Tipu Sultan Research Articles

Stato e costituzionalismo (post)coloniali in India. Differenze e attraversamenti

The article argues that the end of the formal division of the world between a colonizing metropolis and a colonized periphery requires a different reading of the State’s history. The essay deals with the relation between the formation of British India and the development of Indian nationalist movement through the events related to the ‘tiger of Mysore’, Tipu Sultan, and the swadeshi movement as portrayed in Tagore’s The Home and the World. The essay shows how colonial constitutionalism developed through the contemporary affirmation of the rule of law and the colonial difference. The postcolonial State emerged via concrete crossing of this difference, which today allows a different reading of the political discourses beyond the affirmation of the State as the barycenter of political organization at a global scale.

Tipu Sultan in History

This historiographical essay seeks to chart a middle course between what may be called Tipu bashing and, to borrow an expression from Anne Buddle, “Tipu Mania,” with a view to providing a balanced view of Tipu Sultan the man and the statesman. This study is premised on the verdict of Joseph François Michaud who not only admires the Sultan’s courage and noble intentions but also laments his superstition, lack of discretion and farsight, apathy to deliberations, and counterproductive stubbornness that inevitably led to his undoing. Tipu’s tenacious conviction in the rectitude of his policies and measures deprived him of the sagacity to mend and amend them as and when necessary. The American gymnast and three-time Olympian Dominique Dawes observed that people do not plan to fail but respond to failure when it occurs by bouncing back and responding to it. Tipu Sultan’s misfortune was that he failed to learn from his failures.

Review: Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India, 1770–1830

Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India, 1770–1830 . Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. 11 October–31 December 2011. The chronologies and categories of the architectural history of South Asia were crystallized in the mid-nineteenth century. British and Indian historians and antiquarians built upon a corpus of knowledge accumulated since the late eighteenth century that included picturesque depictions, exploratory essays, and the piecemeal documentation of sites. Many of these were published in Asiatick Researches , the journal of an association established in 1784 and initially comprised of British orientalists, antiquarians, and dilettantes, called the Asiatick Society. These early years of scholarship on India were critical to British imperial expansion, yet information regarding agents, techniques and processes is still incomplete. Historians agree that Indians played pivotal roles in the production and illustration of this knowledge, but their specific contributions largely remain relegated to discussions of “native assistants” and “Company artists.” Adapting the Eye , at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, made a significant contribution toward filling out this story. The focus was on a network of patrons, artists, and assistants in western India beginning around 1790, the year that the East India Company signed a treaty with the Maratha Peshwa Madhavrao II against Tipu Sultan of Mysore. The broker of this treaty, Charles Warre Malet, was also the principal patron who facilitated the work of artists James Forbes, James Wales, Gangaram Chintaman Tambat, and Robert Mabon. Curated by Holly Shaffer under the supervision of Gillian Forrester, the center’s …

A Neutered Beast? Representations of the Sons of Tipu Sultan -‘The Tiger of Mysore’- as Hostages in the 1790s

In 1792 the British took two young Indian princes as hostages to guarantee that their father, Tipu Sultan, would meet the terms of his surrender. This article analyses the art works that emerged in response to that event, arguing that this seemingly triumphal imagery was an ambivalent phenomenon in which can be found significant undercurrents of anxiety over the morality of the capture of children. I suggest that the hostage imagery's recourse to paternalistic motifs in fact demonstrates the crises of legitimacy that paternalism encountered as it attempted to establish itself as a moral incarnation of an increasingly aggressive imperial power.

