Tag Archives: Tiger-The Life of Tipu Sultan

Three lions and Tipu’s Tiger

KARNATAKA / London, UNITED KINGDOM  :

Could the Tiger’s position — now behind a glass case, its crank handle inaccessible to the public — be an apology for the disrespect permitted in East India House?
Could the Tiger’s position — now behind a glass case, its crank handle inaccessible to the public — be an apology for the disrespect permitted in East India House?

The artefact sitting in V&A was iconic, identifiable and far away from home

The day I saw Tipu’s Tiger behind its glass case at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London was a day of significance. That morning, after months of being cooped up in Oxford, some friends and I took the train to Marylebone and found the absence of dreaming spires refreshing to say the least. At noon, a friend from India was waiting for me on the other side of the busy Camden High Street. As we hugged amidst the crush of gliding Londoners, her muffled exclamation might have been: ‘It’s so crazy we’re meeting here of all places, so far from home.’

That phrase would be borrowed by me on two separate occasions during the day. In the evening, I stood before Julian Barnes at the Royal Institution and told him how I had read ‘A Short History of Hairdressing’ over and over again to teach myself the ‘architecture’ of a short story. I felt a potent urge then to parrot my friend. It was ‘crazy’ to see and hear Barnes in the flesh, so far from my bedroom in Kolkata, the only other place he had seemed real and, dare I say, attainable through his prose and through the material object, that is, his books in my hands, the only feasible rendezvous with the man.

I had never thought then it would happen: to have someone I studied so minutely sit before me and confess he didn’t think as highly of his short prose as I did.

Iconic meeting

The second occasion I was inclined to echo her words that day was when I stood in the South Asia section of the V&A before Tipu’s Tiger, which had always been relegated to the Did You Know section of our history books. It was not exactly like meeting an old friend or a revered author, but it bore all the characteristics of such a meeting. Like Barnes and my Kolkata friend, it was instantly iconic, identifiable from a distance, and a ready reminder of my distance from India. In fact, standing before the wooden automaton, slightly disconcerted, I addressed it and thought: ‘You are so far away from home.’

The possible inspiration for the mechanical figure seems fitting to some. Hector Munro Jr, whose father defeated Tipu’s father Hyder Ali in the Second Anglo-Mysore War in 1781, was mauled by a royal Bengal tiger at Saugor Island in 1792 and died from the injuries. This must have seemed like divine intervention to Tipu, a wrong set right. The carved and painted, almost life-size, wooden musical automaton was created for the Sultan, whose personal emblem was a tiger and whose hatred of the British was well-known.

The last laugh

With the fall, however, of Seringapatam and the execution of Tipu in the Fourth Mysore War of 1799, the Tiger travelled from the music room of Tipu’s summer palace to the Company’s East India House at Leadenhall Street in London, where the public was given access to view and play with it.

Its wooden body with a keyboard embedded in the flank was thrown open to the English masses who came in and played ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule, Brittania!’ upon it. If Tipu thought he had been mocking the Englishmen with the Tiger, they were now having the last laugh.

I deal with issues of empire and post-colonial anxiety almost on a daily basis, especially in a place like Oxford, especially on a course called World Literatures in English. Of course, when I first saw it, I silently demanded a restoration of the tiger to its previous owner, to its previous nation. My anger at seeing the Tiger in an English museum, so far away from home, was justifiable. The Tiger was not borrowed. Nor was it touring, as it had to New York’s MoMA in the 50s. Instead, it was a ‘permanent’ acquisition at the V&A.

Of collaborations

For every Indian schoolchild, the Tiger, just an artefact but nonetheless awe-inspiring, was not an affordable train or flight away, like Fatehpur Sikri or Sher Shah’s tomb.

For me, the Tiger’s distance from my home was a reiteration of the national and racial distinctions not only of the Anglo-Mysore variety, but also of the Jadavpur-Oxford type that I faced every day. Besides dodging questions like ‘If you’re from India, how’s your English so good?’ for the past few months, I had had to clarify to a white friend who subsisted on the chic-ideal of Zadie Smith that India has Bengalis too, and no, I did not have relatives in Brick Lane, not that I knew of anyway.

Seeing Tipu’s Tiger that day catalysed a recollection of an afternoon in 2016 in the Victoria Memorial Hall with Thomas Daniell and his nephew William. Their tranquil scenes of India, while in stark contrast to the ferocity of the Tiger, do something interesting.

