This is an excerpt from the work, Making History – Karnataka’s
People and their Past, authored by Saketh Rajan under the
pen name, Saki. While the book itself brings a new people’s
perspective to understanding the history of Karnataka, the 200+ pages on
Tipu Sultan, based on several years of academic study and historical
research that is widely appreciated by historians, activists and
academicians of different pursuits, give a new vision to the times and the
personality of Tipu Sultan. This particular extract explains how the
reforms introduced by Tipu hampered the interests of the British, the
coloniser, as well as the Brahmin, the local feudal lord, and how, after
Tipu’s death, these vested interests combined to tarnish his image by
distorting the history of his times.
The changes resulting from the growth of the modern state during the
rule of Haidar and Tipu, the reforms these two rulers implemented and the
influence of Islam were additional factors of the time which contributed
to the weakening of the caste system.
The Mysore army and militia were composed basically of recruits from
the Beda, Kuruba, Idiga, Vokkaliga and Lingayat castes. The Voddas, Bovis
and Lambanis were among the other castes who found recruitment in the army
(of the Muslim component in it, we shall see later). The granting of land
to all members of the Kandachara militia and the modernising influence
that the army disseminated among its recruits are bound to have had a
progressive influence on the social standing of these castes.
Among the various anti-feudal measures that Tipu implemented, two in
particular had a positive impact on the caste system. They concern a flat
reduction of the feudal privilege of the Brahmana mathas, which did
much to bring down their prestige among the masses, and the negation of
hereditary authority to the village Gowda and Shanbhoga. These measures
were important in that they also served as steps of rural caste reform.
An important factor of the period, consideration of which is generally
lost under the cloud of Hindu communal historiography, was the impact of
Islam, the religion of Mysore’s rulers, on the caste system. Islam of this
time had a positive impact in weakening this feudal institution.
At the outset, the fact that Muslims had for the first time become the
rulers of this part of Karnataka proved to be advantageous in the tirade
against the Palegaras or the modernisation of the army and the bureaucracy
or the anti-feudal reforms. The fact that Islam was a new religious
entrant to these parts of Karnataka, the rulers had not yet developed any
‘natural’ organic ties with the feudal ruling classes of the region,
making it perhaps among the more important of non-economic factors in
encouraging the uncompromising implementation of these reforms. As a
consequence, Islam which took root here tied up not with the landlords.
Thus it could remain relatively free of the cultural institutions
of local feudalism. Instead, Muslims developed economic and cultural ties
with the state, which was quickly modernising and economic activity that
made it an integral part of the gamut of rising commodity relations.
This fact is borne out by the largely cosmopolitan character of the
Muslim population of southern Karnataka even today. Unlike in areas where
Islam took root at an earlier time in history, for instance in the
Hyderabad-Karnataka region, or for that matter in states like Uttar
Pradesh, and became a recipient of land grants and various accompanying
feudal privileges, in the Mysore kingdom Muslims remained, by and large,
an urban population.
Despite its own feudal origins, which ought not to be overlooked and is
true of most other extant religions, Islam in Mysore as a result of its
near total isolation and separation from the system and institutions of
local feudalism, tended to contain a certain amount of anti-feudal
potential. The loss of such a view of Islam in the kingdom of Mysore can
only lead to a forfeiture of a historical perspective.
A second feature of Islam which is of importance to our point of
discussion on caste is the inherent ideological negation of caste that it
contains, a feature it gathered at the point of its origin itself. This
provides, as we have seen in the case of Adilshahi and Bahmani rule in the
chapter on middle feudalism, a liberating theology from caste oppression,
attracting to its fold, in particular, elements from the low castes of the
Hindu feudal order. Although our information of the time is poor on this
aspect, there can be little doubt that Islam chiefly attracted castes such
as the Bedas, Voddas, Bestas, Madigas, Holeyas, Bovis, Upparas, Naindas
and Lambanis; the life of the people of which either hinged around direct
military service or in activity which associated with providing an array
of services for the army. Thus while Islam on the one hand tended to
retain the class features of these castes, yet on the other, it served as
a powerful cultural instrument of the time in tearing up the tegument of
caste.
