Safin Mustafa from Mangaluru made an entry into the Noble Book of World Records for floating on water for 2 hours 30 minutes and 13 seconds, on Saturday January 13.
The previous best was by Karanam Snehit Simha of Andhra Pradesh in 2023, who clocked 2 hours 21 minutes 53 seconds.
The record breaking event was held at the swimming pool of Prestige International School, Jeppinamogaru here in the wee hours of Saturday. The 14 year old Safin is class 8 student of Prestige International School, one of the reputed educational institutions in the city.
Displaying the clock to the reporters, Safin said that he was coached by Aromal A S. He also thanked the teachers and the management of Prestige International School for their support and guidance in making the achievement.
Speaking to media, coach Aromal said, “Unexpectedly, I discovered swimming talent in Safin. During the learning phase, he demonstrated remarkable proficiency, comfortably swimming for 15-30 minutes. Inspired, I extended his training hours, and today he has set a world record. I am thrilled by his performance and incredibly proud of him.”
Expressing his joy over Safin’s world record, Haider Ali, chairman, Prestige International School said, “The management, staff and students of our school are proud of Safin Mustafa. He is the icon for us all. Our institution always supports and encourages the students to exhibit and to be experts in their talents. Along with academics, the generation should enjoy their age and climb heights in their fields of interest.”
Safin’s parents Abdul Lathif and Safiya Banu, officials of Noble Book of World Records, witnessed the record breaking moment.
source: http://www.daijiworld.com / DaijiWorld.com / Home> Top Stories / by DaijiWorld Media Network -Mangaluru (SB) / pix by Dayanand Kukkaje / January 13th, 2024
A script has been developed for the Beary language spoken mainly by a section of Muslims and others in the coastal region.
The initiative was taken by the Beary Sahithya Academy and the script was developed by nine-member Beary writers.
Academy President Rahim Ucchil launched the script and said that the script has been developed in such a way that it will sync with the Unicode.
The script is unique. There are plans to launch an app to download the script in mobile phones shortly.
The expert team who developed the script are Abdul Rasheed Zaini Kamil Sakhafi, Aboobakker Siddiq, Haider Ali, Abdul Razak Ananthady, A K Kukkila, Muhammed Fouzeed, Abdul Samad Bava, Abdul Rahiman Kuthethoor and Hamza Malar.
Speaking about the script, Ucchil said it has 13 vowels, 33 consonants, numbers, months and days. Efforts will be made to popularise the script using the online platforms.
Further, he said that the academy has submitted a proposal to introduce Beary as a third language in schools for students from class 6. Once it is approved, Beary language will also be taught in schools as a third language.
He said that Beary language is being spoken by nearly 20 lakh people across the world. It serves as a vital link for Tulu, Malayalam, Kannada, Konkani, Kodava and other languages.
The academy plans to publish Beary Calendar titled ‘Naalkanakk’ for the year 2021, he added.
source: http://www.deccanherald.com / Deccan Herald / Home> State> Mangaluru / by DHNS, Mangaluru / September 12th, 2020
Karnataka’s BJP govt has cancelled Tipu Jayanti, celebrating a ruler once hailed for his bravery and genius, but seen by the right wing as a bigot. We must reexamine Tipu Sultan.
The BJP government in Karnataka has done away with Tipu Sultan celebrations. But, as it is vital to remember Tipu Sultan, in this first-part series, I lead you into the life of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore.
The recent efforts of the Hindu right to project him as a Muslim bigot show that their political stakes in him have changed.
Any opinion on the rule of Tipu Sultan in Mysore will in fact be incomplete without mention of the political situation prevailing in and around Mysore towards the end of the 18th century. Mysore, which had emerged from the ruins of the Vijayanagar empire, was moulded into a small but dynamic Hindu state primarily during the rule of Chikka Devaraja Wodeyar in the early decades of the 18th century.
The Wodiyar kings, who had been ruling Mysore for over 300 years, were only nominal rulers by then — the actual power was wielded by their prime ministers or ‘dalavai’.
Tipu’s father, Haider Ali, began his career in Mysore around 1749, as a soldier under one of these powerful ministers.
He used his tact and bravery to stave off Maratha raids into Mysore, fought against the British and expanded Mysore’s territory down south to the coast of wealthy Calicut. He thus eased himself into the title of the ‘sarvadhikari’ or ‘regent of the kingdom’ in 1760.
