To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  Haidar and Tipu’s status as the foremost crusaders against British imperial tyranny in Asia echoed across the globe and captured the imagination of another group of anti-British revolutionaries. Americans quickly recognized a kinship between their own endeavors against British imperialism and those of the rulers of Mysore. As early as 1777, the Irish adventurer Thomas Conway, later famous for his failed cabal that aimed to replace Washington as commander of the American forces, proposed sending American troops to Mysore. The plan was impractical and came to nothing, but Mysore remained on American minds. American troops never reached Tipu’s domain, but American ships traded with Mysore and their French allies throughout the war, seeking to undermine the British East India Company’s monopoly. Pennsylvania honored Haidar Ali by naming a warship after him in 1781, and Philip Freneau, the great poet of the American Revolution, penned a poem in praise of the ship that also paid tribute to the ship’s Indian namesake.

  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.

  That a group of would-be republicans should heap such lavish praise upon two monarchs every bit as autocratic and imperially ambitious as the British is perhaps surprising, but the American focus was limited to Haidar and Tipu’s heroic victories over the British, rather than their political values. When Tipu Sultan came to the throne, he was hailed or reviled throughout the world, and celebrated in American and France, as one of Britain’s most remorseless enemies.35

  Tipu Sultan was an enemy of British colonization in India, but he was not the anti-imperialist of American imagination. Rather, the Mysore of Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan was one of the foremost proponents of imperial expansion in eighteenth-century India. This was a native, though European-inflected, imperialism that clashed with the competing empires of Britain and France and the Marathas, but it was actively and proudly imperial nonetheless. Tipu’s policies, strategies and aims were eerily similar to those of the most imperialist Britons. He used taxes, indemnities, and revenue as a means of controlling petty rulers and landlords, and as an excuse to annex territory. He was merciless to perceived rebels and bandits and sought alliances to defeat his rivals. Tipu’s Mysore was one of a number of imperial powers in India in the late eighteenth century seeking to fill the power vacuum left behind by the crumbling Mughal Empire. The coming of the American War intensified this struggle, fatally undermining France and Mysore, while solidifying Britain’s grasp on the subcontinent.

  Eliza Fay had the bad luck to arrive in India just as the imperial contest was heating up, but she was not the only one to be effected by the American War. The prisons at his capital Sriringapatam, in fact, were full of British captives, including the nearly 300 taken in the aftermath of Pollilur in 1780, a sizable number taken after Tipu’s victory at Tanjore in February 1782, and nearly 500 British sailors handed over to Tipu by the French navy in 1782. When peace eventually came in 1784, Mysore would release more than 1,300 British prisoners and as many as 2,000 native Sepoys who had fought for the British. The capture and imprisonment of British soldiers and officers was less a side-benefit of warfare than a conscious tactic for Tipu Sultan. First of all, Tipu was well aware that British prisoners, especially high-status captives or prisoners in great numbers, could be used as a diplomatic chess-piece, adding leverage in negotiations and providing surety for British good behavior in the treatment of Mysorean prisoners. Second, and most importantly, Tipu was well aware that European innovations in drill, tactics, and technology gave their forces a distinct advantage over traditional Indian army units. His father had long known the importance of European advisors, employing at least 210 Europeans in his army by 1767, with the number steadily rising throughout the period. Europeans were especially useful for modern specialized military tasks such as the use of artillery and naval command. In this respect, Haidar Ali selected a European officer named Stannet to lead his fledgling navy. If such benefits were to accrue to Mysore, Tipu would need European advisors familiar with the new practices and technologies, and what better way to gain such knowledge than through prisoners of war. What the example of William Ayers and the other military adventurers of eighteenth-century India taught Tipu Sultan was that, above everything else, the loyalties of European soldiers were precarious at best. He knew from experience that British prisoners could be turned, convinced, and cajoled into joining the Mysore service. He had uses for such turncoats and he treated his captives accordingly.36