From Charles Stewart’s list of books in Tipu’s library, it is evident
that Tipu was under the influence of Sufi Islam rather than its earlier
orthodox form. Haidar Ali’s lineage ran from the pirzada of a
dargah of Hyderabad-Karnataka and Tipu’s name itself, unorthodox among the
Muslims, is taken from the pirzada of a Kolar dargah, Tipu Olaliah.
Tipu had deep interest, among others, of Bandanawaz’s teachings thereby
making him a vehicle of the views of a reformed Islam.
As a result of all these influences which reflected in the rulers of
Mysore of the time, they tended to negate the system of castes. Wilks said
of Haidar that he was "half a Hindoo". Schwartz, a Christian clergyman,
said: "What religion people profess, or whether they profess any at all,
that is perfectly indifferent to him. He has none himself and leaves
everyone to his choice." Haidar’s anti-caste views are best explained by
the following narration of Buchanan. Of the Punchum Bundum who were
Untouchables and bonded labourers in Arcot, we have seen how Haidar
shifted them to his kingdom and encouraged them to cultivate lands. But
while doing so, Buchanan reports: "He settled them in many districts as
farmers and would not suffer them to be called by their proper name, which
is considered approbrious; but ordered that they should be called
cultivators." Thus one notices, on the part of Haidar, a conscious attempt
to discourage the scourge of untouchability.
Tipu’s attitude to the Untouchables was only more refined and
culturally encompassing. Wilks, writing of Tipu’s response to the left and
right hand conflicts, explained that: "…on one of these occasions, the
Sultan applied his profound research and experience to trace the origin of
these sects and to devise the means of preventing future riots.
"To the Parias (Holeyas) he had already given the new name Sameree,
Samaritans, because as he affirmed, they and the ancient Samaritans were
equally distinguished by skill in magic. The Chucklers (Madigas) were
Chermdoz, the common Persian designation of their chief employment. ‘In
the language of this country,’ he (Tipu) adds, ‘they are called Yere Kai
and Bul Kai, that is right and left hand, because these men being the
grooms and foragers of the horsemen of Islam may be considered as their
right and left hands with reference to the important services which they
perform’."
This was nothing but a Sufist interpretation and theology for the
unshackling of the Untouchable.
Despite these ascendant features of caste negation in the new rulers
and the state they had created, features which were further strengthened
by the anti-feudal reform they had initiated, one must not forget that the
modern Mysore state drew its sustenance from sections of the feudal class
within the village and objectively stood to also serve their interests.
The state was feudal-mercantile in character and disposition although it
was the latter element that always kept the initiative in guiding state
policy. Thus despite the progressive anti-caste features that the state
bore and although Islam in old Mysore had not achieved the effective
integration with the landlord class as such, the state rested on the
support of the (upper caste) feudal class of the village and thus its
negation of caste could never have been overt. It was still a state in the
service of feudalism and the fact that Sufist Islam itself struck a
compromise with feudalism, despite its progressive disposition, gave the
caste-negating element within the state apparatus and in Tipu-Haidar, a
measure of compromise. Thus one must realise that this anti-caste
Islamicist tendency struck a compromise. Objective conditions were not yet
ripe enough for an overt caste-negating assertion. Thus despite all the
anti-caste tendencies one must be reminded that all its manifest forms
took expression in a caste-based semi-feudal society.
Tipu however has been the target of abuse by what is in Karnataka and
India a not inconsiderable tribe of historians. They have heaped him with
zealous Islamic ambitions, to forced conversions, and the run-of-the-mill
communal historiography charges him of Muslim bigotry. We refrain from
going into argument on this question since Praxy Fernandes and Sebastian
Joseph have done the job quite competently. However, it is necessary to
point at the class roots of such chagrin which is not merely an offshoot
of history writing of the universities but may be traced to the social
forces that Tipu and Haidar clashed with in their time.