After Haider’s death in 1782, Tipu took over his father’s position, keeping the Wodeyar king as a proxy but publicly continuing to put on a show of respect. Tipu’s appropriation of this position would not have been possible without the assistance of some of Haider’s closest friends and advisors as well as the acquiescence of the local populace, who had by then come to see a stronger and more prosperous Mysore under Haider and the young Tipu.
From Madras, the British were cautiously observing the rise of Mysore — and resented Haider’s and Tipu’s push into Malabar.
Tipu Sultan took over Mysore in 1782: He remains its most iconic ruler. (Still from The Sword of Tipu Sultan: Via Author)
A 17-year-old Tipu had given the British a fright by galloping with his army into the East India Company’s garden house near the beach in Madras.
He rattled them so much that the governor there fled offshore in a small boat. A series of four Anglo-Mysore Wars started in 1767. These propelled the hitherto unknown Kingdom of Mysore into the powder rooms of Europe and America.
The first war saw Mysore dictating terms to England at the gates of Madras; the second war was Tipu’s brightest moment. At the battle of Pollilur (1780), the sun-and-tiger-stripes banner of Tipu’s Mysore oversaw the worst disaster that ever befell an English army in India — out of 3,000 men in the British army, only about 400 survived.
With these two victories, the mood in England began to change — and a vicious propaganda and diplomatic campaign against Mysore began.
By 1785, one in seven Englishmen in India was imprisoned by Tipu. By this time, the British had won in Plassey and Buxar; the whole of India except the Punjab and the Marathas had capitulated to them. Tipu’s Mysore stood as a bulwark against the British. What rankled the British even more was that here was a native ruler — or ‘despot’, as they branded all of them — who was different from the others.
He did not while away his time in pleasure orgies, nor leave the management of state to some palace coterie; and not once did he ask the British for help against his neighbours. He created an army which, in the words of his nemesis, Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington), was “the best fighting force in the whole of India”.
He took advantage of the enmities being played out in Europe, recruited the French as willing allies and drilled his army in modern European manoeuvres.
Giving It Back: Unlike several other princely states, Tipu Sultan took the British head-on in ferocious battles. (Picture: India Today)
Mysore was the first state to demonstrate the efficacy of rockets in war by modifying what was until then a mere firecracker into something that could carry a sword or wooden blade with it. Tipu even sent back French weapons with a letter stating they were substandard compared to the ones in his arsenal.
Working almost 18 hours a day, he kept meticulous records of revenue and personnel across his kingdom. He created a set of revenue regulations that rationalised land taxes — and even offered subsidies to farmers if they farmed more land. Landowners and temple trusts with excess landholding were asked to hand it over to landless or tenant farmers. He created a navy that sent ships with his diplomats to meet the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople and the French emperor in Paris. He built a powerful navy, consisting of 20 battleships of 72 cannons and 20 frigates of 62 cannons.
A separate board of admiralty was established in September 1786 and massive dockyards at Jamalabad, Wajidabad and Majidabad were constructed on the west coast to build 40 warships and a number of transport ships to strengthen the naval power. The 200-odd forts under Tipu’s reign were mostly named on Hindu script ions.
An elite group of Brahmin civil servants was nurtured during his early rule to make sure that revenue was properly collected. His forts were among the strongest in south India and his currency so beautifully minted that the Mughal emperor apparently felt slighted at receiving coins more beautiful than his own — he even minted coins with Hindu deities on them.
Deep in the midst of war, he wrote of receiving silkworms to create the silk factories of Mysore.
Sugar and paper factories were established for the first time under him. Sword blades and gunpowder were manufactured locally. He was also liberal with gifts to Hindu religious establishments in Mysore and Malabar after subduing it.
A Visionary Leader: Tipu Sultan was an extraordinary mix of courage, skill and heart. (Still from The Sword of Tipu Sultan: Via Author)
The third Anglo-Mysore war in 1792, with Cornwallis at the helm of the British army, did not go well for Tipu.
He was hard-pressed by the British-Maratha-Nizam allied powers to surrender half his kingdom, submit to a war indemnity of ₹3.3 crore — and deliver two of his sons as hostages to the British. Thanks to his financial prudence, he managed to pay the British their ransom and have his sons released a year earlier than the stipulated three years.
