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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
What is intriguing about Brown’s paintings is that Tipu the colonial villain is associated with two putative villains from the British history, Richard the Crookback (Richard III’s nickname popularized by William Shakespeare), child killer, and Henry VII, the usurper. Thus, far from being a savage from a distant culture, Tipu was a familiar devil and one the British public could identify with. If such an interpreta tion has any merit, then it must be conceded that Mather Brown did not actually demean Tipu but in fact made him a mirror in which the painter’s compatriots could recognize their own villains.
Janaki Nair’s article carries on the postcolonial blame game and thus suffers from a logical asymmetry in its com parative analysis of the pictorial representations of Tipu Sultan and his British adversaries by the colonial and impe rial painters. Admittedly, Dr. Nair is a scholar with an inti mate knowledge of the artistic representation of the colonial as well as the Deccani painters. She, however, finds the ide alized images of the British subjects by their artists who pro duced paintings on the Anglo-Mysore confrontation as historically dubious and valorizes the murals of Tipu Sultan’s summer palace Dariya Daulat in Srirangapatam depicting his victorious battles against the British, as historically cred ible by pronouncing the Indian purposive idealization as “informal realism” (Nair, 2006, p. 113).
Linda Colley detects an intentional representation of Indian machismo on the murals of Tipu’s summer palace. In this painting commemorating the Battle of Pollilur (1780) between the forces of Haidar Ali and the British, the former’s son Tipu’s victorious army of mustachioed and bearded men appear in marked contrast to the White captives with “doe like eyes, raised eyebrows, and pretty pink lips . . . painted to look like girls, or at least creatures who are not fully male” (Colley, 2000, pp. 269-270).
Doe eyes in India are universally considered as a mark of beauty for males and females alike. Even Tipu’s portrait by an anonymous Indian artist (1796-1799) shows him as a plump prince with “doe eyes” (see Dhar, 1799/1979, p. 118; Michaud, 1801-1809/1985, p. 151; Nolan, ca. 1859, p. 479). Dr. Colley’s imaginative interpretation of Tipu’s corpse as an intentional denigration of a dreaded foe following his death is baseless. The reference to “sexual excesses” and their mark on his corpse might have been the personal judgment of that senior Scottish army officer who described it, but it would take a quantum leap of imagination to infer an inten tionality or agenda behind the description. Then, according to the formulaic style of Indian iconography, men without facial hair are not represented as sissy or effeminate by the Indian artists or so regarded by lay people. In fact all gods, especially the most popular folk gods, possess a clear face. However, the asuras (demigods or titans) or the danavas (demons) are represented by fearsome faces bearing oversize mustaches. Indians in general regard the fair-skinned Europeans—male as well as female—as intrinsically pretty or handsome. Thus, the representation of the British captives on the murals of Tipu’s summer retreat was not intended to depict them as effeminate but represent them in their true “colors.” Dr. Colley’s postcolonialist-nationalist ventrilo quism15 is explicit when her hermeneutic is placed in cross cultural contexts and perspectives. For example, how does one interpret the classical Greek or the Renaissance paintings and sculptures depicting naked muscular males with tiny limp genitals? Purposive representations of oversize adult males possessing undersize organs? What to make of the Hindu Folk God Krishna who is iconographically repre sented as a pretty boy but whose virility, as described in scriptural and literary texts, scores over the exploits of the Greek titan Herakles.
Colley also appears to be inadvertently impervious to the pain, suffering, and humiliation of the British captives by emphasizing their representation as “chinless wonders and/ or mindless action men” (even though she has a qualifier) or commenting on their diaries and chronicles as “writing . . . something that British officers were increasingly expected to do as part of their job” (note the use of confusing passive voice to cover up an imaginary generalization) or character izing their writing as “partly a function of growing military professionalism” (as if professionalism is a marker of unreli ability! Colley, 2000, pp. 278-280). She has no comments on their actual suffering because she sees all their accounts as “texts” or something that needs to be analyzed before react ing to. Lamentably enough, she even regards the accounts of the Sultan’s savage practice of forced circumcision of unsus pecting men of a different faith as a “dramatic” example of “experimenting with British styles of military drill” (whatever that means; Colley, 2000, p. 287). Clearly, the postcolonial postmodernist critique of Tipu’s historicity, in spite of its attempt to go beyond (or beneath) the conventional histori ans’ interest in “the surface of reality” and make a surgical “cut into reality,” has in fact committed an overkill (Benjamin, 1968). Consequently, while the defects of the old colonial historiography remain to be adequately discovered or dis pelled, a new mythos now surrounds the life and struggle of Tipu Sultan. Admittedly, as Chandrashekhar (1999) has judi ciously observed,
Any attempt to analyse leaders like Tipu is fraught with subjectivity. Tendencies to look at them as angel of virtue or wickedness personified could be discerned in such attempts. Such personalities could be analysed properly by pitting them in their historical context, in space and time . . . To treat him as a “freedom fighter,” as we understand freedom today, is like describing all those who fought against “foreigners” as freedom fighters and it could be endless . . . Simply the concepts such as nationalism, secularism and socialism were not available in the situation. It is too much to argue that Tipu was an embodiment of Indian nationalism.