As we have already seen, the Brahmanas of the mathas and the
feudal bureaucracy fell from grace, vexing them and invoking their curses,
leading to what has rent the air in the form of a Mleccha usurpation of
Hinduism. The British colonialists were however the more effective of
distorters. Their animosity for Tipu must have been well grasped by our
readers by now. Tipu, in defending Karnataka against colonialism, was
shrewd enough to prevent the spread of Christian missionary activity since
the British, after all, came, as N’Gugi Wa Thiongo has said, ‘with the
sword in one hand and the Bible in the other’. The church had always
sought to create, through culture, a clientele for colonialists. And since
British colonialism befriended the landlords and tottering Brahmanas, the
two found common cause and the one egged on the rancorous outpourings of
the other. The British set the trend of written history by being the first
to commit to letter the most perfidious of distortions which later became
the sacrosanct ‘written word’, otherwise reckoned as ‘source material’ for
the jaundiced academics of our universities.
Tipu was religious, just as all other rulers of Karnataka have been. In
being pious he did encourage the conversion of Hindus to Islam. However,
since Islam and Tipu naturally sought and found people in readiness among
the lower castes in particular, conversions of this time carried a
progressive alternative to the oppressed Dalits and disdained Shudras.
Confined to the structures of the state – the army and the civil
bureaucracy – was a rapid and intensifying motion which had upset all
notions of caste privilege. This internal mobility was achieved at such a
quick pace that it had already developed clear features which pointed to
the composition of a future bourgeois state as distinct from that of the
feudal state. The forces of modernisation within the state apparatus in
terms of its composition were already as evident as its external
modernising functions and it must be said that without this internal
displacement of upper caste domination Mysore would have collapsed like a
heap of straw at the very gathering of the clouds of British conquest.
Munro was perceptive enough to see this change and grasp the
consequence of it in Tipu’s war of resistance to colonialism. Of the fresh
blood in the Mysore state, he observed: "...the most simple and despotic
monarchy in the world, in which every department, civil and military,
possesses the regularity and system communicated to it by the genius of
Hyder, and in which all pretensions derived from high birth being
discouraged, all independent chiefs and Zamindars subjected or extirpated,
justice severely and impartially administered to every class of the
people, a numerous and well-disciplined army kept up, and almost every
employment of trust or consequence conferred on men raised from obscurity,
gives to the Government a vigour hitherto unexampled in India."
Tipu’s army was by and large a Muslim force, absolute at the top and
relative at the bottom. And for the first time in Karnataka’s and perhaps
India’s history, the Amildars who were the elite upper crust of the civil
bureaucracy were composed of Muslims with Brahmana monopoly of it totally
displaced.
The lower orders of the civil bureaucracy however continued to be the
forte of the Brahmanas since this grew more from the feudal agrarian order
of the village without changing which this could not drastically be
changed. In short, the state was quickly getting ‘Islamised’. However,
this transformation was brought about not by the conversion of the former
state but by a revolutionary displacement and the Muslims who manned the
new state were by and large first generation convertees from the Shudra
and perhaps Dalit castes. Thus, under the banner of Islam the
transformation of the composition of the state assumed a dynamic and
progressive disposition; it took on strong anti-feudal features and
enjoined qualities, powerful for the time, of caste negation.
Proselytisation by Tipu and the change of character of the state as well
as its composition was the most important of his contributions in the
destruction of caste.
While these conversions were voluntary, there were others which were
coerced. However, this aspect of coercion must be properly grasped since
it included people whom Tipu considered as the property of the state. This
list included prisoners, prostitutes, beggars and children, destitute or
orphaned. On conversion these elements found employment in the army, such
as the Chela battalion that he formed, which was one of his best trained
and most loyal of troops and was composed exclusively of orphans; or in
the industries managed by the state. Despite the element of compulsion
attached to this, can anyone deny the alternative it provided and its
wholesome rejection of the caste malaise?
(Excerpted from
Making History – Karnataka’s People and their Past by Saki. Saketh
Rajan, who wrote under the pen name Saki, was a scholar and revolutionary
activist. He was shot dead by the police on February 6, 2005.)