Tipu Sultan in History: Revisionism Revised
Narasingha Sil (Western
Oregon University, Monmouth, USA)
Corresponding
Author: Narasingha Sil, 1175 Scott Court, Independence, OR 97351,
USA. Email: siln@mail.wou.edu
This historiographical essay seeks to chart a middle course between what may be called Tipu bashing and, to borrow an expression from Anne Buddle, “Tipu Mania,” with a view to providing a balanced view of Tipu Sultan the man and the statesman. This study is premised on the verdict of Joseph François Michaud who not only admires the Sultan’s courage and noble intentions but also laments his superstition, lack of discretion and farsight, apathy to deliberations, and counterproductive stubbornness that inevitably led to his undoing. Tipu’s tenacious conviction in the rectitude of his policies and measures deprived him of the sagacity to mend and amend them as and when necessary. The American gymnast and three-time Olympian Dominique Dawes observed that people do not plan to fail but respond to failure when it occurs by bouncing back and responding to it. Tipu Sultan’s misfortune was that he failed to learn from his failures.
Keywords : Seringapatam, Anglo-Mysore War, Haidar Ali, George Harris, Lord Wellesley
Introduction
Ever since the fall of Seringapatam1 concluding the fourth and final Anglo-Mysore War (1799), in which Tipu Sultan Fath 'Ali Khan, the self-styled Padshah of Mysore (regnal [r.] 1782-1799), died, his character and career have been the centerpiece of a historiographical battle, that could be appropriately termed, a la Anne Buddle (1989), a veritable “Tipu Mania” (p. 53). As Azer Rahman (2003) observed in an arti cle commemorating the 204 anniversary of Tipu’s death, “Tipu remains a controversial figure in history, drawing extensive reactions—he is either reviled or adored.” Tipu confronted the British East India Company (EIC) with ada mant resolve and this audacity of a regional potentate of Mughal India has endeared his memory to posterity to whom he stands for a liberator of colonial India who could have been (Ali, 1999).2 Reacting to the general assessment of British writers (who were mostly military personnel) as pro ducers of imperialist narratives designed to denigrate an adversary from the orient, historical studies on Tipu Sultan by Indian (and a few Western) scholars posit a positive pro file of the man as an enterprising, enlightened, and eclectic regional chief whose struggle for freedom from foreign con trol was brutally crushed by a superior military imperialist power.
Typical examples of this revisionist historiography are comments such as Tipu was a patriot noted for his “love of land and love of liberty” (Ali, 1999) or Tipu offered his blood to write the “history of India” (Subhan, 2002, p. 41), or Tipu was a “modernising technocrat” who beat the West “at their own game,” and was “something of a connoisseur, with a library of about 2000 volumes in several languages” (Dalrymple, 2005). This sort of revisionism in respect of the character and conduct of Tipu Sultan marked the corpus of a number of Indian historians in 1999, the year commemorat
ing
the bicentennial anniversary of his death (Habib, 1999; Ray, 2002). Even to this day, Tipu continues
to provoke con troversy among specialists as well as lay readership at
large. This article addresses this controversy
by revisiting, for the first time, some
significant contemporary Western sources
and their powerful postcolonial critiques with a view to bringing the authentic man and statesman out
of the halo that surrounds his
personality and performance as a major
regional potentate of early colonial India. Consequently, Tipu Sultan emerges from his hallowed
historiography as an ambitious,
courageous, albeit headstrong, impetuous, and
short-sighted autocrat who lacked the sagacity to mend and amend his policies and measures and thus
brought about his own downfall.