This period between 1792 and the fourth Mysore war in 1799 was one of great tribulation for Mysore — rebellions raged and finances were tight on account of the indemnity paid. However, it is to Tipu’s credit that not once during his rule, in the midst of almost incessant war, did his subjects suffer from famine or pestilence.
At the same time in British Bengal, millions of Indians perished in a famine…
(To be continued).
source: http://www.dailyo.in / DailyO / Home> Open To Opinion> Politics / by Sanjay Khan / August 03rd, 2019
Tipu Sultan, son of Haider Ali, on an elephant in a detail from ‘The Battle of Pollilur’, 1780, a mural at Daria Daulat Palace, Seringapatam. Photo by Bridgeman Iages
If the sultan of Mysore had had a bit more luck, George Washington might be known as the Haider Ali of North America
If the sultan of Mysore had had a bit more luck, George Washington might be known as the Haider Ali of North America. As the ruler of Mysore, a kingdom in what is now southwestern India, Haider fought a series of wars with Great Britain in the latter half of the 18th century, at the onset of the Age of Revolution. While Haider was fighting his last battles against the British, Washington was leading the forces of the nascent United States from the harsh winter at Valley Forge to the final victory at Yorktown.
The circumstances of Haider’s childhood did not seem to mark the young man out for greatness. Born around 1720, Haider soon lost his father, a mercenary officer who died on campaign. Haider followed his father’s path, becoming an officer for the Wodeyar dynasty that ruled Mysore. After many years of service, he grew indispensable to the ruling family, sidelining it entirely by the 1760s. It was a dangerous time to come to power in South Asia. The British East India Company was expanding its power throughout the Subcontinent, at the expense of rulers from Bengal in the east to Haider’s neighbours in the south. Allied with France, however, Haider held off the British advance for another two decades, dying in 1782, just a year before the US triumphed in its own rebellion against Britain.
Haider and Washington never communicated directly with one another, but they fought against a common enemy, and shared a common ally. Like the Mysoreans, the American rebels were members of a global coalition funded by the French government, which saw both uprisings as a chance to humble Britain. In the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), Britain had ended nearly a century of conflict with its imperial rival in North America by seizing France’s vast territories in Canada and the Mississippi River Valley. Some French observers tried to minimise the extent of the defeat. Voltaire dismissed loss of North America as ‘a few acres of snow’. Yet French policymakers were well aware that Britain had greatly increased its power. Too weak to confront it again on its own, the French government wove a network of alliances, playing on resentments against Britain’s growing control of global trade and rapidly expanding empire. Beginning in the mid-1770s, it sent money and military advisors to both Mysore and the US, aiming to avenge its defeat by stoking colonial rebellions against Britain.
The alliance with France proved critical to the survival of the fledgling US. The memory of French aid, and particularly of the dashing Marquis de Lafayette’s assistance to Washington, has for more than two centuries served as a symbolic origins story of close Franco-American relations. During the Revolutionary War, however, Americans saw themselves not just as allies of France, but as part of a coalition that included Mysore.
Even after the US made peace with Britain in 1783, the American fascination with Haider and his son and successor, Tipu Sultan (1750-1799) lived on. Mysore’s rulers became familiar references in American newspapers, poems and everyday conversation. Yet, within a generation, Americans lost their sense of solidarity with the Indian Subcontinent. Mysore remained under British control, written out of the story of the American Revolution. The US turned its attention to the interior of North America, and to becoming an imperial power in its own right.
Even before the Revolutionary War, American interest in South Asia was lively. In fact, Americans’ rebellion against Britain in part grew out of the connections between America and the Subcontinent. Before the 1770s, Americans were cheerleaders, rather than critics, of British imperialism. The Philadelphia-born poet Nathaniel Evans (1742-1767) commemorated the victory of the East India Company at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, in which Robert Clive had seized control of Bengal:
The world to British valour yields
How has bold Clive, with martial toil
O’er India born his conqu’ring lance?
Sharing in Britain’s glory in this way seemed natural to Americans, who were proud to be part of the British Empire. The East India Company’s growing influence in Bengal enabled it to export large quantities of South Asian goods, particularly textiles, to American ports such as Boston and Charleston. Colonial elites displayed them in their homes with pride, signs that they were part of a global British empire growing rich from the spoils of the Subcontinent.
