THE TIGER KING
IA historian examines the archival record and the speculative inner life of Tipu Sultan f you live outside southern India, it’s likely that Tipu Sultan was a single chapter in your history book where he appeared as a regional satrap with ideas well beyond his station, a man who indulged in rose gardens and silk worms and whose betrayal by the Maratha Confederacy was a mere footnote in the early battles against the British, as they went from being a trading company to an occupying force. You may be forgiven for thinking that Tipu was just that fellow with a magnificent moustache whose favourite toy was a mechanical tiger tearing out the throat of a British soldier. And, yes, recently someone brought his sword back from England. But in the south, Tipu is a real and insistent presence—his ghost haunts Karnataka, appearing at regular, if infrequent, intervals. We’re not sure what to do with this local warrior, this sometimes son of soil, sometimes alien oppressor. You can receive death threats from neighbouring Maharashtra if you suggest that, like Shivaji, Tipu fought ‘outsiders’ in the name of his own people. If you call for a commemoration of his birthday, a Tipu Jayanti in Karnataka, riots break out among people whose ancestors he killed. You can’t even name Bengaluru’s international airport after him, even though Tipu was born in the village, Devanahalli, where the airport now sits.
It is clear that many of the problems pertaining to honouring Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, have to do with the fact that he is Muslim. In these times, it is impossible to think of someone like him as an incipient ‘freedom fighter’, one who saw the dark horizon of colonialism and tried to build local alliances to protect the autonomous kingdoms in the region. There is a long tradition of critical assessment that demonises Tipu as an upstart usurper of the Wodeyar throne, an opportunist who signed a treaty with the French against the British, a vicious tormentor of his enemies, particularly non-Muslims. Equally, such popular dramatised histories as Praxy Fernandes’s The Tigers of Mysore, Bhagwan Gidwani’s The Sword of Tipu Sultan (the basis for Sanjay Khan’s television serial of the same name broadcast on Doordarshan in 1990) and Girish Karnad’s play The Dreams of Tipu Sultan have sought to present him as a humane and far-sighted monarch and, in doing so, have reached for the man behind the Tiger.
Recently, though, more and more historians are leaning towards the idea that Tipu might well have been a visionary in more ways than one—politically, economically and perhaps even socially. Certainly, his sense of a world beyond the subcontinent and how it might serve his ambitions is being noted. Historian Kate Brittlebank’s Tiger fits snugly into this category of reassessment. She starts by reminding us how Tipu was seen by the British in the 18th century—as a savage barbarian who took pleasure in torturing and killing his English prisoners, “the most feared Indian of his times”. This was a necessary part of the depiction of other races and cultures at the time, building up to the dehumanisation of Oriental and African peoples from which the colonial project drew its moral authority. Brittlebank also wants us to see Tipu as a product of this period—as righteous or cruel as any other contemporaneous ruler might have been. But