Tipu
Sultan: The Tiger of Mysore
Tipu’s encounter with the foreigners reveals that he was not against their presence in his domain; he actually wanted them to comply with his commands, however capricious or contumelious. He was willing to take the help of foreign powers to expel the one he hated. Thus, he had little qualms wooing the Turks, Afghans, and the French into alliance. Tipu in fact asked the Afghan strongman Zaman Shah Abdali (Durrani) (r. 1793-1800) to invade North India and is reported to have candidly confided to Lieutenant-Colonel Russel, commanding officer of the French detachment in the Mysore army: “I want to expel them [the British] from India. I want to be the friend of the French all my life” (Lafont, 2001, p. 99). He even wrote the government of Isle de France (Mauritius) proposing an indissoluble “treaty of alliance and fraternity” creating a family bond between the two states (Martin, 1837, p. 2).3
Tipu’s measures and policies have been variously inter preted, often with forceful generalizations by historians in India and abroad as eclectic and modern (Habib, 1999). One scholar claimed that he “was so innovative and dynamic that, had not destiny cut short his life, he would have ushered Mysore into an industrial age” (Ali, 2002, p. 21). Another speculated that had Tipu been the ruler of Bengal instead of Siraj-ud-daula, the “history of the 18th century India would have been materially different” (Subhan, 2002, p. 44). Actually, all his measures including renaming his government as some kind of a divine endowment (khudadad sarkar) or reorganizing his army into ilahi or ahmadi consisting of slaves or chelas (Muslim converts) were both military and Islamic in tone (Rao, 1948). Burton Stein’s description of the Sultan’s administrative financial organization reveals the construction of an extractive government (Stein, 1989). The Governor of Madras Thomas Munro (1761-1827) considered Tipu’s Mysore as “the most simple and despotic monarchy in the world” (Glieg, 1830, pp. 1, 84). Tipu basically belonged to that class of rulers who could be classified as feudal auto cratic. To him, visible evidence of personal loyalty and security of his regional hegemony were extremely meaningful. We have reports of Tipu’s wanton cruelty. Major Alexander Allan (1764-1820) reports on Tipu’s murdering the European captives on April 28, 1799, the very day he was negotiating with Lieutenant-General Harris for peace terms. “Of the real character of this Prince,” Allan writes,
we hitherto have been ignorant! But now it will be placed in its true light. That he was suspicious, vindictive, cruel and hurried away by the sadder impulse of passion, to which he was subjected even without any apparent provocation, is certain and probably it will be found that he was more deficient in military talents, and others as essential to govern an extensive kingdom than has been generally imagined. (cited in Rao, 1948, Vol. 3, p. 1025)
Lieutenant-Colonel William Kirkpatrick (1756-1813) writes that once the Sultan ordered his brother-in-law Burhanuddin Khan to mount an assault on a region including “every living creature in it, whether man or woman, old or young, child, dog, cat, or any living thing, else, must be put to the sword” (Kirkpatrick, 1811, Letter # 85 dated July 10, 1785, italics in original). Kirkpatrick (1811) writes further, “Colonel Munro [Sir Hector, 1726-1805] assures me, that it is an absolute fact that on one occasion he [Tipu] ordered all the male population of a particular village which had given him offence, to be castrated” (p. 3, translator’s “Observations” on Letter # 1 dated February 17, 1785).
Tipu was a regnant ruler keenly conscious of personal prestige and dignity, but could not command loyalty from his own officers, witness the conduct of his dewans, the Muslim Mir Sadiq as well as the Hindu Purnaiya and others, whom even the writers of Hyderabad, Tipu’s enemy territory, refer to as “seditious people” (Gopal, 1971, p. 91). Colonel Robert Clive, the victor of Plassey (1757), had observed perceptively in his letter to British Prime Minister William Pitt (r. 1756- 1762, 1766-1768): “The natives themselves have no attach ment whatever to a particular prince, they would rejoice in so happy an exchange as that of a mild [British] for a despotic [Indian] Government” (Malcolm, 1836, Vol. 2, pp. 119-125).
