A Tableau Of Feelings Towards Tipu Sultan

As swords are crossed over Tipu Jayanti, everyone revisits a complex debate with all-too-pat answers.

- Ajay Sukumaran

“I have come to the conclusion that everyone should write history based upon his own selection of sources that appear significant to him, but that no one should read it except to obtain general information in areas of peripheral concern. Oddly, only an amateur can be so detached.”—Cyril Stanley Smith, 1981 

It was with this quote by the famous British metallurgist and science historian that Prof. Roddam Narasimha began his 1985 lecture on ‘Rockets in Mysore and Britain, 1750-1850 AD’in Bangalore. Prof Narasimha, who was then director of the National Aero nautical Laboratory, had long been studying the rocket technology employed by Hyder Ali and his son tipu. their military weapon was sufficiently sophisticated for the time, comprising a metal casing holding the combustion powder, tied to a long bamboo pole. Much like a Diwali rocket.

Ironically, the fireworks this Diwali week in the old Mysore region where Tipu Sultan once ruled had less to do with rockets and more with the man himself. The fact is that everything about the Tiger of Mysore has come to be controversial. And this wasn’t lost on Karnataka’s Congress government when it organised an event to commemorate his 265th birth anniversary—falling, inc identally, on November 10, the first day of Diwali. But things turned ugly—three people were killed in violence in Coorg— and the government has been forced on the backfoot because the narrative shifted bey ond Tipu Sultan and boomeranged, thanks to a remark by play wright Girish Karnad, long a Tipu admirer.