British Assessments of Tipu Sultan’s Hill Forts in Northern Mysore, South India, 1802

Hundreds of early modern forts dot the South Indian landscape, but more is known about their art-historical aspects than how these fortifications were built, maintained, and used. The latter aspects are examined in a comparative analysis of six Mysore hill forts, using East India Company surveys that were prepared in 1802 shortly after British forces took command of these installations from Tipu Sultan’s garrisons. These highly detailed inventories show that the hill forts were poorly maintained, inadequately supplied, contained relatively few garrison buildings, and, from the British perspective at least, were inadequately armed to mount a successful defense. At the turn of the century, these forts were functionally obsolete, ill prepared to serve as supply depots, and strategically valuable only to quiet local populations and deny the use of such places to potential enemies.

The Decisive Nature of the Indian War Rocket in the Anglo-Mysore Wars of the Eighteenth Century

The glorious history of the Indian war rocket, also known as the Mysore rocket, is examined, including the role of Tipu Sultan, the son of the King of Mysore. The technological aspects are explained in brief to reveal the reasons for the destructiveness of the rocket. This weapon provides significant evidence of the advanced state of development of military technology in the Indian continent during the pre-colonial era at the time of the Anglo-Mysore wars against the British. The use of captured Indian rockets to develop the British Congreve rocket is described and the global spread of rocket technology from these Indian rockets is explained.

Smallpox in the modern scientific and colonial contexts 1721–1840

Maritime voyages in the centuries immediately following Columbus and Vasco da Gama transformed not only Europe’s economy but also its mindset. For the first time in history, prosperity depended not on the goodwill of the God or the King but on the initiative of the merchant and the skills of the navigator and the artisan. Huge profits were waiting to be made if ships could sail to distant lands and return home safely. Knowledge lay not in the past but in the future, not in the archives but out in the open. And knowledge meant wealth. When the East India Company was established, the telescope had not yet been invented. It is no more than a coincidence that the invention of the telescope (Van Helden 1977) took place in the Netherlands the same year (1608) the first English ship reached India. This numerology brings home the important point that modern science and technology grew hand in hand with maritime exploration, colonial expansion and domination over nature and fellow human beings. Scientific and industrial activity triggered by oceanic voyages can be discussed under three heads. First, there were efforts to make the voyages safe. Second, activity was triggered in Europe by the arrival of new things, such as vibrantly printed and dyed cotton textiles. This eventually led to the industrial revolution. Third, accumulated knowledge from distant lands was incorporated into the European mainstream. The best brains of the time applied themselves to furthering maritime activities. Many names, such as Henry Briggs (1561–1636) and Robert Boyle (162–1691), which are celebrated in the history of science, figure in the annals of trading companies as well. With time, feudal forces weakened, mercantile elements gained ground, and Europe in general became receptive to new ideas and influences. Europeans took great interest in the skills and knowledge of the natives in India and the East in general for the sake of their own survival, out of curiosity and for making an impact back home. Traditional empirical technologies from the East were examined and incorporated into the European mainstream. The process of extraction of metallic zinc by inverse distillation that originated in the Aravalli Hills, India, in ancient times was patented by William Champion in 1738 as Bristol process. Analyses of the samples of Indian carbon steel, wootz, and the process of its making led to advances in European steel technology. Similarly, the metal-cased Mysore rockets used against the British by Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan served as the starting point for the development of Congreve rockets, which served Britain well in its wars against France and USA.

Accessing the Unseen Realm: The Historical and Textual Contexts of Tipu Sultan's Dream Register

AbstractPlacing Tipu Sultan of Mysore's personal dream register in its textual and historical contexts reveals an internal logic to its structure and content that scholars have not previously recognised. An analysis of the manuscript as a whole suggests that it was compiled no earlier than 1795, as part of a range of strategies adopted by Tipu to ameliorate the position in which he found himself in the late 1790s. Isolated by his regional contemporaries and under increasing pressure from the British, he drew on a range of divinatory practices in an attempt to understand, and perhaps even influence, the outcome of events.

