Book Review: 'Tipu Sultan: The Saga of Mysore's Interregnum' Is Vikram Sampath's Unflinching Portrait Of A Polarising Ruler

Tipu Sultan is a historian’s enigma, one who defies easy compartmentalization. What was he really like? A man of the masses, a darling of the subaltern, a modernizer and innovator, a patriot, and a nationalist freedom fighter who fell fighting the British? Or a terrible zealot whose immense antipathy for non-Muslims made him inflect a horrific holy war (jihad) against them? A cruel tyrant who unleashed hell on innocent Hindus and Christians, who razed temples and churches, forced Christian and Hindu women to marry Muslims, and executed non-Muslims if they refused to be circumcised?

The jury is still out, says acclaimed author and historian Vikram Sampath, on Tipu, his legacy, his characterization and his contributions – 225 long years after his body was found on May 4, 1799 night at the Srirangapatna fort in present day Karnataka. He proved himself a worthy adversary who for a short period made his formidable presence felt in the last decades of Mughal India.

Sampath was drawn at a young age to chronicle the Wodeyar dynasty, which held sway over the region from 1399 (when it was established) until 1947. This is when his interest was provoked by Tipu Sultan. There was only a 39-year intermission when the Wodeyar throne was usurped by Haidar Ali, who passed on the mantle to his son Tipu. Those four decades have become one of the most contested in Indian history. After painstaking research, the Bengaluru-based Sampath succeeds in providing a fact-based assessment of the 18th century monarch of Mysore and his extremely troubled and polarizing legacy.

Sampath’s findings are deeply disturbing even as he refuses to erase, unlike some, the redeeming features of Tipu’s character and tumultuous life.

Although Tipu’s reign endured for just 17 years and was beset with bloody conflicts and battles, he wanted to leave his indelible mark on every aspect of Mysore’s life, with a singular objective of obliterating all the past traces of the Hindu Wodeyar rule. Commerce and industry attracted a lot of Tipu’s interest. Thanks to Mysore’s winding coastline, there was brisk exports and imports. Government shops opened in Jeddah, Muscat and Karachi to sell Mysore’s products. Even amid wars, he did not lose interest in the minute details of trade.

Tipu opened 30 factories in sprawling Mysore to produce cloth, paper, scissors, hourglasses, pocket knives, guns, muskets, watches and cutlery. They employed both European and Indian workmen. As Sampath says, Tipu’s industrial policy was modern and progressive, and sought to make his state self-sufficient. His was a well-knit administration. Such were his military hardware that rockets in England in 1801-02 had a range of less than half of that of the Mysore rockets! And unlike his father who remained illiterate, Tipu Sultan was well-read.

But there was a blood-thirsty and cruel side to Tipu, whose religious zeal and expansionist dreams made him declare war on Hindu ‘infidels’ and Christians as he overran smaller principalities. He presided over forcible mass circumcision and conversion, large-scale killings, looting and destruction of hundreds of temples and churches, and other barbarities like gang-rape of women. While pitted against the British, he took the support of the equally colonial French, and invited Zaman Shah of Afghanistan, the Caliph of Turkey and the Shah of Persia to invade India and establish a Muslim Caliphate. Were these traits of a freedom fighter?

Sampath is clear that glossing over Tipu’s cruelties and barbaric deeds, only to sound politically correct or labour under a mistaken notion that whitewashing these crimes would somehow magically maintain social cohesion, is treacherous and intellectually dishonest. To those who argue that Tipu’s excesses were vastly exaggerated by the British, Sampath counters: The monarch’s own dream registers, his own firmans and letters to his officials, and his and his officials’ boastful claims of mass conversions, circumcisions, slaughter of cows and destruction of temples are well documented with absolutely no ambiguity.

Yet, Tipu was a man of strange complexities. He had a deep attraction for Hindu astrology, and frequently asked Brahmin priests to perform special prayers for his and his kingdom’s prosperity even as he killed other Brahmins and their families. Like Mughal kings, he too appointed some Hindus to positions of trust and responsibility. He made donations to select temples, and had a genuine respect for the Shankaracharya of Sringeri. During his end years, he tried to make peace with his non-Muslim subjects. But it was too late. In that sense, Tipu’s religious zeal and bigotry sealed his fate, more than British military tactics.

Book: Tipu Sultan: The Saga of Mysore’s Interregnum (1760-1799)

Author: Vikram Sampath

Publisher: Vintage/Penguin Random House

Pages: xxviii + 904

Price: ₹1,499