Apart from a colossal electoral loss,
May 16, 2014 resolutely demonstrated the ultimate rejection of the
Congress brand of secularism, reducing the mighty national party, which
ruled India for six decades to a paltry 44 seats in the Lok Sabha. The
loss did not end there: in the last six months, the Congress has been
reduced to dust in successive state elections — Haryana and Maharashtra
being the most substantial losses. The only state of any significance
remaining with the Congress today is Karnataka.
Yet it seems that the party has learned no lessons. The
Siddaramaiah-led Congress government in Karnataka appears to think that
the solution to what is being remarked as the party’s "existential
crisis", is a sharper version of the same, six-plus decades of
secularism.
One of the latest manifestations of this sharper secularism
is chief minister Siddaramaiah announcing the launch of the Tipu Jayanti
celebrations from this year, funded by the taxpayer. Indeed, the chief
minister was open about why he was doing this:
“There has been a lot of pressure from various quarters
to celebrate Tipu Jayanti. We have decided to take this into
consideration and will announce the date shortly," Siddaramaiah had said
at the release of a book Tipu Sultan: A Crusader for Change, authored by historian professor B Sheik Ali.
Siddaramaiah had earlier claimed
that “Tipu Sultan was a secular ruler. He was a model king in the
entire country. A section of people criticise him out of prejudice.”
That history writing in India has been the subject of fierce
controversy is now an article of faith, especially following Arun
Shourie’s seminal expose of the Indian history establishment in his Eminent Historians,
a classic in its own right. Shourie, among other things, exposed in
detail how in both official and dominant history textbooks and
narratives at all levels — from school to university to general/popular
history — do several things simultaneously as we shall see.[i][i]
This narrative typically begins by endorsing the discredited
Aryan Invasion (or Migration) Theory as a historical fact and exhibits
its distinctive character when it deals with the protracted Muslim rule
of India during the medieval period. In turn, this character
demonstrates several key features. In no specific order, it includes a
demonisation of Brahmins as the root cause of everything wrong with
India — from the ancient past to the present. And then there is the
whitewashing of the long and voluminous record of Muslim atrocities
against Hindus — mass murders, forced conversions, large scale temple
destructions and the economic emasculation of Hindus by imposing the
Jiyza tax and the Dhimmi status. The narrative also downplays the
cultural, civilisational, and economic excellence attained by India
under great Hindu dynasties like the Mauryas, Sungas, Guptas,
Satavahanas, Cholas, Chalukyas, Hoysalas and the Vijayanagar Empire to
name a few.
 |
Needless to say, none of these is possible without wilful
and wholesale distortion of historical truths, a fact that has been
debunked and rebutted extensively and spread across numerous scholarly
volumes by stalwarts such as Sita Ram Goel, Ram Swarup, Harsh Narain,
Arun Shourie, Koenraad Elst, Meenakshi Jain and others (a partial
bibliography has been provided at the end of this piece). [ii][ii]
The other facet of whitewashing the historical record of
Muslim atrocities in India is donning cruel despots and tyrants as
benevolent and progressive rulers. The classic example is Aurangzeb, the
bigoted tyrant par excellence. Even a casual perusal of Jadunath
Sarkar’s five-volume History of Aurangzib or the shorter India of Aurangzib or even the primary source, the authorised biography of Aurangzeb, the Masir-i-Alamgiri
has ample evidence to show for his fanaticism and hatred against
Hindus. Yet, our school and university and other books of popular
history paint him in nearly the opposite light.
And Tipu Sultan is in many ways the "Aurangzeb of the South". 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 freedom fighter.
To be sure, the Tipu myth gained currency after Bhagvan S Gidwani’s distorted novel named The Sword of Tipu Sultan, where Tipu is hailed as the “tiger of Mysore” among other things.
It is instructive to examine the assessment of Gidwani’s novel by the historian and scholar IM Muthanna in his comprehensive Tipu Sultan X-Rayed published in 1980:
Gidwani’s Tipu has a political value today, especially
after the Congress government in 1974, perhaps to oblige the Muslim
voters, released a commemoration stamp on Tipu, and described him as a
"freedom fighter". Releasing a 50-paisa postage stamp commemorating Tipu
in July 1974, a minister of Karnataka said that Tipu was "a hero" of
Karnataka, "the defender of freedom," and so on. The chariman of the
stamp releasing committee wanted the writers to present a true and
faithful account of Tipu. Well… Gidwani has obliged him, rather
sneakily, and in the form of a novel.