However, we need to bear in mind that Tipu was fight ing against a superior military power of an imperialist country determined to expand its sway in India. The Battle of Plassey (1757) delivered the prosperous region of Bengal into the Company’s hands. The Home govern ment’s interest in these adventures was aroused by its plan to appropriate some of the EIC’s gains for its own budget ary needs. As the EIC began generating debts as well as revenues in the 1770s, the British government insinuated itself into the Company’s administration and thus manag ing the Indian affairs. Territorial acquisition by the Company with increasing governmental involvement was an integral part of this process (see Bandyopadhyay, 2004; Fisher, 1993/1996). A few months after the fall of Srirangapatnam, Governor General Wellesly wrote his superior, Henry Dundas, President of the Board of Control (1793-1801),
If you will have a little patience, the death of the Nizam will probably enable me to gratify your voracious appetite for lands and fortresses. Seringapatam ought, I think, to stay your stomach awhile; not to mention Tanjore and the Poligar countries. Perhaps, I may be able to give you a supper of Oudh and the Carnatic, if you should still be hungry. (cited in Forrest, 1970, p. 310, italics in original)
As to Tipu’s toy—the mechanical tiger and its British victim —Dr. Colley (2000) writes,
But Tipu, in the British imagination, . . . was also—as his own court rituals and chosen symbolism proclaimed—a tiger prince, the personification of all that seemed to the British dangerous and unpredictable about India. And it was partly as a tiger, “tearing in pieces the helpless victim of his craft, of his rapacity, that British propagandists now began describing him.” (p. 296)
Are we to believe “the tiger Tipu” terrorized “the British lion?” Ever since the Norman invasion lion, the king of the beasts, has been the symbol of Britain, the land of a powerful race. Tigers and lions could be conflated or confused in Urdu or Persian—sher or asad, but in English, the two feline spe cies are distinct and hierarchically understood.16 Most prob ably, the British interest in and curiosity for the mechanical toy from Srirangapatnam were inspired by the highly publi cized accident involving the death of Hugh, son of Sir Hector Monroe, on December 22, 1792, from the attack of a Royal Bengal tiger while on a hunting expedition on Sagar Island close to the Sunderbans, some 80 miles south of Calcutta. This gruesome episode captured the imagination of the British public, and the death scene was depicted in Staffordshire pottery in 1820. The scene was also popular ized in the paintings of Joseph Crawhall (1861-1913).17 And if one is inclined to see symbols in everything, then it would not be unreasonable to interpret the British interest in Tipu’s tiger as that of a hunter for its prey. It could also very well be that the toy actually represents Tipu’s fantasy—his ardent desire to see the Company prostrate under the claw of Tipu, the tiger of Mysore.
Conclusion
The hubbub over the Indian national television (Doordarshan) serial “The Sword of Tipu Sultan” (1989) based on a colorful characterization of the man by a popular fiction writer Bhagwan Gidwani demonstrates the curious interplay of communal politics and academic polemics. The television docudrama presented Tipu as a patron of the Hindus and a patriotic martyr who died fighting the imperialist English. This serial incensed some historians and numerous lay view ers, including the Malayalee Samajam (Malayalee Association) of Mumbai and the people of Kerala and else where, who voiced their dissent from what they considered the “pseudo-secularism” of the contemporary government of India (Muthanna, 1980).18 The renegades’s stand was pro jected in an anthology titled Tipu Sultan: Villain or Hero? edited by Sita Ram Goel (1995).19 The authors of this collec tion agreed that Tipu was no multicultural hero and, as the reviewer of this book summed up, “Indian State TV’s promo tion of the serial’s pseudo-history, in the name of secularism no less, was a flagrant exercise of pseudo-secularism” (Walia, 2004).
