Tipu Sultan #1 - SL Bhyrappa and Vikram Sampath's approach to history

This is the start of a series where I read and discuss Vikram Sampath’s new book, Tipu Sultan - The Saga Of Mysore’s Interregnum (1760-1799). I hope you enjoy it.

My interest in this book

Growing up in Bangalore, it felt like history was something that happened in other places. Mysore had the palaces. Chennai had Santhome and Fort St. George, and rock-cut sculptures at Mahabalipuram nearby. There was also the Bekal fort in Kerala where the song Uyire from Bombay was shot, and I’ve been to St. Mary’s Island, where Vasco Da Gama first landed.

But even those things didn’t feel like ‘history’.

History was Delhi with the Red Fort and Qutb Minar, and the subsequent bus to Agra to look at the Taj Mahal. Or the Ajanta and Ellora caves. Maratha forts.

Everything else was not history.

Studying under the CBSE board only helped this mindset. My textbooks barely mentioned Karnataka’s history. Maybe the state syllabus covered more, but all I learned about Mysore was through the Anglo-Mysore Wars, where Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan briefly appeared. I was so uninformed that I assumed they were kings of Mysore (spoiler: they weren’t). No one told me how we transitioned from Tipu to Krishnaraja Wodeyar, or how Sir M. Visvesvaraya brought hydroelectricity to Mysore. Or where the Talakad curse fit into all this.

Maybe I just didn’t pay enough attention in school. But there were two kinds of history - the kind you saw around you, and the kind that made it into textbooks. And if it wasn’t in the textbook, it wasn’t that important to India’s history.

What I’d gotten from my textbooks was Haidar Ali was a brave warrior but uneducated, and hence didn’t meet his potential. Tipu Sultan was educated and hence an improvement, and he fought the British. But alas, since the British were better, they defeated him.

Heck, I remember an elaborate dance performance in school of a song extolling Karnataka. It was sung by SP Balasubramanyam, from what I remember. It mentioned several heroes, like Jagadguru Vidyaranya, Krishnadevaraya, Kittur Rani Chennamma, Basavanna, Sarvajna… and ‘Mysore-ina Huli’ Tipu.

That was my understanding of Mysore history—a small, insignificant kingdom that briefly resisted the British before its “modern” English-educated Diwans (knighted by the British, no less) industrialized it.

Dr. Vikram Sampath comes from largely the same background, so his pursuing the history of Mysore is very, very important to me. Not in the least because it approaches history from the same point of view and starting point as I have.

Vikram Sampath’s dedication to facts

I’m just so inspired by Vikram Sampath’s whole journey. As he shares in his prologue, his fascination with history began with The Sword of Tipu Sultan, a TV show based on a novel by Bhagwan S. Gidwani, who seems to have been a bureaucrat in the government in many high positions and represented India internationally. The show carried a disclaimer that it wasn’t historically accurate, but it still sparked major protests over its misrepresentations—especially in Kodagu, Mangalore, and Travancore.

Wanting to get down to the truth of the depictions of the Mysore royals, he persisted in learning more about Mysore history for all his teens and 20s.

What is inspiring to me is how he persisted. We’ve all heard that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration - this is the perspiration. He writes:

Every vacation meant going to Mysore, meeting members of the royal family, historians, archivists, old-timers and others to collect information about that one ruler and his wife who had been painted so badly in the tele-serial. {…} All of this was going on as I prepared for my board exams, some entrance examinations, and further study. The ‘Mysore bug’ kept me riveted for almost a decade.

This can’t have been easy! Especially with the persistence to devoting all your spare time to it over multiple yearsHe seems like an incredibly dedicated person, because he managed to get into BITS Pilani with all these extracurriculars, and Bombay Jayashree was so impressed with his singing that she offered to teach him. He published two books based on his intense personal research on the Mysore kingdom - Splendours of Royal Mysore in 2008, and My Name Is Gauhar Jaan in 2010. Gauhar Jaan earned him a PhD at the University of Queensland, in 2017. He became a household name only in about 2019 when he wrote the exhaustive two volumes on Savarkar.

Before Dr. Sampath, the idea that an independent researcher could make an impact in Indian history seemed unthinkable. Historians were usually academics or had royal lineage. Dr. Sampath broke the mold—his rigorous primary research, fact-driven narratives, and focus on compelling historical figures have made him a respected authority.

That’s a colossal inspiration, showing a path not only for budding historians, but he’s also created a market for history books. Previously, only boring uncles bought history books, but now author interviews on TV podcasts draw more people into historical discourse, and more readers want to engage with our past. Or maybe we’ve all transitioned into boring uncles.

SL Bhyrappa on Tipu Sultan

Tipu Sultan has been a topic that’s divided Kannada intellectuals. Girish Karnad and UR Ananthamurthy have been pro-Tipu Sultan. Karnad famously had a play titled The Dreams Of Tipu Sultan, and he aimed to portray him as this humane and noble character, as opposed to the British portrayals of him as unprincipled and ruthless. He even demanded that the new Bangalore Airport be named after Tipu Sultan.