British Seapower and the Mysore Wars of the Eighteenth Century

The naval aspirations of Hyder Ali (1760–82) and Tipu Sultan (1782–99), rulers of the southern Indian state of Mysore, is a much neglected subject. In creating a naval force, that clearly emulated those of the European nations, it was seen as a means of first neutralizing the power of the British before being ultimately used to remove all European colonizers from the subcontinent. Factors both aiding and working against the creation of this fleet are discussed together with the interest shown by the French in developing a working arrangement with the nascent Mysore naval power. That the efforts of the two Mysore rulers came to very little was a result of a series of swift and decisive actions taken by the British at the outset of any period of hostility combined with the difficulties faced by a land power developing an effective maritime force.

Among the Unbelievers: ‘Non-Muslim’ Elements in Tipu Sultan's Dreams

The death at the hands of British troops of Tipu Sultan Fath ‘Ali Khan (r. 1782–1799), the Muslim ruler of the predominantly-Hindu south Indian kingdom of Mysore, led to the discovery of an intrigu...

The Dreams of Kings: A Comparative Discussion of the Recorded Dreams of Tipu Sultan of Mysore and Peter the Great of Russia

AbstractA comparative study of some recorded dreams of two significant royal figures—Tipu Sultan of Mysore and Tsar Peter the Great of Russia—allows us to ask whether we can see similar processes at work. This is done in order to re-assess the view that Peter's actions in this regard reflected his curious nature and not a belief in the prognostic or divinatory qualities of dreams. By drawing on the latest scholarship on historical dreams and dreams in history, this re-assessment underlines the importance of cultural and historical context to the understanding of dreams and dream practices, as well as the close connection between dreaming and authority.

Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 (review)

Reviewed by: Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 Mita Choudhury (bio) Daniel O’Quinn. Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 Johns Hopkins University Press. xi, 412. US $60.00 The evolution of British national identity in the last three decades of the eighteenth century was the result of a series of 'crises in governance' caused not only by the loss of the American colonies but also by the constantly fluctuating economic and administrative predicaments of the East India Company. There is no better way to study the crises, Daniel O'Quinn argues, than to locate the 'shifts in governmentality in the theatricalization of imperial affairs.' Economic instability, political turmoil, and the resultant social anxieties created the need towards the end of the century to re-examine the constitutionality of Empire and the contingencies of maintaining an imperial stance in the face of overwhelming evidence of corruption and chaos in the colonies. This is a conscientious – and commendable – attempt to understand the ways in which the task of nation-building relies upon orchestrated performances of national identity. By transcending disciplinary boundaries and asking the questions that involve radical realignment in several overlapping fields, O'Quinn has made a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century studies. Divided into three parts – 'Ethnographic Acts,' 'Women and the Trials of Imperial Masculinity,' and 'A Theatre of Perpetual War' – this book does not claim to present a linear narrative that conjoins parliamentary, imperial, and theatrical history into one cohesive trajectory; but rather, it selectively points to specific moments in the British cultural imagination when the business of empire, the anxieties of financial strain, and the immediacy of intercultural engagements create ideal settings for self-reflexive dramatizations, both in the theatre and in Parliament, which becomes a battleground for rehearsing foreign policy, and the philosophy of empire. The first part of Staging Governance is divided into two chapters, the first of which situates Samuel Foote's The Nabob not only in the context of anti-nabob discourse but also amid a complex web of sociopolitical anxieties linked to the East India Company's rapidly changing status – from a commercial enterprise to an imperial organ. The strength of this chapter lies in its strategic juxtaposition of several dramatic events that frame [End Page 432] Foote's satire: the passing of the Regulating Act; Parliament's new role as guardian of the company; Robert Clive's frequently cited speech defending British actions in Bengal; and the volatile nature of Britain's economic reliance upon a company with dubious dealings with Indian rulers and Indian bankers, creating a system of credit that was perceived as being shaky at best. O'Quinn extends his analysis of 'ethnographic acts' with a careful consideration in the next chapter of Omai; or, a Trip round the World, the spectacular pantomime that celebrates the protoanthropological instincts of the time and explores the theatrics of sexual and racial clash when Britain's Pacific fantasies encounter the real Omai. As museological elements interact with pantomimical strategies in The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, the spectator witnesses 'the theatre as an exhibition space,' O'Quinn contends, where Britannia is variously represented. The book's strongest arguments lie in 'The Theatre of Perpetual War' – the third part of Staging Governance. The purpose of the chapter in this segment titled 'Starke Reforms' is to present a reciprocal equivalence between Cornwallis's military reforms and Marianna Starke's The Sword of Peace in which the 'proliferation of "brown families" poses a threat to the stability of Britain's distant sovereignty.' The next chapter in the same segment, 'Tipu Sultan and the Allure of the Mechanical Display,' outlines the role of military spectacles at a time when Cornwallis's establishment of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal and his decisive victory over Tipu Sultan called for the mobilization of dramatic narratives that endorsed these significant steps towards consolidating the British empire in India. O'Quinn has repeatedly and appropriately cited Foucault, but this study does not embrace the ferocity of Foucault's oppositional discourse, nor does it claim to address the incommensurability of the fundamentally disjunct performative instincts that define the colonizer and the colonized. Thus the tortured historiography of the...