Muthanna was both perceptive and prophetic given how the
Tipu myth was since used in the service of vote bank politics. But there
was another review of Gidwani’s novel predating Muthanna’s book by four
years. The December 19, 1976 edition of Hindustan Times carried a scathing review of the Sword of Tipu Sultan by MC Gabriel:
The author’s effort throughout is to rebuild the past
closer to his heart’s desire. But anyone will grant that such
consideration is extra-historical… it is a pity that… he could not put
his material to better purpose than giving us just his private views… To
say that Tipu was "the first nationalist", "a believer in communal
harmony" and an "apostle of non-violence"… is quite uncalled for.
This detailed look at the Sword of Tipu Sultan was
essential because much of the material for Tipu myth-making is derived
from this book. In our own times, Girish Karnad’s Kannada play, Tipuvina Kanasugalu (The Dreams of Tipu Sultan) borrows approvingly from Gidwani’s book.
But what is astonishing is the manner in which this myth
has persisted despite the availability of copious amounts of primary
sources regarding Tipu Sultan which prove the exact opposite of what
Tipu myth-makers claim. These include and are not limited to letters he
wrote to various officials in his administration and military, letters
he wrote to himself (in the form of a journal/diary) [iii][iii],
eyewitness accounts by his contemporaries (Indian, French and British),
land and other records. Indeed, we can construct an 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 primarily a tenure of military and economic
terror as far as Hindus were concerned. He razed entire cities literally
to the ground and depopulated them.
As representative samples, we can examine his raids in
Coorg and the Malabar for the extent and scale of sheer barbarism and
large scale destruction.
In 1788, Tipu marched into Coorg and burnt down entire
towns and villages. Mir Hussein Kirmani, Tipu’s courtier-cum-biographer
describes how the raid resulted in the burning down of villages in
Kushalapura (today’s Kushalnagar), Talakaveri, Madikeri, and other
places. Additionally, Tipu in a letter to the Nawab of Kurnool, Runmust
Khan describes 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
large-scale prisoner-taking depopulated Coorg of its original
inhabitants to a severe extent. To Islamise Coorg, he 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 priests fled to Mangalore along with their families.
Worship came to a permanent halt in several temples. Some temples were
covered with leaves in order to conceal their presence. The Maletirike
Bhagavati temple at Virajpet is a good example of this. Equally, the
renowned Omkareshwara temple in Madikeri was about to meet the same fate
— the then ruler at Madikeri panicked at the approach of Tipu, removed
its tower and replaced it with a dome so that it looked like a mosque
from afar. The temple continues to retain this appearance till date. In
his raid of Napoklu near Madikeri, Tipu destroyed the temples in the
surrounding villages of Betu and Kolakeri.
Remnants of Tipu Sultan’s savage raid of Coorg survive even
today — the forcibly converted Coorgis are today known as Kodava
Mapilas (Coorg Muslims) whose last/family names are still Hindu —
representative examples are 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 equally, if not
gorier. Indeed, Tipu’s incursions into the Malabar can form the subject
of an independent book. Like in Coorg, remnants of Tipu’s disastrous
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 accounts 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 representative
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 in Calicut was so comprehensive that it
changed the character of the place forever. Calicut 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.”
If this was not enough, we have testimony from the horse’s
mouth. Tipu Sultan in letters to Syed Abdul Dulai and his officer Budruz
Zaman Khan respectively gloats thus:
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. I am now determined to
march against the cursed Raman Nair.
It is also pertinent to mention an extract from Life of
Tipu Sultan published by the Pakistan Administrative Staff College,
Lahore in 1964 [iv][iv]:
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.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s enough material on Tipu’s
ghastly raid on the Malabar to merit an independent volume but these
should suffice. In passing, it must be said that the consequences of his
invasion was all-encompassing. Until his aggression, the Malabar region
was a flourishing hub of pepper and spice trade throughout the world.
However, when Tipu burnt and destroyed several cities and towns in one
disastrous 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. [v][v]
Much is made by Tipu apologists of how he was kind towards
Hindus and how he gave gifts to the Sringeri Mutt. One swallow indeed
does not a summer make. Chapter 11 of my book debunks this myth in
detail but here’s the short version.