The English hands of the Daniells reproduce the Indian hands of the architects behind the buildings and locations they sketch. Their canvas becomes a surface of Anglo-Indian collaboration, similar to how it is conjectured that the mechanics of the Tiger have an Indo-French history.

This recollection, and the subsequent contemplation on collaboration, made me think of several works of restoration that the V&A carried out upon the Tiger, especially after the bombing of London in World War II. Could this act of restoration be seen as an act of reparation? Could the Tiger’s position — now behind a glass case, its crank handle inaccessible to the public — be an apology for the disrespect permitted in East India House?

The Tiger, so far from home, is an icon that reminds me of a past based on plunder and pillage by the nation it sits in. Yet, its 18th century splendour has weathered war and wear so well. Do present acts of safekeeping obliterate the violent history of its, for want of a better word, theft?

I am persuaded to wonder if the Tiger is now a collaboration between Tipu’s Mysore craftsmen and its modern conservationists in England and if I should be thankful for the restoration. Are the acquisition and conservation of an Indian object in a British museum and the works of British painters displayed in a Calcutta museum an instance of transnational collaboration and exchange? But in the case of Tipu’s Tiger, this then also begs the question: how long is too long before we forget that what is ‘acquired’ is what was once ‘removed’ from its home?

The writer, a Felix Scholar, is studying World Literatures in English at Oxford

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Society> History & Culture / by Rohit Chakraborty / May 05th, 2018

Tipu Sultan, a Product of His Times

Mysuru, KARNATAKA :

An extract from Kate Brittlebank’s Tiger: The Life of Tipu Sultan.

 

Tipu Sultan. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Tipu Sultan. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Karnataka government’s decision to celebrate the birth anniversary of Tipu Sultan has once against created a controversy, with the BJP and the RSS as well as local groups in Kodagu district opposing the move.  A rally against the proposed celebration is planned in Bangalore on Tuesday. Last year, the government’s decision led to large-scale violence; this year, a case was filed against the move, but the court’s declined to interfere, calling it a policy decision. At the same time, the judges asked what the rationale was to hold such a celebration.

Was Tipu Sultan (1750-1799) a hero or a villain and was he, as is claimed, against Hindus? Some scholars have contested these views. In this excerpt from her book Tiger: The Life of Tipu Sultan, historian Kate Brittlebank gives a more nuanced and holistic view of the man and the monarch, who, she says, was a product of his times.

 

Kate Brittlebank Tiger: The Life of Tipu Sultan Juggernaut, 2016
Kate Brittlebank
Tiger: The Life of Tipu Sultan
Juggernaut, 2016

It was also important, if Tipu were to retain power, that he tap into the south’s shared sacred landscape, and it is in this light that we should read his patronage of religious institutions, which was widespread. For centuries, kings had associated themselves with the sacred sites of the region, the most significant being the river Kaveri, the Ganges of the south. Rising in the hills of Kodagu, the river wends its way across the Mysore plateau and down onto the plains of Tamil Nadu. Its entire length is dotted with religious landmarks, small and large. For south Indian kings the Kaveri was not only the source of life-giving water but also of divine power. Along the river are three islands, formed where the water divides: from east to west, they are Srirangam, Sivasamudram and Srirangapattana. These are the places where Vishnu sleeps upon the great serpent Sesha, when he is known as Sri Ranganatha, and on the islands are temples dedicated to the deity. The most magnificent is at Srirangam but all were recipients of past royal patronage; in 1610, Raja Wodeyar transferred his capital to Srirangapattana from Mysore after seizing the island from the Vijayanagara viceroy, Tirumala.

Given that the island of Srirangapattana was such a significant repository of divine power, Tipu would have been foolhardy to transfer his capital elsewhere. He continued the Wodeyars’ patronage of the Sri Ranganatha temple, alongside which stood his main palace, and erected a Friday mosque. Haidar’s tomb stood at the other end of the island, near the sangam, next to which Tipu built another, smaller mosque. Put simply, lordly benefaction, one of the defining characteristics of Indian kingship, was pragmatic in purpose. Along with their magnificent displays of power and wealth, kings were expected to be conspicuously pious. They made land grants, donated precious artefacts and mediated in religious disputes. In return, they could expect support for the legitimacy of their rule and prayers for the security and prosperity of the realm. Tipu behaved no differently: his generosity to temples, Sufi dargahs and mosques, as well as the great Math at Sringeri, are well documented, primarily through inscriptions and institutional records.

