We can thank two bestselling and most influential text books for creating the myth about Tipu being a great patriot, moderniser and do-gooder internationalist who ruled his lands with a firm hand. One was the book for students, written in 1946 by Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Hemchandra Raychaudhuri, Kalikinkar Datta (An Advanced History of India), the other was the school textbook on history written by Bipan Chandra for the NCERT in 1971 (Modern India).

An Advanced History of India was written at a time when Indians were searching for heroes in the past who had put up resistance to English colonialism. Tipu fitted the bill rather well. Even the English memoirs had mentioned Tipu many times over as a great opponent who had fought them well. But the English also mentioned a lot about how Tipu was harsh with people whom he conquered. Some 130 Nairs were forcibly circumcised and converted to Islam. Thousands of people were deported and their places of worship destroyed. Hundreds of Catholics were hanged when they refused to convert to Islam.

However, among these gory memories, there was one book of historical research to depend upon for some nice words about Tipu. This was a study done by the historian Surendranath Sen, published in 1930. Sen was rather guarded in his evaluation of Tipu. “What was Tipu Sultan?”, he asks right in the beginning of his book. “A normal man or an abnormal monster? A benevolent king or a sanguinary tyrant? A tolerant ruler or an intolerant bigot?” and concludes that “Contemporary opinion was very sharply divided”. Sen’s own strategy to square the memories about Tipu as a tyrant with his being a hero was to say that Tipu heaped the honour of forcible conversions, property destruction and sacrilege of the holy places, only on those who showed some recalcitrance, who resisted domination by Tipu. For this evaluation, Sen had Tipu’s own words to go by that Tipu had written to various correspondents. Sen noticed that even while putting up resistance to the English effort to overtake his lands, Tipu ruled his kingdom with a firm hand. However, when Datta used Sen’s judgement for inclusion in An Advanced History, he transmogrified it to mean that Tipu was not merely harsh but also evenhanded and fair during his rule. This was demonstrated by the grants that Tipu made to various temples.

Tipu was a man of “remarkable personality — a man of sound moral character”, said An Advanced History of India. It said that Tipu “forced (conversion) only on those recalcitrant Hindus on whose allegiance he could not rely”. In the 1950s, R C Majumdar was asked to write the history of the freedom movement in India. While working on this project, he made a self-reflective statement that got published in the newspapers. On the matter of the “proper history of the freedom movement in India,” Majumdar opined that the history of the freedom movement was best written from the time that India came under the domination of the Muslims in the 12th century. This kind of view, which made the Muslims out to be foreigners who invaded and occupied India, had been used by the communally minded to justify their pursuit of communalism. Nationalists, those who loved modern India as a secular nation, understood that this communal view of history only justified the evil forces in India. Consequently, R C Majumdar was removed from the freedom struggle project and that project was handed over to Professor Tarachand. A much-peeved Majumdar then went on to write much against the Muslim domination of India. But his own history of the freedom struggle, published a little before the Tarachand version, continued to look up to Tipu as a great ruler. The same bits of evidence that Sen had used to say that Tipu had something of a mixed reputation were now interpreted to mean that he was a great ruler. Tipu’s elevation from merely being a great ruler to a ruler whose greatness was specified in terms of his internationalism and commitment to the idea of freedom, happened in Bipan Chandra’s NCERT textbook, Modern India (1971). What was the basis for Chandra to elevate Tipu thus? We can merely make a reconstruction of how things got created thus. The most charitable explanation is that Chandra got carried away by Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India (written between 1942-46, when Nehru was in jail). That book was by way of Nehru’s effort at self-discovery about what India was and what India could be once it became independent. When Nehru wrote this book, his generation was languishing in self-pity and helplessness against the colonial regime with people showing a great propensity to fight each other rather than the oppressive colonial regime. It was more of a parable about the greatness of India and all the great things that India could achieve in the future. Chandra, a nationalist to the core, created his own text for schoolkids in the image of Nehru’s book. There are far too many similarities of causation between Nehru’s book and Chandra’s text. It suggests that a close borrowing of ideas by Chandra from Nehru. Tipu was the son of Hyder Ali, who had overthrown his Hindu employer and master to take over the kingdom of Mysuru and become its ruler. Nehru in his, history of India has only this much to say: “Haider Ali was a remarkable man and one of the notable figures in Indian history. He had some kind of a national ideal and possessed the qualities of a leader with vision…His son Tipu continued to strengthen his navy. Tipu also sent messages to Napoleon and to the Sultan in Constantinople.” What was Nehru’s basis of saying these things about Hyder and Tipu? None other than the contemporary reports filed by the English on these two adversaries of the English East India Company. Reports, published in the form of widely read books, portrayed Tipu as a military genius who was reasonably harsh towards those whom he conquered.

They highlighted Tipu as a powerful adversary whom the English East India Company defeated by assembling even greater power and guile. The English were following the adage of never trying to make your enemy look like a fool for it will only reflect upon you.

There is no evidence to suggest that Nehru was aware of Sen’s cautious portrayal of Tipu. It looks he had merely used the information from the English memoirs of Tipu, inverted them to give them a nationalistic spin. Chandra merely added further spin to the tale, dubbing Tipu to be an internationalist, influenced by liberationists’ ideologies. In a school textbook the author is absolved of providing detailed explanations about the narrative.

The writer is a Professor of History, Panjab University, Chandigarh.