The Ghost of Tipu Sultan Still Haunts India

A report appeared in The Times of India on March 6, 1930, titled ‘Tipu Rehabilitated’. It was based on Mahatma Gandhi’s article in Young India that lauded Tipu Sultan as a “real martyr in the cause of liberty.” Gandhi, like Leopold von Ranke, the great German historian and modern founder of source-based history, titled his intervention “Tipu Sultan as he was.” The nonviolent pundit paradoxically commended the fact that “It was found that even in death his hand still clutched the sword, which was his instrument, as non-violence is our instrument, for the vindication of liberty.” So far, so good. Gandhi went ahead to historiography and reprimanded “foreign” (English) historians that they had blackened the stature of a ruler who was known for his “broadminded toleration”. In the larger cause of Hindu and Muslim unity, Gandhi seemed to indicate that when even Nero and Heliogabalus have been whitewashed by European historians, why should Indians keep calling their Muslim monarchs “fanatic” when they were “nothing of the kind”?

Are we to declare Tipu a zealot, a patriot or both? What does it mean to be a patriot, after all? Can we overlook the historical context of a regional ruler or provincial aspirations in defying British domination? Was every feat of regional resistance in the eighteenth century or before an act of a “freedom fighter”? Are we to exonerate somebody’s tyranny and fanaticism on the ground that they battled an alien financial corporation?

Moving on, in 2017, a raging debate on Tipu Sultan’s legacy flashed a war of words between the ruling Congress and the opposition BJP in Karnataka. It was not new; not unheard of, since such controversies were always alive and kicking. BJP opposed the Congress government’s plans for ‘Tipu Jayanti’ celebrations. One of the greatest living historians of India, Irfan Habib (AMU) interfered. Habib told PTI, “If Indians want to celebrate the anti-colonial struggle, they must celebrate Tipu Sultan.” On Tipu being called a “brutal killer”, Habib, who edited two books on the ruler, namely State and Diplomacy Under Tipu Sultan: Documents and Essays and Confronting Colonialism: Resistance and Modernisation Under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan added, “That kind of attack on his character was not even made by the British”.

Habib, in continuity with the Gandhian line or argument, wishes to celebrate everybody who fought the British—be it the Company or the Crown—as anti-colonialism. Habib with other historians like B Sheikh Ali and Mohibbul Hasan celebrated Tipu for his remarkable achievements of building a modern army, manufacturing modern weapons and giving economic development priority among other forward-looking measures. While few of them accept the charge of religious conversion, especially after the suppression of two rebellions in Coorg and Malabar, the charge of mass murders is vehemently booted and rejected. These anxieties have not evaded even the Kannada literary world with UR Ananthamurthy and Girish Karnadremaining firmly pro while SL Bhyrappa and Chidananda Murthy remaining anti-Tipu.

Beyond these binaries, when critically investigated under the lens of primary evidence, Tipu appears as a bundle of contradictions. ​His legacy is a ​maze and a modern historian’s riddle. ​However, his life, actions and words could still be rescued from the radical encroachment of the oppositional ideological camps. Vikram Sampath with Tipu Sultan: The Saga of Mysore’s Interregnum (1760–1799) rises to the occasion!

Here we have an exhaustive, eager and well-researched biography of Tipu with factual accounts and a captivating narrative style. A word or two on the style of the prose before we jump into its substance and quintessence. Sampath writes beautifully. ​ Beginning from My Name is Gauhar Jaan: Life and Times of a Musician (2010) to VD Savarkar volumes​ (2019, 2021), Sampath is on a mission to rescue us from the stultifying tradition of hagiography and dogmatism of Marxism. The old-fashioned man of letters who used to write engaging and voluminous narrative histories was forced to disappear from the literary world chased by the JNU/AMU variety of philistinism. With Sampath, that man of letters makes a comeback who never compromises on scholastic rigour and​ idiomatic English. This 950-page weighty tome divided into 20 equally spaced chapters that are further divided under brief and cohesive sub-headings and all knit together by the linear unfolding of chronology makes it a compelling read.

