September 2006 
Year 12    No.118

Cover Story


A king revealed

Tipu Sultan, his rule and his times – a people’s perspective

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.)

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