Tipu Sultan was no nationalist freedom fighter, the novel ist Gidwani’s sentimental description of Sultan notwith standing. Admittedly, Tipu was an inveterate enemy of the English. But “his alternative to the English was not some kind of Great-India, the alternative was the French” and had Tipu been victorious, “one colonial power would have been replaced by another” (Strandberg, 1995, p. 157).20 It is time we arrived at a reasonably realistic assessment of Tipu Sultan. If it is fair to maintain that Tipu was an energetic, assiduous, and industrious ruler and an immensely brave sol dier, it is also reasonable to consider reports of his haughti ness and hubris. Despite many adulatory assessments, it is quite obvious on the basis of several eyewitness accounts that Tipu, fed by the flattery of his sycophants, came to believe that he was the greatest prince of Hindustan, if not of the world. This benighted narcissism rendered him deaf to any admonition from his well-wishers and led to his ultimate nemesis.
Michaud (1801-1809/1985), who was never a denouncer of the Sultan, observed nevertheless that “the more he encountered obstacles . . . the more irascible became his tem per, and . . . to conquer these difficulties, he had very often recourse to acts of tyranny” (p. 151). Michaud commented further that Tipu’s pride was only a childish vanity, and his ambition came near to delirium . . . He belonged to that small group of persons who could never put up with reverses, and who in adversity would not fall much lower than in their good fortune. (Michaud, 1801- 1809/1985, p. 151)
Tipu’s innovative spirit that has been admired by some biographers was actually counterproductive in that it was guided less by genuine impulse than by “the whim of the moment.” To quote Michaud again, the Sultan’s love of new inventions amounted to no more than an expensive hobby that incurred incredible expenses for stuff such as swords, daggers, pistols, and muskets. Michaud (1801-1809/1985) estimates that the expenses he incurred to satisfy his hobby for new inventions together with the sum of 3,300,000 pound sterling which he paid to the allies according to the treaty of 1792 had contributed not a little to diminish the wealth of Seringapatam. (p. 156)
Tipu’s policy of emasculating the poligars, the power ful military nobility, destroyed the base of the strength of his realm. This situation worsened further after the Treaty of Srirangapatnam of 1792 as the state of Mysore suffered severe financial and territorial loss, and reduction of its former formidable military. As Jadunath Sarkar observed,
Wellesley killed a Tiger of Seringapatam whose claws had been cut and fangs extracted seven years before, a dazed and drooping chieftain with obscured vision and lost initiative, a mere shadow of the military genius, whose strategy in 1790-92 had excited the admiration of his English antagonists. (cited in Rao, 1948, p. 1027)
Yet, we must recognize with the benefit of hindsight the crucial role Tipu Sultan played in the history of English imperialism in the subcontinent. He proved himself to be a worthy adversary who for a short period of time made his formidable presence felt in the declining decades of Mughal India. Indeed, Munro made a disarmingly candid admission that Tipu Sultan “possessed an energy of character unknown to eastern princes” (cited in Mithal, 1998). I can do no better than conclude this essay with Denys Forrest (1970), Tipu’s elegant biographer, who observed that the Sultan had a rare quality of singlemindedness . . . That is why the English feared him, even beyond reason. And he was a brave man. He may have fallen short in wisdom and farsight, but never in courage, never in aspiration, never in his dream of a united, an independent, a prosperous Mysore. (p. 337)
But he could not have aspired to a prosperous and inde pendent India, as he was aware only of his own patria, Mysore and its dependencies, not of a larger political entity called Hindustan (though he was certainly aware of its spa tial identity)21—much like the patriots of Renaissance Tuscany, Lombardy, or Venetia who had no concept of Italy but who passionately loved their individual principalities, republics, or signoria, nonetheless.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: This study was supported by the Western Oregon University Faculty Development Travel Grant 1998.
Notes
1. Srirangapatnam is variously spelt as Srirangapatan, Sriran gapatam, Seringapatam, Seringapatan, or Srirangapatnam. I use Seringapatam, the preferred conventional choice, while retaining the orthography as found in the quoted passages.
2. Tipu Sultan was the son of Haidar Ali, Dalwai [de facto ruler] of Mysore, and Fatima (Fakhr-in-Nissa), daughter of the keeper of Cuddapah fort. The name “Tipu” may have been chosen for the boy at birth (November 20, 1750) when his mother visited the tomb of the famous Muslim mystic Tipu Mastan Aulia in Arcot. Some writers suggest that “Sultan” was an adopted title for Tipu when he ascended the throne, though several contemporary sources maintain that it was part of his name and not a title (Hasan, 1951/1971, p. 7). I follow Tipu’s own explanation of “Sultan” as title as found on his personal seal (Dirom, 1794, p. 251).