SL Bhyrappa in his informative ‘Foreword’ sets the ball rolling. Bhyrappa provides us with a perspective on how the historical truth in India has time and again been sacrificed on the altar of national integration and secularism. He recalls his own experiences as an NCERT faculty working with a government committee in 1969-70 under the chairmanship of G Parthasarathy and how he was left dismayed at the suggestion (or Command!) that problematic historical truths were “thorns” and how “it is our duty to remove thorns from the minds of the growing children, which will shape up as barriers for the national integration.”

Sampath then takes over and does not stop until he has written on every issue and side of Tipu and his father Hyder Ali’s life. He already had a section on this Interregnum (1760-1799) in Splendours of Royal Mysore: The Untold Story of the Wodeyars (2008). However, in the new offering, lots of new materials have been added and the interpretation has been made more critical and widespread to transform the provincial history of Tipu into the national history. How?

Sampath commences by explaining how the ghost of Tipu Sultan is still haunting us, and it keeps resurfacing to meddle with contemporary politics. He chooses a metaphor that is equally material to ground this quest. A long quote from AJArberry’s The Library of the India Office: A Historical Sketchon how ‘The Musical Tiger’ that was ceased from the fort of Srirangapatna in May 1799 after the fall of Tipu intrigued the English also sheds light on the collective rivet of a modern nation-state with an eighteenth-century individual. Why is Tipu Sultan still being discussed today? Sampath skillfully peels the layers of contemporary politics to interrogate all the interested parties. He reports the (mis)deeds of the Congress Government in Karnataka when they represented the state with a gigantic bus of Tipu Sultan to nationalize the “icon” in the Republic Day parade. Or Congress’ attempt in 2015 to commemorate Tipu Jayanthi and how it led to a social uproar covering divergent issues like wasting taxpayers’ money to the misrepresentation of fanatical acts of the man. Now before the partisan scholars make the same charge on Sampath, we must underline that he does not spare anybody including the BJP. He comes down heavily on the party recalling how in the run-up to the 2023 State elections in Karnataka “BJP drummed up a story of Tipu Sultan having been killed not by the British but by two strongmen, Uri Gowda and Nanje Gowda, citing a book Suvarna Mandya by D. Javaregowda.” He adds, “In all of this cacophonous surround sound, history becomes the real casualty.”

Promising to present “an unbiased and fact-based, objective assessment of this eighteenth-century monarch of Mysore” Sampath allows the facts and documents to speak more loudly than his voice. The historian’s hand has been allowed to work in the background while evidence takes the foreground. Students of history are often told that “Objectivity” is an impossibility. “Objective assessment” is unfeasible. While the truth of these maxims could not be challenged and “Objectivity” is an impossibility, its aspiration is possible and feasible. Sampath’s aspiration for that objective assessment is on full display in the tome. A few examples would be helpful.

Sampath mentions his deus ex machina to retrieve Tipu from the binaries that he had been subjected to by politicians and historians with politics. He suggests: “To understand and contextualize Tipu Sultan, one needs to closely study his father Haider Ali.” Understandably then, the first half of the book is dedicated to Haider Ali; in fact, the first nine chapters. What these chapters do is provide the readers with a comprehensive political history of the eighteenth-century Deccan that had lots of divergent actors starting from Marathas, the Nizam, the Malabar chieftains, the Travancore Rajas, the Arcot Nawab, the waning Mughal dynasty and the British and French. From Hyder to Tipu when the “Passing on the Mantle” occurs in Chapter 10, the reader gets an embedded comparison between the two.