Beyond exceptionalism

Despite many institutional restraints, several independent strands of research on south Indian history have developed and flourished in ways that significantly revise older and influential historiographical formulations. This article explores the ways in which historians of the geographical south have made productive use of the ‘incommensurability’ of geography and history. To begin with, I briefly sketch some of the historical and historiographical constructions of the ‘south’, usually as a space of difference from the dominant north (Section I). This has produced a series of ‘inclusions/exclusions’ vis-à-vis not just the north, but within the geographical south itself. I discuss three somewhat disparate sites in new and largely unpublished work on south India that move beyond the trope of ‘exceptionalism’ to generate new insights on Indian history: new modes of fashioning the self, as in new scholarship on Keralam; a new way of conceptualising a region such as Karnataka; and finally, new perspectives on even such well-known and researched historical figures such as Tipu Sultan. Such scholarship is relatively unencumbered by earlier laments either about the paucity of sources for histories of the geographical south, or about the ‘politics of mention’ in broader ‘Indian’ histories.

?Face Him Like a Briton?: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800-1875

By 1864, when British Army officer Walter Campbell offered this advice, tigers and tiger hunting had become invested with several potent meanings. As royal beasts and kings and masters of the jungle, tigers had been closely associated historically with Indian and other Southeast Asian rulers (Wessing 27), associations of which many nineteenth-century Britons were keenly aware. Not only did many Britons seek to emulate various Mughal emperors for whom tiger hunting was an element of kingship, but on the way to presuming themselves the New Mughals they had to outdo various regional rulers such as Mysore's Tipu Sultan (who held power from 1782 to 1799) who also employed tigers as powerful symbols of their rule (Brittlebank 140-46). Tigers also represented for the British all that was wild and untamed in the Indian natural world. Thus, the curious late Victorian and Edwardian spectacle of British royals and other dignitaries being photographed standing aside dead tiger carcasses depicted the staging of the successful conquest of Indian nature by virile imperialists (MacKenzie 47). More generally, tiger hunting was an important symbol in the construction of British imperial and masculine identities during the nineteenth century. Precisely because tigers were dangerous and powerful beasts, tiger hunting represented a struggle with fearsome nature that needed to be resolutely faced like a Briton, as Campbell put it (162). Only by successfully vanquishing tigers would Britons prove their manliness and their fitness to rule over Indians. Much has been written about the place of the tiger in Indian and other Southeast Asian cultures during the precolonial period,

Tipu Sultan, History Painting and the Battle for ‘Perspective’

The military defeat and death of Tipu Sultan in the Fourth Mysore War (1799) paved the way for the establishment of British rule over most parts of India. This event may also be considered a turning point in the history of visual practices in India. The British struggle to defeat this indomit-able enemy on the battlefield was re-enacted within the realm of the visual. This essay examines the question of whether colonial rule signalled the arrival of ‘perspective’ as a compulsory site of viewing in the modern period. Through a comparison of two sets of ‘history painting’, the essay argues that the decisive defeat of earlier ways of seeing and staking a claim to legitimacy took far longer than the military conquest, leading to the emergence of a Mysore traditional style alongside forms of realism that echoed the split between real (colonial) and de jure (Wodeyar) power in the princely state of Mysore.