3. It must be noted, however, that Tipu’s policy in this regard was not unique but shows uncanny similarity with that pursued by the Roman emperors who often allied with the European barbarians to fight barbarians or, in Britain, by the Romano
British bretwalda of Kent, Vortigern, who invited the Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa from the Continent to fight against his enemies nearer home, the Picts of the hilly north (Scotland) and the Scots of Ireland.
4. According to the foreword by the Raja of Panagal, Tamil Nadu, “on the whole, the work is one of the most unbiased contributions to Indian history.”
5. This Canarese expression is borrowed from the liberal Kerala politician Veerappa Moily (1999) who, however, believes that both Haidar and Tipu were, indeed, “true sons of the soil.”
6. Tipu’s ancestor, a Quraishi Arab named Hasan Bin Yahya, had been appointed Sheriff of Mecca by the Ottoman caliph ate (Nadvi, 2004, chap. 4). An admirer of Tipu claims his legitimacy to the throne of Mysore but questions that of the Wodeyars unwittingly by stating that their “dynasty was not really long established” and that the British “partly constructed the Wodeyar dynasty’s legitimacy.” Thus, she writes in mildly mocking tone, “The Company promptly restored his [Tipu’s] throne to its supposedly rightful incumbent, the puppet king Krishnaraja Wodeyar, age five and ‘of a timid disposition’” (Jasanoff, 2005, 175, 184, 363 n. 99).
7. Bandyopadhyay (2002) observes that Tipu’s coins are similar to Haidar’s bearing the figure of the Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati or Vishnu (Ray, 2002). But Brittlebank states on the authority of Henderson (1921, pp. 13-14) that although Tipu retained Haidar’s initials and the icon of the elephant on the coins minted during his reign, “he did away with the Hindu figures . . . and adopted a style which was predominantly Islamic” (Brittlebank, 1997, p. 67).
8. Wilks does not mention how he obtained the information on Tipu’s reaction to Mornington’s letter of January 9, 1799. 9. See a judicious analysis of Tipu’s Islamic leanings and reputa tion in Brittlebank (1997).
10. Tipu appears to have regarded the European Christians as infi del though he occasionally referred to the Hindus by this term. 11. Tipu also recruited some converts in his slave battalion (che las); Datta, 1924; see also Appendix A: iii and v).
12. Anyone going through Wellesley’s dispatch of March 20, 1799, to the Court of Directors of the East India Company (EIC) in London would notice the sense of confidence on the part of the Governor General in his military preparations and prospects and in the “comparative Weakness, . . . Disappointment, and probably Dejection” of the ruler of Mysore (Lambert, 1975, pp. 3-23).
13. For Kirkpatrick, see Dalrymple (2002) and Chancey (2003, chaps. 7 and 8).
14. It is tempting to ponder if such a sanguinary wish was quite natural for someone who experienced Tipu’s hospitality in incarceration.
15. I borrow this expression from Moi (1985) without, however, the pejorative connotation attached to it by her.
16. Colley’s (2000) casual remark “tiger and lion imagery had another less acknowledged significance for the British” does refer to a lion’s superiority in a quote but she never expa tiates on its significance (pp. 267-268). For some curious interpretations of Tipu’s toy, see Brittlebank (1995) and Jasanoff (2005).
17. “The Tiger and the Thistle: Tipu Sultan and the Scots in India” exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (July 29-October 3, 1999; see www.tigerandthistle.net/ scots43.htm).
18. Muthanna’s book was cited by the dissenters extensively in their protest. If Gidwani is the purveyor of a virus, then Muthanna’s book written earlier now served as what may be called a violent antidote. Both works ought to be considered marginal from academic standpoint but both command wide readership among the Indians.
19. See, especially, the article by Ravi Varma (1923; a member of Kerala’s historic royal family, the Zamorins).
20. For a similar assessment of British rule, see also Sil (2005). 21. In his letter soliciting the Sublime Porte’s “assistance to our Brethren Mussulmans; support our holy theology, and not withhold my power and endeavours in defending the region of Hindustan [italics added] from the machinations and evil of these enemies [the English],” Tipu shows his notion of territo riality but not polity. However, his notion of a nation is devoid of its conventional secular political meaning. He considered the Muslims as a “nation” as he did in respect of the English and the French by considering them as nations of infidels (Kausar, 1980, p. 268).
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Author Biography
Narasingha Sil published numerous monographs, research arti cles, book reviews, and encyclopedia entries on European, African, and Asian history in presses, journals, and newspapers around the globe.
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