While Americans were free to purchase these imperial commodities, they were not free to join British merchants in South Asia. Britain’s colonies served to provide the motherland with raw materials. They were not supposed to have direct economic relations with each other, but rather to send their exports to the great trading centre of London. New England merchants in particular resented being pushed to the side of the mercantile system. Following military victories by the East India Company in South Asia, the company’s economic power within the British Empire, including North America, grew even greater, and so too did New England merchants’ resentment.
In 1773, the British government issued the Tea Act, a bill in effect subsidising the East India Company so it could sell tea to North America more cheaply than any other company. The Tea Act was meant to save the Company’s struggling finances, which were sinking under the cost of its expensive wars. By allowing the Company to sell its tea without paying the heavy taxes normally due on tea exports to the colonies, British officials thought they could help the Company while also keeping Americans happy. Because of the taxes levied on it, tea was expensive in the colonies, and tea-loving New Englanders often resorted to buying theirs on the black market. If the Company no longer had to pay these taxes, it could pass the savings on to thirsty American consumers.
Seeing themselves as victims of Britain’s imperial oppression, Americans sympathised with the empire’s other victims: South Asians
The colonists, however, did not respond as the British expected. By granting the East India Company an exemption from the tax, Parliament had confirmed that the tax on tea, passed without Americans’ consent, was there to stay for all other merchants. And the smugglers that the British government hoped to cut out of the tea business were influential members of New England society. On 16 December 1773, economic self-interest combined with principled opposition to taxation inspired a group of protestors to attack a Company shipment of tea, dumping its contents into the ocean.
The Boston Tea Party marked Americans’ growing opposition to British rule, and the beginning of a new perspective on South Asia. The British government retaliated by stripping Massachusetts of its right to self-government. Outraged colonists met in 1774 to form the First Continental Congress. The following year, armed conflict between colonial militias and British soldiers broke out at Lexington and Concord, and the American Revolution was underway. Americans started to see themselves as victims of Britain’s imperial oppression. They were soon sympathising with the empire’s other victims, particularly South Asians.
The American revolt against Britain quickly took on international dimensions. In 1776, the Continental Congress declared independence, transforming the former British colonies into the United States of America. American agents were soon busy seeking international recognition and goodwill from countries including Morocco, the Netherlands and, most importantly, France, Britain’s imperial rival. Within a year, the French government began sending aid to the fledgling US. A year later, in 1778, France and the US officially became allies.
The Continental Congress recognised that it was not France’s only partner against Britain, and looked for ways to cooperate with Mysore, France’s South Asian ally. In 1777, on the advice of Thomas Conway, an Irish-born French military advisor, the American patriots contemplated sending troops to join the French military expedition to the Subcontinent. The provisional American government lacked the resources for such a scheme, so instead it encouraged American privateers to attack the East India Company’s shipping to weaken Britain’s economic grasp on South Asia.
Different state governments also made friendly gestures toward Mysore. In 1781, the Pennsylvania legislature commissioned a warship named theHyder-Ally, an eccentrically spelled tribute to the Sultan of Mysore. This ship sailed the North Atlantic only, far from the Indian Ocean. Its existence, however, demonstrated the affinity American elites felt for Mysore’s cause. Philip Freneau, an ally of Thomas Jefferson and one of the country’s leading poets, wrote a poem in honour of the Hyder-Ally and its namesake, the sultan of Mysore:
From an Eastern prince she takes her name,
Who, smit with freedom’s sacred flame
Usurping Britons brought to shame,
His country’s wrongs avenging.
Clearly, nothing prevented these 18th-century Americans from seeing faraway Asian peoples as exemplars of liberty.
Despite Freneau’s optimistic vision, freedom’s sacred flame did not save South Asia. By the early 1780s, it was becoming clear that Britain would lose the war. Many Americans happily imagined a post-war world in which the East India Company would no longer be a significant force. Britain, however, managed to hold on to its territory in the Subcontinent, resisting the combined forces of Mysore and France.
