The 4th of May usually goes unnoticed in the Pakistani calendar. On that day in 1799, a company of the army of the East India Company led by Col. Arthur Wellesley, another by Gen. Harris and another by Maj. Gen. David Baird, along with men and arms provided by the Nizam of Hyderabad, entered the fort of Sultan Tipu Khan Bahadur at Seringapatam in present-day Kannada, South India. Seringapatam fell in the battle. Tipu died fighting the invading English. Maysore was taken by the Company. An infant Hindu prince of the Woodeyar dynasty was installed on the throne (Tipu’s father had earlier usurped the Woodeyar Raja to establish his kingdom). Commissioned historians portrayed this chain of events as fortuitous for the people of Maysore who had been enduring the ‘tyrant’ Tipu Sultan. In London it was hailed as a victory for forces representing the march of civilisation in ‘In-doos-tan’, soon to be completely Anglicised as ‘India’. The English found themselves in the midst of an empire. What began as a search for trading rights and tariff concessions, moved towards political interference, king-making, then armed intervention, the oft-repeated divide-and-rule, and gradually morphed into full-scale colonialism.
It would be far too simple to portray Tipu as a resistance hero against the yoke of British imperialism. For good or for bad, the British brought many liberal practices with them. They provided the subcontinent with modern education, hospitals, roads, planned cities, efficient bureaucracy, and a new unifying language that everyone has to learn and loves to speak in Pakistan today. At the same time, it would be wrong to assume — and the British worked hard to cement this impression — that before the advent of English rule, the people of Hindustan lived primitive lives without any cultural and social development to speak of. The British completely effaced Hindustan as it once was, and recreated India in their own image. The people of Hindustan bought the idea. They became Indians. Perhaps it was this change that Tipu was most opposed to.
From what we gather from his life, Tipu Sultan grew up hating the English. He developed a fetish for symbolically portraying English soldiers being defeated by his men, or being mauled by his tigers. Taken in this context, the resistance offered by Tipu Sultan gains academic significance. Tipu offered the only opposition to what had become by the 1790s English imperial designs. He hated the English for what they stood for. To the English mind, the Englishman in India was serving a higher cause, making a career and, sometimes, some profit on the side. To Tipu (from what historians have written), the English were contemptible foreigners who had no business being in Hindustan, let alone rule it. Tipu was willing to solicit French military assistance to check mate the English in India. He tried to rally Muslim rulers across the Middle East and South Asia to mount an ‘Islamic’ anticolonial campaign. He employed faith in his narrative to counter the colonial storyline that depicted the English as a superior liberating civilisation. His efforts bore no fruit. The French were too occupied in their own problems and the Islamic anticolonial campaign never materialised.
In one way, Tipu Sultan reminds you of Greek tragic heroes. Critics generally agree that protagonists in Greek plays struggle against insurmountable odds while exploring the limits of human freedom. These tragic heroes continue to wage battle even though they know they cannot win. Tipu Sultan faced similar circumstances. Whether through abstract forces like destiny, the political machinations of the English, the perfidy of native Hindustani rulers, his own political shortsightedness, or a mixture of all of these, Tipu faced odds he could not have prevailed over. Tipu’s survival depended on his forming an alliance with his enemy, the English. But this would have meant according legitimacy to their presence in Hindustan, something he was not ready to offer. As fate would have it, Tipu was forced into pursuing at least two humiliating peace treaties with the English. One of these treaties stipulated that Tipu hand over two of his sons to the English till he had made good all his commitments. The Marhattas and the Nizam of Hyderababd cast in their lot with the coloniser, and the British relished the opportunity of battering and baiting the Tiger of Maysore.
What happened on May the 4th also reminds one of present-day political upheaval and assorted wars of liberation led by NATO and the First World. If the invasion of Seringapatam had been led today, the campaign would be called ‘Operation Kill Tyranny’ and the result achieved would be dubbed ‘regime change’.
Tipu Sultan is a controversial figure. Since 2014, the BJP government has banned all celebrations marking his birth anniversary in his home state of Kannada. English texts portray him as a hot-headed despot whose ‘time had come’. In Pakistan, Tipu is not a recurring figure in popular public imagination, especially since the advent of private TV channels. All said and done, Tipu Sultan may not have been a liberal democrat, but he is the nearest thing to a resistance figure we have.
The writer is a lecturer in English Literature at Government College University, Lahore. He can be reached at [email protected]