Most
probably, Tipu was more feared than respected or loved by his subjects. As the French
historian and publicist Joseph Michaud
(1767-1839) writes,
If his ministers dared to combat his opinion he stared at them in a threatening manner and replied to them in words of disdain and insult. Thus his true friends seeing that their frankness only created resentment in the sovereign, which became fatal to them, began to accommodate their opinion to the caprices of their master and the unhappy Tippoo was surrounded only by his courtiers who praised all his plans and applauded all his fantasies. (Michaud, 1801-1809/1985, pp. 157-158)4
Speaking
of Tipu, Major James Rennell (1742-1830)
observed perspicaciously as early as 1792:
He is unquestionably the most powerful of all the native princes of Hindoostan; but the utter detestation in which he is held by his own subjects, renders it improbable that his reign will be long. (cited in Rao, 1948, Vol. 3, p. 1230)
Major
Allan, who knew the Sultan at firsthand, observed,
It is impossible that Tippoo could have been loved by his people. The Musselmen [Musalmans] certainly looked up to him as the head of their faith; by them, perhaps, his death is regretted but they could not have been attached to him, by affection. (cited in Rao, 1948, p. 1025)
Tipu’s
Islamic Consciousness and Conscience
Tipu
Sultan and his father were no real “sons of the soil” (manninamaga)5 of Mysore as they hailed from
a migrant Arab tribe (Quraish). Tipu’s
father Haidar Ali was a soldier of
fortune who acquired this predominantly Hindu territory
Although Husain’s point is well-taken, Tipu’s plea to the “King of Muslims” to empower the “True Religion” makes it clear that he sought the support of Turkey, an ally of the English and an adversary of the French, as the liberator of the Muslims and thereby made himself a co-jihadist ruler (I. Husain, 2001, pp. 40-42). It is noteworthy that Tipu’s sovereign consciousness itself was ultimately connected with religion intimately. He issued coins that at once proclaimed the primacy of Islam and the independence of the Sultan by omitting the required reference to the imperial Mughals.7
Tipu
even had the khutba (sermon in the mosque) read in his name (omitting that of the Emperor) as
sultan-i-din (“prince of the faith”)
dedicated to upholding “the honour and interest
of Islam . . . and . . . its increase and diffusion” (Kirkpatrick, 1811, Letter # 331). Mir Hussein Kirmani
(1980) points out that “the Sultan had a
great aversion to . . . Hindus and other
tribes,” built a mosque in every town, and appointed a muez zin, a
moula, and a kazi to each (pp. 154-155). Tipu urged his army commander in Calicut on December 14,
1788:
I am sending two of my followers with Mir Hussain Ali. Along with them 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. These are my orders.
Two
years later, he boasted his conquest of Calicut in a missive to Syed Abdul Dulai:
With the grace of Prophet Mohammad 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. (cited in Sharma, 1991, pp. 111-112)
In
his letter of February 10, 1799, to the Grand Seignior of Constantinople Tipu claimed that “near five
hundred thou sand of the infidels of the district of Calicut, Nuzzuraband, Zufferabaud, and Ashrufabaud . . . have been
converted at
different
times” (Martin, 1837, p. 30). In a military manual titled Fat’hul Mujahidin (Victory of the Holy
Warrior), he also declared a “Holy War .
. . against the English,” who were
alleged to have “converted many Muslims . . . [and] enslaved many Muslim women and children . . . [and]
destroyed Muslim mosques and tombs to
build their idol-houses [churches]
thereon” (Habib, 1999, p. xxv).
Admittedly, Tipu appointed Hindus to positions of trust and responsibility as indeed did the Mughals and other regional Muslim rulers. It is, however, doubtful that appoint ment of Hindus to responsible posts followed any principle other than sheer common sense (Sharma, 1991). All Hindu appointees were highly qualified and though all of them were not impeccable and some outright corrupt, as Francis Buchanan (1762-1829) found out, getting rid of the bad apples “was impossible, for no other persons in the country had any knowledge of business” (Buchanan, 1999, p. 167). However, Tipu appointed even illiterate Muslims as Asophs [Lord Lieutenants] who were “entirely sunk in indolence, voluptuousness, and ignorance” (Buchanan, 1999, p. 167).
It is on record that the Sultan addressed the head of the Sringeri Math, Swami Sachchidananda Bharati,
as Jagadguru (“World Teacher”; Saletore, 1999, p. 127) and, according to an eyewitness account, “went barefoot to
[the] . . . Math to receive the Swamy’s
blessings and to ask him to pass on a
letter to the Marathas requesting them to take his side than that of the British” (Subhan, 2002, p. 43).
Tipu patronized the temples of Sri
Gandeswara and Sri Ranganatha. Subbaraya
Chetty (1999) cites a list of grants from the Sultan to the Hindu temples and priests. Tipu’s
attempt at forced conversion leading to
the alleged suicide of 3,000 Brahmins to
escape it, as noted by a Sanskrit scholar of Calcutta University, has been dismissed as unfounded
by a scholar politician (Pande, ca. 1996).
