Sandeep Balakrishna - Tipu Sultan: The Tyrant of Mysore

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Total Pages : xii + 212 = 224First Published : 2013 ISBN : ISBN : 8-7E-Book

Sree Vijayam
No.9, Vijayaraghava Road, T. Nagar, Chennai 600 017.

e have seen, read, and heard about a lot of phony people claiming to be freedom fighters and receiving pensions from the Government. Several of these worthies would not have been born before Independence; yet they succeed in such blatant manipulations. One portion of this unholy cesspool includes freedom fighters, who have brutally massacred our own people, destroyed our own culture, and yet are recognized as the pioneers of our freedom struggle! Tipu Sultan happens to be one such infamous name that belongs to this cesspool. And a special brand of Indian secularism continues to render many services to perpetuate his name and fame as a freedom fighter.

Heres a small sample which can often be seen in many of the nooks and corners of Karnataka: hoardings that advertise the cause of the downtrodden, the marginalized and the suppressed by displaying the images of Buddha, Basavanna, Chennamma, Gandhi, and Tipu Sultan. I fail to understand even one aspect thats common between Buddha and Tipu. The former renounced his wealth, position and prosperity forever, lived and taught an elevated path of truth and peace and endeared himself to the entire society while the latter stood for the exact opposite. Yet, our brand of secularism finds many glowing parallels between the two.

In this chaotic state of affairs, my good friend Sandeep Balakrishna has made a bold and serious attempt in unveiling the true colours of Tipu, the freedom fighter.

During the Nehru era, India witnessed several catastrophic changes as a result of which many new icons and ideologies were propagated and their tentacles spread far and wide and even today, the people of India continue to suffer their ill-effects. Tipu is one such heavily-eulogised icon in both our textbooks and popular media. Nowadays, our pseudo-intellectual community seems to be hell-bent upon justifying even the vilest deed committed by him. Here are just three key samples of this intellectual charlatanism:

Tipu was a great lover of books and had a wonderful libraryIn which case, one fails to understand why he gave away all the valuable collection of books in the royal library of Mysore to his stable to be used as fuel for cooking horse gram.

Tipu was a sensitive secularist and patronized many scholars of Hinduism including temples and mutts: Then what explains the fact that Pradhani Venkappayya (or Venkamatya), an accomplished scholar, a polymath and polyglot well-versed in the nuances of polity was imprisoned for no reason and humiliated and tortured to death?

Tipu had a scientific bent of mind and in his farsightedness, made many innovations in civil and military engineer-ingIn which case we dont really have a logically tenable explanation for his religious bigotry, which made him twist everything that he came across to conform to the ideology of Islam?

We have several irreconcilable facts similar to these, drawn from the murky waters of modern secularism in which our blissful intellectuals are fishing.

Although Sandeep is not the first writer to unveil these lies about Tipu, he has done a very commendable job through his comprehensive and well-documented work, which is equally readable by both the scholar and the lay person alike. His objective of providing a reliable historical account of Tipu based on primary sources after thoroughly scrutinizing them in the light of irrefutable logic has been achieved to a great extent as every chapter in the book is selfcontained and well-connected to the overall narrative.

For the first time, Sandeep has consolidated many layers of historical accounts and scholarly discourses starting from contemporary British writing about Tipu to the present day debates done by the honest historians and intellectuals of India in general and Karnataka in particular. The opening chapter itself stands as a telling testimony to this fact. He has not spared any aspect of Tipu Sultan and has succeeded in forcefully demolishing the myth that Tipu was a freedom fighter.

Apart from giving a historical account of Hyder Alis ascent to power followed by Tipus own rise and fall, Sandeep has thrown the doors wide open and revealed Tipus religious bigotry, economic disasters, tampering of the calendar, breaking treaties, changing the names of cities and towns to suit his Islamic bias, destroying Hindu temples, forming a battalion of forcibly converted youth for Jihad against India, and similar acts of cruelty and misdemeanour.

All of this valuable information is presented in a lucid and impeccable manner so that the reader doesnt miss the wood among the trees. Such writing is a very challenging task and at the same time, is the need of the hour because todays India is almost coming to a dead end. For this reason, we need to be courageous and honest and re-examine our past and formulate our own future based on the ideals of truth and liberty. For this purpose, I am sure that this book makes a welcome addition to the host of books published by the likes of Voice of India, Aditya Prakashan and so on.

I wholeheartedly congratulate my long-standing friend Sandeep and his publishers for taking up this much-needed work. This is because many of the earlier publications on this topic, in spite of their merits, lack some qualities which are sorely expected by the Indian youth engaged in a serious study of history. Sandeeps work fills this void and stands a class apart and makes a lasting impression in the minds of the seekers of truth.

n November 2012, Rahman Khan, the Union Minister of Minority Affairs announced that the Moulana Azad Education Foundation under his Ministry, was setting

up five universities across the country. One of them would be established at Srirangapatna and it would be named after Tipu Sultan, the 18th century Mysore ruler. While the project of setting up these universities is not objectionable, the fact that one of them would be named after Tipu once again, showed exactly everything thats wrong with Indian politics and public life.

Guess what else is named after Tipu? A Pakistani missile. This is unsurprising given that Pakistan has been consistent in naming its missiles Ghaznavi, Ghauri, Abdali, and Babur, all names of medieval Muslim invaders who plundered India, forcibly converted hundreds of thousands of Hindus, and destroyed their ancient culture. The fact that Pakistan, an enemy nation has named its missiles in the honour of such medieval barbarians who vowed to completely Islamize India is pretty revealing.

And here we have an Indian citizen, a Central Minister no less, who wants to establish a university named after Tipu who stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the aforementioned medieval marauders. Even worse, Rahman Khans Government brazened out the act of naming the university after Tipu