Sampath packs the volume with lots of details for the readers to make up their minds on the issue at hand. We​ read a long discussion on the Treaty of Mangalore (11 March 1784). We read about the treatment of English prisoners and the extreme tortures they were subjected to after the Second Anglo-Mysore War. We are informed about the plight of the Christians of Mangalore from as many sources as available, starting from Tipu’s Tarikh-i-Khudadadi, Diocese’s record, Abbé Dubois, Sir Thomas Munro, Hamilton, Buchanan, historian Saldanha and an old Kannada manuscript written by a Catholic, the Barcoormanuscript. All these records have different numbers for captives that were taken from Mangalore. Sampath documents all of them with no interpretative blindness. The related issue of these acts being “political” or “theocratic” is also settled. We are told how the day chosen for the persecution was also sacred to the communities concerned, be it the Naraka Chaturdashi night before Diwali for the Mandyam Iyengars and Ash Wednesday (24 February 1784), the first day of Lent marking six weeks of penitence before Easter for the Christians. Again, in September 1785, Tipu ordered his sipahadar Zain-ul-abidin Shoostri to invade Coorg and terminate the insurgency explicitly ordering “both the slain and the prisoners are to be made Musulmans.” Fast forward to 1853, the same facts is reiterated through Rev. Hermann Moegling, a German missionary from the Basel mission, who came to Coorg in 1853 and wrote Coorg Memoirs. A lengthy discussion of The Dreams of Tipu Sultan makes a departure from his sword and reveals the inner world and bigotry of the monarch. Definitionally, primary sources are those that are written close to an event. While primary sources document the fanaticism of Tipu in meticulous detail, much later Gandhi and even later many historians dismissed those reporting as “exaggeration”. Based on which evidence? None. Just the upper hand of interpretative social sciences. Sampath deliberately avoids that pitfall. While he meticulously documents Tipu’s foreign embassies, he also extends the same treatment to the “Southern Terror” of Tipu as shaped by a theocratic ideology in Sarkar-e-Khudadad and how Coorg, Balam and Malabar bore the burnt and terms like ‘Padayottakalam’ (bloody era) came into being.

Sampath also breaks the back of a long-running argument that whenever the theocratic intention of a Muslim fanatical monarch is placed on the table, a counter comes that he also made grants to Hindu temples. Tipu is no exception. Sampath shows how Mohibbul Hasan quoting an AMU dissertation of CK Kareem argues that seven such land grants to temples are on the record. However, it is unclear if those grants are from the earlier time of Haider Ali, or if they continued with the intervention of others.

Back to The Times of India. When Sanjay Khan’s ‘The Sword of Tipu Sultan’ created a nationwide stir in 1990, Marxist historian KN Panikkar wrote a piece for the newspaper titled “Why are we hesitant to give Tipu Sultan his due?” (18 May 1990) Panikkar lamented how even Surajmal Jat and the ruler of a petty principality like Cochin are Maharajas, while Tipu Sultan is invariably referred to as Tipu. He continued that former Organiser editor and BJP ideologue KR Malkani who cleared the serial with a few changes as part of a Congress Govt committee also saluted “Tiger Tipu” as a “great patriot” but chose to on a first name basis.

Well, Vikram Sampath has chosen to call Tipu with the suffix Sultan. But he goes ahead to decipher the Sultan and his sultanate to its bare facts. He appreciates and lauds. Yet he ridicules and calls out the fanatic. He enumerates his “forward-looking” policies, but he never leaves his “backward-looking” fundamentalism. Mohibbul Khan, PK Balakrishnan, PraxyFernandes, B Sheikh Ali, CK Kareem, Kate Brittlebank, Mohammad Moienuddin, Irfan Habib and many others wrote about Tipu. We had to wait till Vikram Sampath for a “reveal-all” biography that ticks all the boxes that a historian should ideally do. Alas! Before Sampath, we cannot name many such ideals.

About The Author

Shaan Kashyap

Shaan Kashyap is a PhD candidate at Ravenshaw University, Cuttack. Currently, he is Sir Jadunath Sarkar Fellow for Indian History (2024-25)