IIf only the Marxist editors of NCERT textbooks had accepted that Tipu Sultan was a flawed human being, perhaps some of us would not have so many problems. The absence of such honesty compels us to say: Ay, there’s the rub! in the earlier Marxist version official sycophants, Tipu was a patriot, a tolerant, secular ruler, a great freedom fighter etc. The question of “errors” does not arise.
Tipu’s advocate, Australian historian Kate Brittlebank, points out that he was unique in being a truly Indian ruler who died fighting the British and did not receive a pension from them. There is a lot of truth in that statement. But this does not automatically make Tipu a patriot. He allied with the French and if the fate of the war had been different, India could have come under the rule of the French East India Company – not exactly an optimistic prospect for Indian patriots.
False patriotism of Tipu Sultan
The ruler of Mysore corresponded with the Sultan of Turkey and was not averse to the great man becoming the ruler of India. At least for many of us, the British Raj was a better combination than the Ottoman Raj and that is our view as patriots. The Ottomans are unlikely to have built railways or established universities, institutions which coincidentally were established in British India decades later in the Ottoman Empire. Tipu wrote to Zaman Shah Durrani, the third king of the Durrani Empire in Afghanistan, for help. Throw out English in India. Some of us see this as evidence of religious bigotry against Hindu Marathas and not secular patriotism.
Emphasizing his anti-British credentials, which are taken as self-evident evidence of his patriotism, the Delhi-JNU-Aligarh-Rutgers-Australia coterie of historians forgets that the British were not the only enemies of Tipu. At the final siege of Seringapatam (or Srirangapatna, if you prefer) in 1799, the force attacking Tipu had more troops from the Nizam of Hyderabad than those from the East India Company. And I believe that no one can accuse the Nizam of being a Hindu fanatic. There were also many Maratha soldiers. In fact, soldiers loyal to Indian rulers, Hindus and Muslims, fought Tipu more than soldiers from the East India Company, whom Marxists love to hate.
My mother’s family is of “old Mysorian” family and many of these stories are stories that I have heard from my grandfather Madhav Rao and many of my grandparents. Our narrative is that while Hyder Ali, Tipu’s father and ruler of Mysore, was a usurper, he still maintained the fiction that he was the representative of our beloved Wodeyar kings. It was Tipu who started calling himself “Sultan” and who completely marginalized our traditional rulers. The Dowager Wodeyar Maharani Lakshmanmani was in correspondence with the British, whom she saw as the legitimate “restorers” of order in our land and who saw Tipu as treacherous, treacherous and, I must say, a traitor. Marxist historians would no doubt dismiss the venerable lady as a Hindu fanatic or, in current parlance, a supremacist.
Kodavas, Roman Catholics, Nairs and British
It is interesting to see how today’s Marxists are taking lightly the suffering of the Kodavas of Coorg (or Kodagu) and cleverly portraying them as British agents. The fact is that most of the Kodavas hate Tipu who allegedly forcibly converted many of them. The descendants of this community of Kodava “converts” are still around.
Tipu was also cruel to the Nair community of Travancore and Malabar. Once again forced conversion was the rule. And after that he broke the temples. His worst plunder was against the Roman Catholic Christians of Mangalore. Forced marches, forced conversions, kidnapping of Mangalorean Christian women – these are all documented and well-known, I wonder whether the bishops of today’s crypto-Marxist Roman Church in India would even bother to talk about this. World’s leftists including historians reject Tipu’s cruelty towards British prisoners forced dressing Young drummer boys masquerading as girls and the violation of their civil rights as “imperialist propaganda”. It was definitely propaganda. But let us not forget the kernels of truth in these accounts.
So-called secular historians talk endlessly about Tipu’s support of the Hindu temples of Srirangapatna and Nanjangud and the Sringeri Math. Many of these are documented and cannot and should not be denied. But if historians are neutral, they should have the honesty and courage to say that some of this support stemmed from Tipu’s belief in these temples having unique abilities in the field of astrological predictions. Tipu was a Believer In astrology. I give him credit for this. Would secular historians do the same?
a brilliant strategist but a weak strategist
The second point that Marxist historians point out is that Purnaiah, who was a Brahmin and minister under Hyder Ali and Tipu, was a Tipu supporter. This is true. But the same historians should have added and should have added that many Mysoreans believed and still do that Purnaiah was a traitor at times! I have a simple explanation. Poornaiya was probably a nobody until Hyder saw him and his entire rise, including becoming the Diwan of Mysore, was on account of Hyder and later Tipu. He was simply being loyal to his benefactors. Incidentally, in his later life, Purnaiah was equally loyal to the East India Company. Arthur Wellesley, who later became the Duke of Wellington, respected and admired Purnaiah. My grand-uncle Nagaraja Rao, himself a devout Brahmin, once told me while talking about Poornaiah that “Brahmins have chameleon-like abilities that can realistically accommodate forces.” This may summarize the full story. Not loyalty or infidelity, but realism.
Tipu called his government (which, from our family’s point of view, was one of the usurpers) Sarkar-i-Khudadaad, an Islamic Persian expression indicating that it was the government of God. Tipu deliberately included Persian in the land records of his dominions. Is it too fanatical of us to admire Mark Cubbon, the British army officer who later changed the rules and reintroduced Kannada and Marathi to the village map? Who is the traitor? Who is the patriot? Who was the benefactor? Who was the bad guy? Important question to ask. No wonder that even today no political party wants to change the name of Cubbon Park in Bengaluru or remove his statue.
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The fact is that Tipu was a brilliant military strategist and a poor military and political strategist. He entered into an alliance with the French, who ended up on the losing side. He was bigoted and used to pretend Muslim conquest of India. That’s why he had access to Turks and Afghans. He was a Parvenu local Muslim and anathema to the Nizam who advertised his Persian ancestry. The Marathas saw him as a thorn in their side. Muhammad Ali Khan Walajah, the Nawab of Carnatic, hated Tipu and was his implacable enemy. Many of Tipu’s subjects longed for the return of Wodeyar rule.
Hyder Ali was a military and political genius but his son Tipu lacked good sense. He allowed a grand alliance—the Marathas, the Nizam, the British, the Kodavas, the Maharaja of Travancore and the Nawab of Karnataka—to unite against him. He depended on the French who were intransigent and incompetent; He appealed to the Turks and Afghans, who were otherwise already preoccupied and reluctant. He was clever. But unlike his father, he was not intelligent. He has lost.
However, he was not a great, shining patriot. He was flawed, as are most of us.
Jayateertha Rao is a retired businessman based in Mumbai. Thoughts are personal.