  If Tipu’s goal in taking and holding so many British prisoners was designed to drain both British manpower and their technical military advantages, he succeeded very well. In 1784, with peace declared between Britain and Mysore, Tipu agreed to release 1,300 captive British soldiers. Though free to leave the site of their captivity, more than 400 chose to remain in Mysore, most as soldiers or advisors in Tipu’s army. Fully 1,700 British men, however, remained in Tipu’s prisons after the peace, with a quarter of these eventually joining Mysore’s army, many willingly, some by force. For most soldiers of the time, regardless of their country of origin, soldiering was a job not a calling, wage labor rather than a labor of love or loyalty. Conditions, pay, and treatment in the service of a native state were often better than in the British army, and many were more than happy to trade one uniform for another with little hesitation or compunction. The deep divisions between British and Indian, the age of strictly bounded national identities was just beginning in the 1780s.37

  When Tipu Sultan came to the throne in 1782, he immediately infused his reign with more vigorous Islamic valence, a “colour of religious militancy” in the words of one scholar. Unlike his father, Tipu had been educated in Persian, the language of Muslim rulers throughout India, and was familiar with Islamic theology and Muslim history. He was concerned to project, both to his own Muslim governing class and to his Muslim neighbors, that his rule was divinely ordained, a “God-given government” as reflected in the formal name he gave his government, sarkar-i Khudadad. He struck coins with legends that invoked God, the Prophet, and Ali, the first of the Twelve Imams in Shia Islam. The tiger imagery he so famously employed was likewise a direct reference to Ali, whose title also meant tiger (or lion). Religious schools were founded and qazi appointed to teach Islam, towns were renamed with Persian names, and the idea of a holy war or ghazwa was invoked in Tipu’s battles against Britain and the Hindu Marathas as a means of inspiring his soldiers and officials. Tipu thus departed from his father’s more tolerant practice by employing a belligerent Islam as the “great ideological prop for his power.” When Tipu began to expand his territories in the 1780s, this prop was transformed into active persecution of religious minorities.38

  War with Britain, a Christian power, forced Tipu Sultan to reconsider the loyalties of his Christian and Hindu subjects, leading to persecution and a permanent hardening of religious divisions in south India. When he invaded the territory surrounding Mangalore in 1784, he captured tens of thousands of indigenous Catholics, many of whom were imprisoned, forced to convert, or mutilated. From his own place of captivity, the British sailor James Scurry provided a heart-rending first-hand account of the suffering of the Mangalorean Catholics.

  Their country was invested by Tippu’s army, and they were driven men, women and children to the number of 30,000 to Sirangapatam where all who were fit to carry arms were circumcised and forwarded into four battalions. The sufferings of these poor creatures were most excruciating . . . The Chambars or Sandalmakers were then sent for and their noses, ears, and upper lips were cut off. They were then mounted on asses, their faces towards the tail and led through Patan, with a wretch before them proclaiming their crime. One fell from his beast and expired on the spot through loss of blood. Such a mangled and bloody scene excited the compassion of numbers and our hearts were ready to burst at the inhuman sight.39

  Other accounts confirm Scurry’s story, even if the number
s involved sometimes differ considerably, ranging from Scurry’s 30,000 to as many as 80,000 in some estimations. In his memoirs Tipu Sultan himself put the number of Christian captives at as many as 60,000 men, women, and children. In typical fashion, he had planned the procedure down to the most minute detail. First, the local diwan was instructed to make a detailed list of every Christian household and every piece of property owned by Christians. Once the Christian population was recorded, soldiers were stationed in every Christian community, with the command that they were to remain vigilant until they received further orders. In order to coordinate the purge, and prevent any Christians from escaping, sealed letters were then sent to each officer with instructions to open and read the letter at a specific time on a specific day, while the Christians were at prayer. It all went off without a hitch. According to Tipu himself, “our orders were every where opened at the same moment; and at the same hour (namely, that of morning prayer) were the whole of the Christians, male and female, without exception of a single individual, to the number of sixty thousand, made prisoners, and dispatched to our Presence . . . and ultimately admitted into the honor of Islamism.”40