Tipu’s
correspondences with the Guru of Sringeri Math
reveal his scare for the foreboding of doom that he tried des perately
to counter (Sharma, 1991). A firm believer in astrol ogy, he often resorted to
religious rituals and wore apotropaic
objects and trinkets—Hindu as well as Islamic—either to avert a disaster or to attain success in his
undertakings. A near contemporary
historical account describes how, on May
4, 1799, the day Tipu died in the battlefield, he had ordered
for all the ceremonies prescribed by the Brahmins to be duly performed, and having given them several presents, requested their prayers for the prosperity of his government. He also ordered to be slaughtered two elephants with all their golden trappings; . . . and large sums of gold mohurs were distributed amongst the beggars. (Maistre De La Touche & Mohammad, 1855, p. 307, italics in original)
The reporter of this ritual wonders if it were inspired by the Sultan’s fear and superstition in the face of the besieging British army.
In
fact, he already appears to have developed a defeatist mentality of a doomed man several months
before the siege of Srirangapatnam.
Lieutenant Wilks writes of the Sultan’s
apprehension of an impending dissolution of his empire based on a folk tale of cephalomancy he
sincerely believed. According to this
tale, the mysterious power of a crushed
human skull showing some cracks caused the death of 40 persons. When Tipu noticed some cracks on the
mast of the ship the Frenchman Ripaud
had taken to the Isle of France, he was
convinced that these cracks foreboded the destruction of his empire and thus “he readily made up
his mind to throw himself
unconditionally in his Lordship’s [Wellesley’s] com passion” after he had read
the Governor General’s letter of January
9, 1799 (Wilks, 1810-1817/1869, Vol. 2, pp.
332-333).8
The
Sultan sported a gold ring etched with the name of the Hindu God Rama—a gift from the Guru of the
Sringeri Math (Olikara, 2012). Tipu and
Haidar’s portraits in full regalia hang
on the walls of a Hindu temple of Lord Narasimha at Sibi near the city of Bangalore, which was
patronized by the Sultan. These “vibrant
paintings” as well as “a frieze of
marching soldiers escorting Tipu on his elephant” inside the temple are evidence more of Hindu eclecticism
and tolerance or of the Muslim rulers’
power and authority over their sub jects both Hindu and Muslim than of genuine
spiritual or religious convictions on
the part of both rulers (Brittlebank,
1997, pp. 152-153). Indeed, as Denys Forrest (1970) has observed,
The easy thing is to accept him as a straightforward persecuting bigot . . . He certainly followed the routines of piety, with much reading of the Koran, punctilious ritual ablutions, texts in his turban and the name of God ready to his lips and pen. But he was also intensely superstitious, with an obviously higher opinion of astrologers than of maulavis. The seven stars rather than the hand of Allah seem to rule his universe, and it is significant that he paid tremendous attention to the interpretation of dreams. (p. 212)9
Tipu
destroyed at least three Hindu temples: the
Harihareswara temple at Harihar, the Varahaswami temple at Srirangapatnam, and the Odakaraya temple at
Hospet. In the Tamil land and in
Malabar, he earned the sobriquet of “a
Brahman-killer and a despoiler of south Indian temples” (Brittlebank, 1997, pp. 125-126; see also
Logan, 1887/2000, p. 449). His forced
conversion, circumcision, and merciless
massacre of the Hindus and Christians in Malabar have been graphically described by the Portuguese
traveler Fra Paolino da San Bartolomeo
(1748-1806; Bartolomeo, 1800). Roderick
Mackenzie (1793) commented on Tipu’s march to
Trinomaly and his mayhem there in 1790:
Here neither respect, for the grandeur and antiquity of their temples, nor veneration for the sacred rites of a religion whose origin no time records, proved any protection for the persons or property, even of the first Brahmins. Their pagodas, breached with sacrilegious cannon, were forcibly entered, their altars defiled, their valuables seized, their dwellings reduced to ashes, and the devastation was rendered still more horrible by the scattered remains of men, women and children, mangled beneath a murderous sword. (Vol. 1, p. 203)
Admittedly, as Richard Eaton (2000) observes, Hindu temples had been sites for the contestation of royal authority well before the advent of the Muslims in India and thus Tipu’s desecration as well as endowment of Hindu temples followed the pattern of Mughal conduct for purely political (and not religious or iconoclastic) reasons (cited in Panikkar, 2000). Even though it has been observed by Major Dirom (1794) that Tipu Sultan’s “cruelties were, in general, inflicted only on those whom he considered his enemies,” one cannot condone or overlook his penchant for sheer gratuitous blood letting (p. 250). He does come across as a religious zealot in his command to Mir Zainul Abidin Shustari, sipahdar [commander] of a kushoon [brigade], ordering him to punish the inhabitants of Coorg, guilty of committing “excesses” at Zufferabad, by murdering or imprisoning them and then “both the slain and the prisoners . . . to be made Musulmans [that is, circumcised]” (Kirkpatrick, 1811, Letter # 117, italics in original).
