It is as wrong to call Tipu Sultan a 'secular' as Mohan Bhagwat a 'liberal'
During the Tipu Sultan Jayanti celebrations in the Karnataka state secretariat on Tuesday, Girish Karnad observed that the Bengaluru airport should have been named after Tipu Sultan as he was “a freedom fighter”. The Jnanpith awardee compared him with Chhatrapati Shivaji as he emphasised how Tipu Sultan, had he been a Hindu, “would have been honoured just like Shivaji has been, with the international airport in Mumbai named after him.”
Later, quite predictably, Karnad was threatened by the lunatic fringe of meeting the same fate as writer MM Kalburgi. And it all fell into a conventional jigsaw of being just another Right-wing agenda, post beef politics, to polarise people on communal lines. After all, for a generation, grown up on Sanjay Khan’s portrayal of Tipu Sultan based on Bhagwan S Gidwani’s book, The Sword of Tipu Sultan, it was absolutely reasonable to celebrate such "a national icon" — and to expect a resultant Right-wing protest just because he belonged to another religion!
But then happened something which disturbed the historical consensus built with much efforts by our eminent historians: For, the Congress-led state government’s decision saw not just the Hindu community but also a large number of Christians coming out on the streets against the move.
Before discussing why there’s so much brouhaha over Tipu Sultan in Karnataka, one needs to question the growing tendency among governments of all hues to impart the contemporary "secular" halo to medieval era characters, whether it’s Tipu Sultan in the Congress’s case or Maharana Pratap in the BJP’s. In fact, in its hurry to get the Tipu Jayanti done, the Karnataka government failed to even get the basics right: While the ruler was born on November 20, the government celebrated the event on November 10, ironically the day Tipu Sultan hanged 700 Melkote Iyengars in south Karnataka!
The anger, however, wasn’t just confined to Melkote Iyengars, but also the Coorgs, the Mangalorean Catholics, and the Nairs of Malabar. And there’s historical reason for that. After all, during his Mangalore campaign, about 60,000 Syrian Christians were taken captive, and brutally coerced to convert to Islam. Likewise, Tipu Sultan himself wrote in a letter, “With the grace of Prophet Mohammed and Allah, almost all Hindus of Calicut are converted to Islam. Only on the borders of Cochin State a few are still not converted. I am determined to convert them very soon. I consider this as jihad to achieve that objective.” As for Coorg, one can still gauge hatred for him as street dogs are contemptuously called “Tipu”.
Even the names of places were Islamised, new coins minted, and Persian replaced Kannada as the court language. In his zeal to give Islamic names to existing cities and town, Tipu Sultan gave the same name to different places causing confusion. So Mysore became Nazarbad, and Mangalore was called Jalalabad.
Tipu Sultan, unlike what both the secularists and their critics would like us to believe, was a man of contradictions. He was as innovative, as someone like Karnad would say, as he was fanatic, as he would boast in his own letters and diaries. He loved science and technology, as could be seen in his attempts to pioneer rocket technology, usher in a horticulture revolution, or even bring in silkworm farming in India, and yet he was obsessed with his religious obligations as a Muslim. To selectively quote Tipu Sultan’s 30 reverential letters to the then Shankaracharya of Sringeri, to establish his secular credentials would be as incorrect as depicting Hitler as a pacifist just because he was a vegetarian and loved animals, especially dogs!
Tipu Sultan, like most rulers of his era, never thought he was doing anything unusual; else he wouldn’t have written about them so openly in his diaries and letters. It’s our zeal to place him into the current ideological paradigm of secularism, communalism and nationalism — terms which didn’t exist then — that creates such controversies. It’s time we realised that regarding Tipu Sultan as "secular" and "freedom fighter" would be as ironical as calling Mohan Bhagwat "liberal". It’s grave injustice to both history and its protagonists.