In a year that saw the lynching of a man on the outskirts of Delhi for his alleged food preferences, it was inevitable that some others, including a few long dead royals, would be raised from their graves, as it were, to fuel the divisive debate. Tipu Sultan, the “Tiger of Mysore”, provided easy grist to the mill. The decision to celebrate Tipu Sultan’s birthday proved good enough to spark a controversy in 2015. The Karnataka government’s move to mark Tipu’s anniversary in a big way provided the fuel. The battle lines were drawn early on and views were sharply divided. Tipu Sultan was either the villain who put thousands of Hindus and Christians to sword, and ordered many more to be converted to Islam or, he was the great hero — an emancipator who lived ahead of his time.
Sadly for the bigots of our time, the truth is that both versions are equally true. History does not present itself in sharp and clear black and white — but in multiple shades of grey. That was true of Tipu Sultan as much as of any complex and powerful personality who has left a mark on the pages of history. So of Tipu one could say with Shakespeare: “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.” As the tempers were running high on either side of the imagined fault line debating Tipu, nobody seemed to remember the birthday of another famous son of the soil and a scholar to boot, Dara Shikoh. Wronged by his brother as much as by history, we haven’t been fair to the man either. Dara’s 400th birth anniversary on June 20, 2015, passed largely unnoticed. In an ironic twist, it was our neighbours to the west who sort of reminded us of the man. The year witnessed two excellent Pakistani productions of a play based on Dara’s life that were brought to Delhi and played to full houses here in June and again in September.
The multiple shades of grey were also invoked by eminent Hindi playwright Surendra Verma in his Mughal Mahabharat — a compendium of four plays, three tragedies and a comedy. Mr Verma, winner of both the Sahitya Akademi and the Sangeet Natak awards, has dealt with the succession struggles of the later Mughals. The plays invoke the scale and intensity with which the imperial Mughals played the games of power. Needless to add, Mr Verma’s plays have a bearing on contemporary society and politics as well. If Dara could not make it to the 2015 headlines from the front door, Aurangzeb managed to sneak in through the side door. The British, when they laid out Lutyens’ Delhi as the future capital, remembered to name one of the city’s major roads after Aurangzeb. The present government, in its apparent zeal to purify the past of its unwholesome influences, decided to rechristen the road dropping “Aurangzeb” by the wayside, as it were. However, there is a lesson from the life of Aurangzeb that nobody could miss and all rulers should remember. Especially so, when it comes to forcing puritanism down people’s throats.
Francois Bernier, the French traveller, one day called on the emperor and found him looking morose. On being asked the reason, the emperor complained that though he had ordered total prohibition throughout the empire, everybody seemed to be imbibing the spirits except two people — the emperor himself and the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid. Bernier later added his own observation to this narrative. He had visited the Shahi Imam, he wrote, and personally presented him a bottle.
Tipu, too, like Aurangzeb, was fanatical about prohibition. Needless to add that his orders on this were flouted with as regularly as in the case of the Mughal. But the irony is that for all his zeal for prohibition, the sword of Tipu, which lay in the British museum after Tipu had died in battle, was bought at an auction and brought back to Mysore, a little over a decade ago, by, who else but, a liquor baron. History has a way of getting back at the puritans and the prohibitionists.
There is yet another page from the life of Aurangzeb that the narrow-minded bigots of all hues might like to read and ponder. For all his pious puritanism, Aurangzeb could be so cruel as to behead brother Dara, put his head on a platter and send it to his father in prison. And when the father, the erstwhile emperor and the great builder, died a few years later, Aurangzeb ordered his servants to bury him during nighttime without any of his family or friends being present. At the end of it all Aurangzeb himself died in total repentance.
Finally, it is time one puts the record straight on Tipu as well. Tipu was not how the guy was supposed to be known as. His proper name was Sultan Fateh Ali Khan. But nobody cared to call him by his proper name, in his lifetime or later. For everybody he was “Tipu” and has been so since. He acquired this sobriquet from a local saint that the family of Hyder Ali, his father, were devotees of. The saint was called “Tipu Mastan” and the young son of Hyder Ali got to be called Tipu long before he succeeded to the throne to be designated a sultan. In the end, nobody complained. Which other royal would you get to call by his nickname? Equally, it may be for the best that we are closing the year with Bajirao Mastani. This Bollywood blockbuster is about a Peshwa brahmin warrior and his Muslim consort. The moral is not hard to draw. As 2015 draws to a close, whether it be the episode about Tipu Mastan, the saint or Bajirao Mastani, the consort, our take away should be: May the communities trade in love and not war, as the New Year dawns upon us!
The writer has been a foreign correspondent based in Colombo. He is the author of Sri Lanka: A Land in Search of Itself.
Download the all new Deccan Chronicle app for Android and iOS to stay up-to-date with latest headlines and news stories in politics, entertainment, sports, technology, business and much more from India and around the world.