Tipu Sultan’s ceremonial sword bears an unabashed admission inscribed on it: “My victorious sabre is lightning for the destruction of the unbelievers.” He publicly claimed himself to be a descendant of Muhammad and his avowed aim was “to restore the religion of that prophet by destroying or proselytizing all heathens and infidels.” At the center of his personal seal that validated all his public dispatches the Arabic inscription reads: “I am the messenger of the true faith;” around the edge of the seal a couplet in Persian reads: “From conquest, and the protection of the Royal Hyder, comes my title of Sultan; and the world, as under the sun and moon, subject to my signet” (Dirom, 1794, p. 251). His own writings (Sultan-ut-Tawarikh and Tarikh-I-Khudadadi) speak eloquently of his religious fanaticism (Sharma, 1991, p. 109, inscription on Tipu’s sword cited on p. 118). He even dreamed of either converting or conquering the infidel (M. Husain, 1957, 64 # 13, p. 67 # 17).10 As a contemporary esti mate has it,
a dark and intolerant bigotry excluded from Tippoo’s choice all but the true believers; and unlimited persecution united in detestation of his rule every Hindoo in his dominions. In the Hindoos no degree of merit was a passport to favour; in the Mussulman no crime could ensure displeasure. (Wilks, 1810-1817/1869, Vol. 2, p. 383)
Tipu
thankfully acknowledged in his letter of February 16, 1799, to the Grand Seignior of
Constantinople for the latter’s desire,
for the sake of the whole body of the faith and religious brotherhood, to afford assistance to our Brethren Mussulmans; support our holy theology and not withhold my [Tipu’s] powerand endeavours in defending the region of Hindustan from the machinations and evils of these enemies [the English and the French Christians]. (Kausar, 1980, p. 268)
He invited Zaman Shah to attack the Mughal capital of Delhi because the Emperor Shah Alam had “reduced the faith to . . . weakness” (he had become a pensioner of the powerful Maratha leader of Gwalior, Mahadji Shinde, ca. 1730-1794) and the letter of invitation concluded with a report how
near a hundred thousand followers of the faith, nay more, assembled every Friday, the Sabbath of the Mussulmans, in the two mosques of the capital, better known as the Aulah and the Asqa mosques, and after the prescribed form of prayers, supplicate the Bestower of all things according to the words of the Scripture, “Grant thy aid, O God! To those who aid the religion of Muhammad; and let us be of that number; Destroy those, O God! Who would destroy the religion of Muhammad; and let not us be their number”. (Kausar, 1980, 141-142)
More
(2003) observes that Tipu was suspicious of the
Indian Christians, and he did not tolerate the presence of European missionaries in his territory,
though he tolerated the Syrian Christians.
In
one sense, the Sultan’s practice of converting convicts or rebels into Islam as an instance of their
humiliation and punishment does not seem
to be an example of his religious
fanaticism, for apparently he considered conversion into Islam to be an instrument of punishment for
the rebels— something odious rather than a channel for their spiritual upliftment and welfare.11 He clearly was not
an evangelical Muslim but appeared to be
a dispenser of punishment by forcing his
own religion on the unworthy subjects thereby,
ironically, debasing its own merits.
