Tipu Sultan:Villain or Hero?

Tipu Sultan:Villain or Hero?

edited by Sita Ram Goel

New Dehli: Voice of India, 1995
85 pages, $2.50
Voice of India http://www.voi.org

Reviewed by C.J.S. Wallia

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"From my perspective as a secular humanist and my personal experience, I regard a typical liberal Indian Muslim to be as good a human being as any other Indian."-- C.J.S. Wallia
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In 1989, the national Indian TV, Doordarshan, ran a serial on Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore from 1782 to 1799 A.D. With the lofty objective of national integration and communal harmony, the national TV presented Tipu Sultan as a hero of Hindu-Muslim amity and a staunch freedom fighter against the British.

Based on a novel by Bhagwan Gidwani, the docudrama "The Sword of Tipu Sultan" provoked widespread outrage. Tipu Sultan: Villain or Hero? originally published by the Bombay Malayalee Samajam, is an anthology of essays that excoriates Doordarshan's depiction of Tipu Sultan and criticizes the peculiar "secularism" practised by the contemporary Indian State.

In the words of Ravi Varma, one of the contributors to the anthology: "It was Tipu Sultan and his fanatic Muslim army who converted thousands of Hindus to Islam all along the invasion route and occupied areas in North Kerala, Coorg, Mangalore, and other parts of Karnataka. Besides over 8,000 Hindu temples were desecrated and/or destroyed by his Muslim army. Even today, one can see large concentrations of Muslims and ruins of hundreds of destroyed temples in North Kerala as standing evidence of the Islamic brutalities committed by Tipu Sultan ... He was, all through, waging a cruel Islamic war against the Hindu population of Kerala, with a large Muslim army and ably assisted by the French with powerful field guns and European troops. ...In spite of all this, historical documents and records are being suppressed, distorted, and falsified in order to project this fanatic Tipu Sultan of Mysore as a

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For anyone interested in the contemporary 'secularist' Indian State and the politics of history, this is a must-read book.
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national hero like Chhatrapati Shivaji, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Rana Pratap Singh, and Pazhassi Raja of Kerala. It is an insult to our national pride and also to the Hindus of Kerala by our 'secular' government and the motivated Muslim and Marxist historians of Jawaharlal Nehru, Aligarh, and Islamia universities."

So what do the original sources tell us about Tipu? The anthology includes excerpts from Tipu's letters as researched by the distinguished Kerala historian K. M. Panicker, which he reviewed in the Bhasha Poshini magazine, August 1923:

1. Letter dated March 22, 1788, to Abdul Kadir: "Over 12,000 Hindus were honoured with Islam. There were many Namboodri Brahmins among them. This achievement should be widely publicised among the Hindus. Then the local Hindus should be brought before you and converted to Islam. No Namboodri Brahmin should be spared. "

2. Letter dated December 14, 1988, to his army chief in Calicut: " I am sending two of my followers with Mir Hussain Ali. With their assistance, you should capture and kill all Hindus. Those below 20 may be kept in prison and 5000 from the rest should be killed from the tree-tops. These are my orders."

3. Letter dated January 18, 1790, to Syed Abdul Dulai: " ...almost all Hindus in Calicut are converted to Islam. I consider this as Jehad."



The anthology also quotes from A Voyage to the East Indies by Fra Barthoelomeo, a renowned Portuguese traveller and historian, who was present in Tipu's war zone in early 1790:

"First a corps of 30,000 barbarians who butchered everybody on the way ... followed by the field gun unit under the French commander, M. Lally. Tipu was riding on an elephant behind which another army of 30,000 soldiers followed. Most of the men and women were hanged in Calicut, first mothers were hanged with their children tied to necks of mothers. That barbarian Tipu Sultan tied the naked Christian and Hindus to the legs of elephants and made the elephants to move around till the bodies of the helpless victims were torn to pieces. Temples and churches were ordered to be burned down, desecrated, and destroyed. ... Those Christians who refused to be honoured with Islam were ordered to be killed by hanging immediately. These atrocities were told to me by the victims of Tipu Sultan who escaped from the clutches of his army and reached Varapphuza, which is the centre of Carmichael Christian Mission. I myself helped many victims to cross the Varapphuza river by boats."



Moreover, evidence of Tipu's atrocities abounds in many contemporary church records in Mangalore, Calicut, and Varapphuza.