  Unsurprisingly, Tipu’s account of the Mangalorean captivity is silent on the suffering of the captives, but the stories told by some of the captives in the years after their release seem quite similar to those presented by British captives such as James Scurry. A survivor from Barcoor painted a much grimmer picture of the forced march from Mangalore to Sriringapatam as well. Conditions were brutal, with as many as 20,000 succumbing to illness or starvation before they reached their destination. Others, especially leaders of the Christian community, were said to have been abused by their guards, and some even executed, although on whose orders remains unclear. When they arrived at Tipu’s capital, many thousands, especially young men fit for military service, were forcibly converted to Islam, with resisters tortured, their lips, noses, and ears cut off as a warning to others. Many young women were given as wives to Muslim soldiers and officials. Targeting young men and women in such ways served not only to swell the ranks of the Mysorean army, but also to eliminate, quickly and irrevocably, future generations of Christians whose loyalty might be divided or suspect. Once the Christians had been rounded up and removed from Kerala, their churches were destroyed and their lands seized and redistributed to Tipu’s loyal followers. It was as if a perceived cancer was being removed from Mysore’s territory, eradicated to make it safe for Tipu’s purposes and to prevent future British aggression. It was also, in many ways, a deliberate strategy of ethnic cleansing.41

  Though they had long lived side by side with the largely Muslim ruling class, and made up the majority of Mysore’s total population, Hindus were regularly targeted by Tipu as well. The thickly forested mountainous area of Coorg, in modern Karnataka, had been a thorn in Mysore’s side since the days of Haidar Ali. The Kodava Hindus who lived in this hostile terrain were fiercely independent and regularly resisted the intrusions of the government of Mysore. With ongoing war against Britain and the Hindu Maratha Empire as part of the American War, this resistance was especially dangerous, and Tipu Sultan became increasingly concerned that the recalcitrant Kodavas might not only undermine his authority in the region, but potentially ally with his enemies, the British and the Marathas. Several attempts had been made to bring Coorg to heel, all without success as the Kodavas merely melted into the jungle hills, engaging in guerrilla warfare. When peace with Britain came in 1784, Tipu used the lull in his war with the East India Company to deal with Coorg once and for all. A force was sent under Runmust Khan, Nawab of Kurnool, which finally succeeded in taking the Kodava capital and capturing the Coorg leadership.

  In Tipu’s eyes, the Kodava had brought this fate upon themselves with their continuously rebellious behavior. Indeed, such sedition could not be tolerated, and thus, as was now becoming Tipu’s regular practice, the conquered people were to be made captives and forcibly converted to Islam. In a letter to Runmust Khan Tipu outlined his policy for defeated rebels.

  The exciters of sedition in the Koorg country, not looking to the consequences, but agreeably to the nature of children of selfishness and of opportunity-watching rebels, conceiving of vain hopes from the great distance of our victorious army, raised their heads, one and all, in tumult. Immediately on our hearing of this circumstance, we proceeded with the utmost speed, and, at once made prisoners of forty-thousand occasion-seeking and sedition exciting Koorgs, who alarmed at the approach of our victorious army, had slunk into the woods, and concealed themselves in lofty mountains inaccessible even to birds. Then carrying them away from their native country (the native place of sedition) we raised them to the honor of Islam, and incorporated them with our Ahmedy corps. As these happy tidings are calculated, at once, to convey a warning to hypocrites, and afford delight to friends, the chiefs of the true believers, the pen of amity has here recited them.42