France’s military support for Mysore and the US helped drive it into crippling debt and push French society toward its own, more radical revolution. Meanwhile, Britain’s finances survived the conflict intact, allowing it to continue an aggressive policy in the Subcontinent after 1783. The cash-strapped French, however, could maintain only a token military presence in the region. The situation left Mysore’s new ruler, Tipu Sultan, to his own devices. He resisted mounting pressure from the British for nearly two decades, succumbing only in 1799. He died beneath the walls of his citadel as he fought a last-ditch battle against the East India Company.
The American government adjusted to the new realities of South Asian politics. New England merchants eagerly sought to trade directly with the Subcontinent. In the first years after the end of the Revolutionary War, they relied on the French colony of Pondicherry on the southeastern coast of the Subcontinent as a port. They soon realised however that they could not enter the region’s most lucrative markets without the permission of the British East India Company. They lobbied for the establishment of American consulates to foster goodwill for American interests. Responding to their pressure, the US government created its first consulate in South Asia in 1792, in Calcutta. Two years later, in Madras, they added another. American consuls in the region were responsible only for relations with the Company. They had no contacts with independent South Asian states such as Mysore, which the American government, like the French, left to fend for itself.
Only recently an enemy of the British empire, America had won independence and become Britain’s junior partner in empire
On a state level, American interest in Mysore disappeared. But many Americans remained fascinated by Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan. When Tipu sent a team of ambassadors to Paris in 1788, in an unsuccessful attempt to restore the Franco-Mysorean alliance, Jefferson, then the American minister to France, reported on the event with keen interest. Like Jefferson, a wide range of Americans were eager to learn more about Mysore. American newspapers of the 1780s and ’90s reported on the country’s desperate struggle with Britain. American textbooks, including Jedidiah Morse’s influential The American Universal Geography (1793), included sections on Mysore. Haider and Tipu seem to have approached the status of household names. In Williams vs Cabarrus (1793), a lawsuit brought before a circuit court in North Carolina, the two parties disputed a wager made on a horse race. One of the horses was named ‘Hyder Ali’ in tribute to Mysore’s former ruler.
Even in the wake of Tipu’s final defeat, in 1799, his struggle for an independent Mysore continued to echo in the imagination of Americans. In his sermon on 4 July 1800, John Russell, a Baptist minister in Providence, warned his audience about the dangers of British imperialism. While many Americans, such as Alexander Hamilton, advocated for closer ties to Britain, Russell insisted that Britain could not be trusted. The ultimate example of British injustice, he argued, was its conquest of Mysore. Deeply moved by what he saw as Tipu’s heroic resistance, Russell told his congregation of Tipu’s death at the hands of British soldiers: ‘here the full heart must have vent… [Tipu Sultan] defended his power with a spirit which showed he deserved it. His death was worthy of a king.’
For Russell, Tipu’s end ought to warn America about the mortal dangers of empire. By the early 19th century, however, America had embarked on its own imperial project. American missionaries fanned out across North America, travelled to the Levant, and poured into South Asia, writing glowing reports back home on the work that the British were doing to ‘civilise’ the world, including the Subcontinent. Only recently an enemy of the British empire, America had won independence and become Britain’s junior partner in empire.
American diplomats, merchants and missionaries in South Asia accepted Britain’s empire in South Asia, working alongside it to profit from local trade or proselytise to potential converts. Over the following decades, foreign policy officials, commercial interests and religious groups pushed for the US to acquire a colonial empire of its own. Just like the British empire Americans had once rebelled against, the US became an imperial power, with colonies stretching from Puerto Rico and Guantánamo in the Caribbean to the Philippines in the Pacific.
Today, with military bases in more than 70 countries across the globe, the US remains an empire. Yet, the generation of Americans who fought for independence from Britain and laid the foundations of America’s identity saw the US as an anti-imperial cause and nation. The founding generation and the children of the founders were fascinated with Mysore and its leaders because they thought Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan embodied American values of resistance to empire and aspiration to freedom. If later generations of Americans had continued to see Haider and Tipu as heroes, had continued to identify with underdogs and anti-imperial causes, then the US, and indeed the world, might look quite different today.
source: http://www.aeon.com / Aeon / Home> Essays / by Blake Smith / Edited by Sam Haselby / December 07th, 2016
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Blake Smith is a postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His research, focusing on the French East India Company, has appeared in scholarly journals such as French Cultural Studies and the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, as well as popular media such as The Wire and The Appendix.