From Tadri to Basra: The Journey of Khwaja Abdul Qadir as Recounted in the Waqai-I Manazil-I Rum

The Waqai-i Manazil-i Rum is an important Indian document of the late 18th century. An incomplete account of Tipu Sultan of Mysore’s embassy to the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid I, it provides a fascinating insight into the travails of sea voyages of the time, as well as descriptions of local conditions along the Persian Gulf. Of note is its frankness in reporting the internal squabbling, desertions and difficulties endured by the mission. A reassessment of the text, in the context of recent scholarly interest in travel writing, reveals similarities with other Muslim travelogues. In addition, questions are raised regarding the diary’s authorship, in the light of Tipu’s recently translated instructions to his envoys.

Widows, Pariahs, and Bayaderes : India as Spectacle (review)

Reviewed by: Widows, Pariahs, and Bayadères: India as Spectacle Sudipto Chatterjee Widows, Pariahs, and Bayadères: India as Spectacle. By Binita Mehta. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002; pp. 282. $49.50 cloth. Most academic publishers these days have a line in the area of postcolonial studies, including titles about colonialism in South Asia, concentrating on history, politics, gender, and sociology. However, very few of these publishers offer little, if anything, about colonial performance. Bucknell University Press has done the non-normative and published this book, which intersects the fields of postcolonial studies and performance. The book is noteworthy not merely because it conjoins overlapping concerns of postcoloniality and performance, but also because it addresses a cultural encounter between India and Europe seldom paid worthwhile critical attention in either postcolonial or performance studies: the colonial interactions between France and India that did not lead to a French Empire in India; France was effectively jostled out by the British, despite its best imperial designs and efforts. While following the trajectory of critical discourse [End Page 543] generated by Edward Said's Orientalism (thus pursuing the binary opposition he noted between the Occident and the Orient as colonizer and colonized), Mehta also picks up the line of criticism leveled against the main methodological lacuna in Said's argument: namely, his failure to register the heterogeneous quality of the West's discourse about the Orient. In her attempt to address this, Mehta claims to "demonstrate that theater was more than just a metaphor. An India was literally created onstage for the enjoyment of the West" (35). Mehta chooses several plays from extant French drama on the subject ranging over two hundred years, from the late eighteenth through the late twentieth centuries. She consistently demonstrates the presence of both contiguous linkages and subversive discontinuities in the way French discourse on India evolved. She argues that the French presence in India moved from expressly imperialistic designs (rivalry with the British in establishing colonial commerce and empire) to—once imperial intentions had wilted—creating a fantastically fixed Other through which to talk about French nationhood. In fact, Mehta argues "that French playwrights 'invented' India precisely because France lost its colonies in India in the eighteenth century" (32), suggesting that after 1761 French theatrical representations sans effective colonial sway "deal largely with Indian social customs and do not overtly depict French imperialist policies" (42). After a short first chapter that examines the grand colonial exhibitions and Orientalist spectacles as proof of the European imperial desire to gaze upon the colonial via performance, Mehta turns to specific French plays. Chapter 2 examines Antoine-Marin Lemierre's La Veuve du Malabar (1770) to explore how the French endorsed the pan-European ideology of colonialism as mission civilisatrice. We see a young French general "save" an Indian widow from immolating herself on her husband's funeral pyre, even as two Indian Brahmins (one supporting the practice, known as sati, and the other denouncing it) fight the battle of beliefs. The third chapter examines Etienne de Jouy's Tippo-Saëb (1813), a history play about Tipu Sultan's tragic fight against the British that emphasizes French involvement in the affair. Critical of the British, Jouy's play supports the French standpoint. Regrettably, "the Indian side of things is not really considered, even though India is the territory contested by the two European powers" (94–95). Chapter 4 treats Casimir Delavigne's Le Paria (1821), a play about the Indian caste system written in the French classical mode. It depicts a climactic day in the life of the much-admired Idamore, an untouchable (or pariah), in love with Néala, daughter of a Brahmin. Idamore is elevated to hero status when he sacrifices his own life to save his father's. Although ostensibly set in India, Delavigne's play—fitted with a Greek-style chorus "of Brahmins, warriors, and people"—is more about "France's political, social, and religious preoccupations during the Restoration period" (125). Chapter 5 deals with Sacountala (1858), a ballet by Théophile Gautier, adapted from the tenth-century Indian dramatist Kalidasa's celebrated Abhijnan Shakuntala. In this chapter Mehta, for the first time, devotes extensive attention to...