William Logan’s Malabar Manual gives a detailed list of all the temples Tipu had destroyed in Kerala, and Lewis Rice in his Mysore Gazetter
holds that “in the vast empire of Tipu Sultan on the eve of his death,
there were only two Hindu temples having daily pujas” and further
estimates he 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 Sringeri Mutt was more on the lines of
realpolitik: Tipu had been badly beaten and weakened during the Third
Anglo Mysore war of 1791. He was also smarting from a recent raid by the
Marathas who had then become all-powerful. It was to placate the Hindus
in his dominion that Tipu gave the said gifts.
The source of much of his cruelty and sprees of savagery
owes to his religious fanaticism. Tipu Sultan regarded himself as the
protector of Islam and went to extreme lengths to make the world aware
of this fact.
Consider these: One of the major things Tipu did after
taking over the Mysore throne in 1782 was to rename cities and towns
with Hindu names to Muslim ones. He also changed weights and measures to
be consistent with the tenets of Islam. So, he changed 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. [vi][vi] If this was not
enough, Tipu also changed the measurement of time. To quote Bowring
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.” Tipu’s calendar began with the year of
the birth of Prophet Mohammad, and even gave names to years as Ahand,
Ab, Jha, Baab, and so on.
Indeed, Tipu made no secret of his hatred for infidels —
both Hindu and Christian. 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 did away with both
these 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.[vii][vii]
Tipu also appointed only Muslim officers to key posts in
both the military and administration irrespective of merit. MH Gopal in
his Tipu Sultan’s Mysore: An Economic History avers thus:
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…
This has an echo in William McLeod who was appointed by the
East India Company Government as the Superintendent of the Land Revenue
department after Tipu’s death. McLeod discovered that “the list of the
chiefs of every province or district contained only Muslim names like
Sheikh Ali, Sher Khan, Muhammad Syed, Meer Hussain, Syed Peer, Abdul
Karim, and so on. There was nary a…non-Muslim name.”[viii][viii]
Finally, we can examine the greatest myth about Tipu
Sultan: that he was a brave 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 over India as one of its
colonies and introduced European concepts such as nation states,
nationalism, patriotism, democracy and so on, and indeed, the concept of
the whole of India as a nation state was alien to the Indian
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.[ix][ix]It was only in 1858 that India became a nation in the
sense of a colony ruled by Great Britain.
And so if 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 as the most powerful threat to the
British during Tipu’s rule. More importantly, the whole of India was not
united politically as a single nation under any ruler. And like the
Marathas, Tipu Sultan too was engaged in constant battle to expand his
empire in order to bring the “infidel land under the sword of Islam.”
[x][x] Therefore, to claim that Tipu fought against the British for
India’s freedom ignores historical truths and defies logic. 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.
In fact, the opposite is true. Tipu’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. [xi][xi]
This then is the near-comprehensive history and legacy of
Tipu Sultan which leaves no doubt as to the kind of ruler he was or the
nature and extent of his barbarism.
The Siddaramaiah-led Karnataka Government has now declared
that it will use taxpayer money to celebrate an annual Tipu Jayanti
starting this year. My parting observation on this proposed move is
something I read somewhere: naming a road in Aurangzeb’s honour in Delhi
is akin to naming a road in Hitler’s honour in Israel. And so it is
with Karnataka. And Kerala. And all other places where Tipu wreaked
havoc.
References:
[i][i] Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud. Arun Shourie
[ii][ii] Bibliography on historical distortions:
· Hindu Temples: What happened to them (Volumes 1 and 2), Sitaram Goel
· Indian Muslims: Who are they, K.S. Lal
· Nationalism and Distortions of Indian history, Dr. N.S. Rajaram
· Negationism in India - Concealing the Record of Islam, Dr. Koenraad Elst
· Perversion of India's Political Parlance, Sitaram Goel
· The Rigveda - A Historical Analysis, Shrikant Talageri
·
[iii][iii] Select letters of Tippoo Sultan, Colonel William Kirkpatrick
[iv][iv]Life of Tipu Sultan—Pakistan Administrative Staff College, Lahore, translated by Bernard Wycliffe
[v][v] Tipu Sultan: Villain or Hero? Compiled by Sitaram Goel
[vi][vi]Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan, Lewin B Bowring
[vii][vii] It is impossible to build a strong nation on the foundation of falsehoods, Dr. S.L. Bhyrappa 24 September, 2006.
[viii][viii] Tipu Sultan X-rayed, Dr. I.M. Muthanna
[ix][ix] Bharatiya Samskruti (in Kannada), Dr. S. Srikanta Sastri. Paraphrased and translated by the author.
[x][x] See Footnote iii
[xi][xi] See Footnote viii