An idea of the number of Tipu’s religious endowments across his realm can be gained by looking at in‘am registers held in the Kozhikode Archives in Kerala. The records show that Tipu authorised sixty-seven grants of rent-free land, primarily to temples and mosques, solely for the taluks of Calicut, Ernad, Bettathnad and Chowghat. If we extrapolate that figure across the entire realm, it is clear that his patronage of such institutions was extensive. We know of several temples that hold objects donated by Tipu – the Sri Ranganatha temple at the capital received silver vessels, the Nanjundeshwara temple at Nanjangud has a jadeite linga said to have been installed on Tipu’s orders, and inscriptions record that he gave elephants and silver vessels to the Narayanaswami temple in Melukote.

The Sringeri Math, with which Tipu maintained a close relationship, received gifts of valuable cloths and shawls, a silver palanquin and a pair of silver fly whisks. The importance of the Math to south Indian and Deccani rulers – both Hindu and Muslim – since its foundation in the eighth century, is demonstrated by the fact that it holds more than 200 copperplate grants and sanads, the earliest dating from the Ganga dynasty (c. 250–1000 ce). Tipu referred to the Math’s Swami as the Jagadguru and, after the Marathas had raided the Math in 1792, he wrote in a letter that the culprits would ‘suffer the consequences of their misdeeds at no distant date in the Kali age’, concluding that ‘treachery to gurus will undoubtedly result in the destruction of the line of descent’.

The political nature of religious patronage was also the rationale behind acts of destruction. All across India, whenever a king conquered another, he signalled his victory by either seizing or destroying the religious sites with close ties to his victim – and it made no difference if conqueror and conquered were co-religionists. Just as Shaivite and Vaishnava dynasties in south India patronised mosques, dargahs and churches, they did not hesitate to capture the temples of their enemies and seize or destroy the images. The Cholas seized temple images from the Calukyas; and Vijayanagara’s Krishnadevaraya, to celebrate his defeat of the Gajapati king, removed an image of Balakrishna from Udayagiri to the capital. We can see this process in operation with Tipu’s demolition of the Varahaswami temple at Srirangapattana; after his death, the Wodeyars, in a statement of their own ‘victory’, relocated the ruined temple’s image to Mysore town, which once again was serving as their capital. If Tipu’s actions had been driven by religious rather than political motivation, he would not have allowed the Sri Ranganatha temple to continue to flourish within sight of his palace. It was the Wodeyars’ direct association with Vishnu’s boar incarnation that led to Tipu’s demolition of the Varaha temple. Nor were Christians exempt from such treatment – the Venkataramana temple in Nagar (formerly Haidarnagar/Bednur) possesses a bell cast in Amsterdam in 1713. The presence of this oddity in a Hindu place of worship is due to Tipu’s removal of it from a church in Malabar.

Similarly, Tipu did not discriminate against particular religious groups on the basis of their faith – indeed, his diwan or chief minister, Purnaiya, was a Hindu. As we have already seen, Tipu suspected the Kanara Christians of treachery and being in league with the British; the Nairs and the Kodavas, too, were punished for intriguing against him. And if there should be any doubt about what lay behind the treatment of such groups, the expulsion of the Mahdevis from Mysore in 1794 confirms the political character of such acts. This tight-knit Muslim community of several thousand mainly served in Tipu’s army as horse soldiers, under the command of their own officers. That Tipu was in no way prejudiced against this sect is demonstrated by the fact that one of his four vakils to Istanbul, Ja‘far Khan, was a Mahdevi; even so, he too was expelled in 1794. The stated reason for the community’s expulsion was their refusal to obey Tipu’s command to keep certain celebrations low-key – they were prone to noisy bouts of praying – as the festivities that year coincided with the return of the hostage princes from Madras. The more likely reason, however, was that Tipu suspected the Mahdevis of treason, with their festival disobedience merely the trigger for the order that they leave the kingdom. Interestingly, during the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, many of them served under Arthur Wellesley as irregular horse, although it is not clear if this was a consequence of Tipu’s treatment of them, or if Tipu had been correct in his original assumption of their disloyalty.


Excerpted with the permission of Juggernaut Books from Tiger: The Life of Tipu Sultan by Kate Brittlebank, available in bookstores and on the Juggernaut app

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source: http://www.thewire.in / The Wire / Home> Books / by Kate Brittlebank / November 07th, 2016