islam. Only on the borders of Cochin State few are not yet converted. I am determined to convert them also very soon. I consider this as Jehad to achieve this object.” His massacre of Melkote Iyengars is still mourned by the community which, to this day, does not celebrate Diwali. 

Such evidence is either ignored by Left-liberal historians or considered not worthy of being taken seriously. However, such victorious boasting is so endemic in the history of Muslim India that, even if exaggerated, it confirms the general consensus in the Islamic narratives over the desirability of such acts. 

Instead of branding those who point to it as “communal” why shouldn’t such criminal acts of looting, vandalism, genocide, imprisonment, enslavement, and so on being carried out in the name of Islam be condemned?

But lest we rush to the other extreme to ask for a banning of Tipu as entirely Hindu-hating, there is also convincing evidence of support for the Sringeri math and the endowment of other temples, including Guruvayur. The anti-Tipu lobby hasn’t been able to countenance or countervail such facts either.

Instead of politicising figures such as Tipu, we need to consider them as complex individuals and products of their times. At the same time, more accurate and critical histories of their lives and times need to be produced so that reductive, ideologically motivated, and distorted accounts do not prevail. 

How seriously does the ruling Congress party itself take Tipu Jayanti in Karnataka? Not very, if we go by Education Minister Tanveer Sait, caught watching porn in Raichur during the celebrations.