In the preface, Sita Ram Goel observes that the contemporary Indian State, under the sway of a distorted concept of secularism, promotes pseudo-history. "Secularism per se is a doctrine which arose in the modern West as a revolt against the closed creed of Christianity .... But secularism in India became the greatest protector of closed creeds [Islam and Christianity] which had come with foreign invaders and kept tormenting the national society for several centuries." This pseudo-secularism, foisted by Nehru, is "a magic formula for transmuting base metal into 24-carat gold.... How else do we explain Islam becoming a religion of tolerance? One has only to go the original sources in order to understand the true character of Islam. How do we explain Tipu Sultan and Bahadur Shah Zafar becoming the heroes of India's freedom struggle against British imperialism?"

Goel's comment on Nehruvian pseudo-secularism brings to mind Vallabhbhai Patel's famous remark, just before the partition, that in India there's only one nationalist Muslim: Jawaharlal Nehru. And, three decades before the partition of India, Sri Aurobindo raised the question about the fundamental intolerance of Islam: "How is it possible to live peacefully with a religion whose principle is 'I will not tolerate you?' How are you going to have unity with these people?" Sri Aurobindo cited the Koranic injunction (chapter IX, verse 5): "Slay the Idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent [i.e. convert to Islam] and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave them free. Lo! Allah is forgiving, merciful."

Does the Doordarshan serial's characterization of Tipu in "The Sword of Tipu Sultan" as a patron of Hindu temples have any historical basis at all? Yes, says C. Nandagopal Menon, the convenor of the Bombay Malayalee Samajam: "Tipu had immense faith in astrology. It was at the appeal of his Hindu astrologer and his own mother that Tipu spared two temples out of 12 within Sriangapatnam Fort. Moreover, by the end of 1790, Tipu was facing enemies from all sides. He was also defeated at the Travancore Defence Lines. It was only then, in order to appease the Hindus of Mysore, that he gave some land-grants to Hindu temples."

The Doordarshan serial seized on this historical event and fabricated most of the other events in its so-called "docudrama." As to Tipu's struggle against the British, it was to maintain his usurped kingdom, not as a nationalist fight for freedom. This is clear from the historical documents in which he invited the French to join him to defeat the British and then divide South India between himself and the French.

Dr. P.C.C. Raja, a direct descendent of the Zamorin of Calicut, writes in the anthology: "Tipu Sultan was one of the worst fanatics, and more inhuman than even the Nazis." The Bombay Malayalee Samajam and numerous viewers, especially in Kerala, were as outraged by the pseudo-history of this TV serial as the Jews would be at a depiction of Hitler as a multicultural hero!

Historical evidence has clearly established that Tipu Sultan was, to put it mildly, no multicultural hero. Indian State TV's promotion of the serial's pseudo-history, in the name of secularism no less, was a flagrant exercise of pseudo-secularism.

It is precisely to repudiate this sort of wishful, self-deluding pseudo-history that Koenraad Elst, the Belgian scholar, recently published Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam (published by theVoice of India) . To be sure, other Western historians have written of this record before. In The Histoire d l'Inde, French historian Alain Danielou wrote: "From the time Muslims started arriving in 632 A.D., the history of India becomes a long monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is as usual in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilisations." In the words of the well-known American historian,Will Durant, "the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident lesson is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate balance can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplication from within."

The historical record of Islamic ideology practised in India is heavily tainted.(To cite two sources: The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India by Sita Ram Goel, published by the Voice of India; The Koran and the Kafir: All That An Infidel Needs to Know About the Koran But Is Embarrassed to Ask by Arvind Ghosh.)

From my own perspective as a secular humanist, I believe that promotion of pseudo-history will be ultimately counterproductive. Fabricating history for the sake of a current cause, no matter how lofty its ideals, tempts the fates. To forget history will always be fateful; to forgive some of its frightful facts can be redemptive. Forgive -- but never forget -- history. A salient example of making sure that history is not forgotten is the contemporary German State's making it illegal to publish a reconstructed World War II history that attempts to negate or conceal the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jews, Gypsies, and Poles.

As a secular humanist, however, I make a distinction between an ideology and its adhering victims, especially those born into it. And, nonetheless, from my own experience, I regard a typical liberal Indian Muslim to be as good a human being as any other Indian. Genuine secularism in India will finally emerge from the Hindus' forgiveness of Islamic history in India, not from the pseudo-secularists' self-deluding denials and glossy cover-ups tacked onto the documented facts of that history.

For anyone interested in the contemporary 'secularist' Indian State
and the politics of history, this is a must-read book.

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EndNotes:

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