Postcolonial
Revisionism of Tipu’s Representation in
Colonial Texts
The
reassessment of Tipu Sultan’s character and career since 1999 has produced a new mythology by
postcolonial postmodernist scholarship in place of what it regards as imperialist-colonialist demonology in which
he is portrayed as an oriental despot
with a diabolical design of oppressing
his people and subverting the Company’s prospect in India. Postcolonial scholarship reinforced by
postmodernist dis trust of grand narratives or hegemonic discourse
questions such interpretations depicting
Tipu in a negative light. We now have a
counter hegemonic discourse in place of the
imperialist metahistory and consequently Tipu Sultan appears as a fallen nationalist leader whose
vision of a mod ern industrialist and enlightened free India failed to material
ize because of the grand alliance forged by the EIC with Mysore’s inimical neighbors, the Nizam of
Hyderabad and the Maratha Confederacy of
west central Mughal India.
Some scholars even argued that the British paranoia of the monarch of Mysore was caused by their fear of an adversary who challenged the West by mastering the secrets of Western science and technology, thus meeting the Western power on its own terms.12 One scholar posits that “the real threat repre sented by Tipu resulted from his blurring of distinction between East and West in his appropriation of European ideas, tactics and individuals” (Teltscher, 1995, p. 238).
A number of studies since the 1980s and 1990s debunk all reports of Tipu’s maltreatment and forcible conversion of war prisoners by the EIC’s military officers as downright propaganda by a bunch of “fighters as writers” (Colley, 2000, p. 277). Historical accounts by Mark Wilks (1759-1831); Alexander Beatson (1759-1830); Francis Buchanan (1762- 1829); Lewin Bowring (1825-1910); William Fullerton, Roderick Mackenzie, and Henry Oakes (1756-1827); James Scurry (died 1822); or James Bristowe (born 1737) have been dismissed by a scholar and their works are “constructed around the figure of the oriental despot” (Teltscher, 1995, p. 233). It is, however, known that Colonel Wilks of the Madras army at Fort St. George is admired for his Historical Sketches, a work based on his access to state records, especially those of Fort St. George, and on his personal firsthand knowledge of the official records of Mysore that had been taken from Srirangapatnam to Calcutta after its fall.
Kate
Teltscher (1995) considers Kirkpatrick’s transla tion of the Sultan’s letters
as unreliable, especially because “he
describes Tipu’s epistolary self-portrait in terms drawn largely from the vocabulary of despotism: the
cruel enemy, intolerant fanatic,
oppressive ruler, harsh master, the san guinary and perfidious tyrant” (p.
235). There may be a kernel of truth in
this allegation. He was quite open about
his feelings about the Sultan even to the extent of opposing his brother James Achilles (1764-1805), who
considered Tipu a brave soldier
(Dalrymple, 2002). Nevertheless, the
Kirkpatrick brothers were experts in Persian. William’s translation of Tipu’s letters is credible
enough as the man was quite pernickety
about his job. One just has to go
through the preface to his Select Letters of Tippoo Sultan (Kirkpatrick,
1811, pp. ix-xxv) to note his scheme of trans lation, his hermeneutical
methods, and his scholarly intro spection and circumspection in respect of his
literary enterprise. As he avers,
My principal object, in this work, being to present as striking a likeness of Tippoo, as the nature of materials, and the extent of my ability to employ them advantageously, would admit, I thought it essential to this end, to render his sentiments, on all occasions, as closely as the different idioms of the two languages [Persian and English] would allow, without involving the same in difficulty or obscurity. (Kirkpatrick, 1811, p. xi)
Thus, despite Kirkpatrick’s disparaging epithets for Tipu, his translation of the Sultan’s letters is unlikely to be doctored to vent his personal dislike of their author.13
Nevertheless, Teltscher (1995) notes that he “endeavours to guide the reader’s response quite openly” and concludes, “Tipu’s letters are thus framed to conform to expectations of despotism, even as they are offered as firsthand evidence of the sultan’s character” (p. 237, italics added). Interestingly enough, Teltscher credits the account of Lieutenant Edward Moor (1774) because he mocks at Tipu’s detractors for their “confined prejudices of contracted minds.” But she over looks Moor’s observations that Tipu was not a “good man,” that his state of Mysore was “unlimitedly monarchical,” that his “mandate is the law” that was used to execute con victs in the most sanguinary manner, and that Tipu might have suffered from qualms of guilt for his cruel excesses (cited in Rao, 1948, Vol. 3, pp. 1228-1229).