SL Bhyrappa and Chidananda Murthy have been on the opposing camp. Chidananda Murthy has compared him to Hitler in terms of how many Hindus he killed.

Bhyrappa’s perspective in the Foreword is quite illuminating on how history is manipulated in textbooks.

SL Bhyrappa was on an NCERT committee, presumably about textbooks. The Chairman of the committee said the committee aims to ‘weed out thorns from the minds of growing children,” which would be barriers to ‘national integration’. Bhyrappa asked him to explain, as he didn’t understand.

He started saying, ‘Ghazni Mohammed looted Somnath Temple, Aurangzeb built the mosques by demolishing the temples in Kashi and Mathura, he collected jizya, etc. How do such useless facts help build a strong India other than creating hatred in the minds?’ When I said, ‘But they are historical truths?’, he replied, ‘Plenty of truths are there. To use these truths with discrimination is the wisdom of the historians.’

I added, ‘Sir, you gave examples of Kashi and Mathura. Even now, lakhs of people visit these places from nooks and corners of the country as pilgrims. They see huge mosques built using the same walls, pillars, and columns of the demolished temples. Behind the mosque, they also see a cowshed-like structure built recently in a corner that represents our temple. The pilgrims are disturbed to witness such awful structures. They describe the plight of their temples to their relatives after they return home. Do you think such feelings can create national integration? One can hide the history in school texts. But can we hide such facts when the schoolchildren visit the place as part of the excursion? The researchers have listed more than 30,000 such ruined temples in India. Can we hide them all?’

This shows the mindset of the people who designed our curricula - they thought facts and truths were ‘seeds of poison’ to national integration. They considered it their duty to fiddle with our knowledge of facts in order to maintain social harmony.

Bhyrappa responded, saying nobody can define the purpose of history, but we can discuss the purpose of teaching history, which is to seek the truth about our past. He said categorizing people as majority and minority and attributing historical figures to each community would cause division in society. Why should any Indian think of Mahmud of Ghazni or Aurangzeb as their own people, when these figures killed so many Indians and destroyed so much of our heritage?

Bhyrappa was dropped from the committee and someone else with more amenable ideals replaced him subsequently.

He says,

If education does not impart the intellectual power to face the truth and build emotional maturity, then such education is meaningless. I strongly reiterate: teaching history that is not based on truth is dangerous.

Tipu Sultan, like all Islamic rulers in India has been subjected to severe whitewashing in many ways, and no one knows that better than Bhyrappa (well, maybe the Mysore Royals). Tipu Sultan was valorized mainly because he opposed the British, but that is used to paint him as different from what the facts, including his own writings, would suggest.

Politicians often call Tipu Sultan a great son of Karnataka, but Bhyrappa challenges this idea.

The official language of the Wodeyars was Kannada, but Tipu changed it to Persian. Many of the terms used in land records and revenue in Karnataka to this day are in Persian thanks to him - khatha for property document, jamabandi for record of rights, khaneesumari for census (why didn’t the Wodeyars change this back?). He then went on to change names of places into Persian - Kozhikode became Farrukhabad, Devanahalli to Yusufkhan, Mysore to Nazarabad, and so on.

In addition, he imposed Persian and Urdu as the sole medium of instruction. Thus, while the Muslims of Kerala and Tamil Nadu speak Malayalam and Tamil, those in Karnataka speak Urdu.

Bhyrappa also mentions that in 1796, Tipu Sultan looted the Mysore palace and burned all the valuable and rare books and manuscripts, including palm leaves containing priceless handwritten notes. The resulting fire was used to cook horse gram for his horses. And this is nothing compared to his atrocities in the Malabar:

forcible mass circumcision and conversion, large-scale killings, looting and destruction of hundreds of Hindu temples, and other barbarities like gang-raping helpless women.

And he concludes saying

It is impossible to reinforce nationalism based on the false picturization of history.

In this background, we can see how valuable Dr. Vikram Sampath’s approach is. The dedication to facts and reliance on primary sources examines history beyond ideological filters.

Prior to his books on Savarkar, the media only focused on whether Savarkar ate beef or whether he did or didn’t write mercy petitions. The Savarkar volumes and resulting long-form author interviews have dramatically changed how the public engages with the topic (the mainstream media is mostly unchanged). The voluminous citations in the books have been helpful in going straight to the source and using them not only to call out big names spreading misinformation, but also so we ourselves get a grip on the facts and develop our own narratives.

I’m excited to read further and unpack what Tipu Sultan - The Saga Of Mysore’s Interregnum reveals. In the next post, we’ll go into the origins of Tipu’s father, Haider Ali.

Stay tuned.