  The lesson of the forced removal, captivity, and conversion of the Kodava Hindus was not apparently heeded as carefully as Tipu might have wished. The Nair Hindus of Malabaar, the people among whom Eliza Fay had been held captive, were also targeted for chastisement through captivity and conversion. A few years after the Fays’ stay in Calicut, Tipu crushed a Nair rebellion he feared was inspired by the British. The defeated Hindus were forcibly removed from their homelands and converted to Islam. In letter after letter to his military commanders, Tipu urged them to crush any sedition and convert the populations to Islam. He commanded Buruz Zuman Khan to crucify one rebel leader (and his nephew if he was over 25 years of age) and to convert 200 of his followers, and commended the same officer’s forced circumcision and conscription of 135 young Nair captives in a second letter a month later. When the Nair continued to chafe under Mysore’s rule, Tipu threatened mass hangings, evoking memories of a previous purge. “Ten years ago,” Tipu informed his commander, “from ten to fifteen thousand men were hung from the trees of that district; since which time aforesaid trees have been waiting for more men. You must hang upon trees all such inhabitants of that district, as have taken a lead in these rebellious proceedings.” To another officer he gave a blanket command to suppress unrest wherever it cropped up, “to chastise the turbulent wherever they raised the head of revolt; and after making them prisoners, to place those under age in the Ahmedy band [converted regiment], and to hang the remainder.”43

  The exact number of Hindus taken into captivity or forcibly converted to Islam is not entirely clear. Sources put the number of Kodava captives as high as 85,000 and the number of Nair captives at as many as 30,000. In all, more than 100,000 Hindus may have been forcibly removed from their lands, with a large portion of these forced to abandon their religion under extreme duress or even torture. Countless numbers also perished in the fighting and the executions that followed the conquest of new territory or the suppression of dissent within lands controlled by Mysore. As terrible as such practices may seem, this was a deliberate, considered tactic, repeatedly employed by Tipu Sultan during a period of constant warfare and regional chaos.

  Tipu’s zealous advocacy of a belligerent Islam and concomitant use of religious violence was strategic and tactical rather than merely bigoted or intolerant. He had good reason to be suspicious of the loyalties of the Catholics of Mangalore and the Hindus of Coorg and Malabar. These territories were on the edge of Mysore’s expanding domain, and thus were areas of constant contestation between the expansionist ambitions of Britain, the Marathas, and Mysore, changing hands repeatedly in the eighteenth century. In 1768, for instance, Managlore had fallen into British hands, and though it was quickly recovered by Tipu’s father Haidar Ali, rumors persisted that the Christians of the area had actively aided the British conquest, sending considerable funds to General Mathews during the campaign. Haidar took a measured approach to the betrayal, imprisoning those suspected of complicity, but refusing to execute anyone or to target the wider Christian community.

  When war with Britain broke out in 1780,
Mangalore became contentious ground, and the pattern of conquest, re-conquest, and betrayal reared its head. In 1782, when Mangalore fell to the British, rumors swirled that the Christian community, coddled by Tipu’s father, had conspired with the enemy against Mysore. Informants reported to Tipu that the Christian community had provided men, money, and supplies to the invading British, and continued to do so during Mysore’s subsequent siege of Managlore. As prince, Tipu had advocated a hardline policy toward the Christians of Kerala, and he was convinced that British success in capturing the territory and his own difficulty in retaking it was in large part the result of local Christian treachery. He accused them of “acting as guides and facilitating their [British] communications,” and of providing men, money, and material to his enemies.44

  Although some assistance was certainly provided to the British by local Christians, there is little evidence of widespread, organized collusion. Nevertheless, Tipu had become convinced that his kingdom would never be secure with a potential fifth column of Christians on such a sensitive border with the British. He feared that a British invasion of Kerala would be a constant threat as long as the loyalty of that region could not be guaranteed. Thus, when Mangalore was regained in 1784, Tipu wasted no time in capturing the by now deeply suspect Christians of the area, seizing their lands, and driving them off into captivity in the more secure heart of the Kingdom of Mysore.