Amal
Chatterjee’s (1998) postcolonial analysis of the cre ation of 18th-century
India in colonial imagination posits
that Tipu Sultan “was at once the bogeyman, the proof that Indian rulers were duplicitous tyrants and
proof that . . . any powerful Indian
ruler was ultimately an evil despot” (p. 173).
Chatterjee also lumps together all accounts of the experi ences of Tipu’s
British captives as intentional, overexagger ated, and even imaginary tales of
terror. In his estimation, “British
audiences were fed on a diet of ‘reports’ of Tipu’s depraved nature” (Chatterjee, 1998, p. 179).
The eyewitness accounts of Tipu’s
treatment of his prisoners are conflated
with fictional tales about him to substantiate the final conclusion:
It
is clear that both the chroniclers and the novelists felt obliged to “prove” that there was falsity . . . in
the heart of the most famous of Indian
monarchs . . . Memories were selective and
convenient serving the end of proving that in the final reckoning British rule was the only stable, and
therefore the preferable, mode of
government of otherwise unstable Indians. (Chatterjee, 1998, p. 194)
Teltscher and Chatterjee’s critique anticipates Ruchira Banerjee’s (2001) analysis of Remarks and Occurrences of Mr. Henry Becher (1793). Banerjee (2001) questions the author Becher’s credibility because of his inability to be impressed by the opulence of Seringapatam, “his delight at the English army breaking into the palace grounds at Lal Bagh,” and his work being “part of a well planned strategy to denigrate the Mysorean rulers to ratio nalize the enormously expensive Anglo-Mysore wars in India” (pp. 206-208). In a footnote, Banerjee lumps the works of Beatson (1800), Scurry, and Oakes together as the products of propaganda in favor of a war against Tipu Sultan. Becher’s work highlights Sultan’s cruelty, but, in Banerjee’s judgment, the Englishman appears to be even more despicable when he concludes his Remarks with a wish that “the left arm and foot of Tippoo . . . will be cut off by the English” (Banerjee, 2001, p. 212).14
Postcolonial
Hermeneutic of Tipu’s Visual
Representation
A
postcolonial critique of the historiography of the Anglo Mysore Wars has come from
the perspective of pictorial rep resentation of Tipu Sultan. Constance McPhee,
Linda Colley, and Janaki Nair have
sought to discover the distortion of the
East in colonial paintings and at the same time the influence of the Indian paintings on the metropolitan
portraiture. McPhee analyzes the
American painter Mather Brown’s
(1761-1831) two paintings, The Departure of the Sons of Tippoo From the Zenana (1792) and Thomas Earl
of Surrey, Defending His Allegiance to
Richard III After the Battle of Bosworth
Field, 1485 (1798) that she believes vilify Tipu Sultan. The first piece depicts Lord
Cornwallis taking cus tody of the Sultan’s two young sons as hostage following
the British victory in the Third Mysore
War. The figure of Tipu Sultan, the provider
of the hostages, resembles the well known representation of the Yorkist King
Richard III (1483- 1485), the alleged murderer of his two young nephews,
sons of Richard’s royal brother King
Edward IV (1461-1483). Brown’s (1798)
painting shows the earl of Surrey being
stripped off his honor by the victor of Bosworth, the Tudor King Henry VII (1485-1509). Here Henry Tudor,
the “usurper” [arguably, the Tudors had
a weaker claim to the English throne
than their dynastic rival the Yorkists], is
shown in Tipu Sultan’s habits—turban and pointed shoes (nagra)—to highlight his villainy. This
anti-Tudor painting was commissioned
from Brown by the Yorkist partisan, the
earl of Surrey’s 18th-century successor, Charles Howard, the 11th duke of Norfolk (McPhee, 1998).
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