TRADING KNOWLEDGE: THE EAST INDIA COMPANY'S ELEPHANTS IN INDIA AND BRITAIN

During the East India Company's rule of India, Britons observed the pervasiveness of elephants in local modes of warfare, hunting, trade, and religious symbolism. The colonizers appropriated this knowledge about elephants: for instance, in the taking-over of Mughal trade routes or Tipu Sultan's stables. What Indians knew about the elephant also fed into a metropolitan culture of anthropomorphism, exemplified in the celebrated shooting of the elephant Chuny in 1826. Anthropomorphic approaches to the elephant held by Britons worked alongside Sanskrit texts and Mughal paintings. These hybrid understandings gave way by the mid-century to an allegedly objective and Christian science of animals, which could not be tainted by what was called pagan superstition. By using the elephant as a point of focus, this article urges the importance of popular traditions of colonial exchange in the emergence of science, and cautions against the reification of indigenous knowledge. The argument aims to show the strengths of a history of knowledge-making that is not focused on elites, the metropolis, or the periphery. A study of the uses of the elephant in colonialism also suggests the multiple and easily interchangeable meanings that animals could carry.

Tipu Sultan and the Christians

This paper investigates the relationship of Tipu Sultan of Mysore with the Christians of southern India, with the objective of clearing up some historical misunderstandings and misconceptions. It argues that Tipu's encounters and dealings with the Christians of both European and Indian origin were in accordance with the spirit of his times and also had a political dimension, often neglected by historians. It also maintains that Tipu did nothing more than the Portuguese, the French, the English and the Marathas did or had done.

Tales of Treachery: Rumour as the Source of Claims that Tipu Sultan was Betrayed

One of the more famous episodes in the narrative of British colonial expansion in India, and one that has been extensively mythologized, is the death in 1799 of Tipu Sultan and the fall of his capital, Srirangapattana. British troops, supported by their Indian allies—in particular, the forces of Hyderabad—stormed the island fortress on 4 May, bringing to an end the Mysore kingdom's role as the last significant indigenous power in the south. The old Hindu Wodeyar dynasty was reinstated and the kingdom itself was reduced to a landlocked state, with much of its territory redistributed among the victors. It is not the purpose of this article to attempt an analysis of why Tipu was defeated. Rather its aim is to underline the importance of returning to sources and re-examining evidence, even, or perhaps especially, if beliefs about a certain event have been held for so long. This is particularly true in the case of such an evocative and contentious figure as Tipu Sultan, whose life and legacy have been appropriated by interests in polemical debates over at least the last 150 years. As the following discussion will show, if one is to achieve a better understanding of an event such as the fall of Srirangapattana and its aftermath, a return to the sources is imperative.