Though hardly on the same scale, Tipu’s persecution of Hindus likewise reflected fears of treachery and the perceived needs of geopolitical strategy. The Nair and Kodava Hindu communities were located in peripheral areas, or areas only newly conquered by Mysore, making the loyalties of these regions immediately suspect. They were also located on sensitive borders with the Hindu Maratha Empire and the British East India Company. Given that Mysore had been at war with both of these powers for decades, and that the Hindus of Coorg and Malabar had long been restive, it is not in the least bit surprising that Tipu Sultan considered the Nair and Kodavas to be potential sources of sedition or subversion. Indeed, there is some evidence that the Nair uprising had been directly encouraged by the British, lending credence to Tipu’s fears of sedition. It must have seemed to Mysore’s ruler that his kingdom was riddled with potential fifth columns right on his most sensitive frontiers. By removing such suspect peoples from the borders and converting them to Islam, he thus hoped to remove a potential weak link in his contestation with his enemies in south India. In other areas, especially in the heart of Mysore, Tipu did what he could to cultivate Hindu loyalty. He gave gifts and grants to scores of Hindu temples, especially the Sringeri temple, with whose swami he kept up a respectful correspondence. The gifts were often small, but they were clearly intended to ensure the support of the Hindu majority of Mysore and perhaps to allay any concerns that that community might have had when news of the repression and forced conversions of other Hindu communities reached their ears.45
It was equally important for Tipu, given the wider context of the American War in the 1780s, to present himself as a champion of a robust Islam. Indeed, he himself justified his harsh treatment of the Christians of Mangalore as a defense of Islam in the face of a treacherous, expansionist Christianity. In his memoirs, Tipu claims that his “zeal for the faith boiled over” in the face of Christian incursions and proselytizing. He was, he suggested, righting a historical wrong 300 years in the making. The “Portuguese Nazarenes” had established themselves at Goa, and, according to Tipu, as they acquired territory, they “prohibited fasts and prayers among the Mussulman inhabitants . . . finally expelling from thence all who refused to embrace their religion.” The Christian plague had spread rapidly, especially among the poor and ignorant, until the time when Tipu conquered Managlore. When he heard of the behavior of the Christians and their priests, he rose to Islam’s defense and removed the Christian community. An act of religious barbarity was thus repackaged as an act of religious restoration. Similarly, in his explanation of his treatment of the Hindus of Coorg, he stressed that the forced conversion was meant both as a warning to other rebels, and also, crucially, as a message of his religious bona fides to his co-religionists, to “friends, the chiefs of the true believers.”46
Repeatedly in the 1780s and 1790s, Tipu Sultan found himself hemmed in, surrounded by enemies. Mysore was almost constantly at war with the British, whose territory pushed in on two sides, and the Hindu Marathas to the north were “infidels” themselves and had been colluding with the British since 1782. Tipu’s preferred ally, France, was hamstrung by the peace with Britain in 1784, and was so ruined by the war itself that it could no longer afford to commit so heavily to Mysore’s cause. In the face of conflict with these Christian and Hindu powers, Tipu needed to make alliances. He attempted to do so primarily by reaching out to Muslim powers, first to his neighbor and sometime enemy, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and later to the Ottoman Empire. In the instructions Tipu gave to his envoys to the Ottoman sultan he warned of the grave threat the British presented to Muslims in India. The British, Tipu warned, had already seized Bengal, appropriated revenues from the Mughal emperors, converted scores of Muslims, enslaved Muslim women and children, destroyed mosques, tombs, and other holy sites and replaced them with Christian churches. With such depredations too much to bear, Mysore had declared a holy war against the British that Tipu now urged the Ottomans to join. These diplomatic missions ultimately came to naught. The Nizam was already too beholden to the British to turn against them now, and the Ottomans had their hands full with Russia and Austria, who were taking advantage of the American War to target Ottoman possessions in Europe and Central Asia. Nonetheless, in a world in which Muslim allies were being actively sought, presenting oneself as a vigorous proponent of Islam, rather than out for personal or territorial gain, was an appealing strategy.47
The image of Tipu as champion of Islam was important not simply in its outward projection, but also in its reception within the kingdom and army of Mysore itself. While Mysore’s civilian population was largely Hindu, Tipu’s army and administration were largely made up of Muslims. Thus, presenting himself as an Islamic ruler was a strategic step designed, at least in part, to secure the loyalty of his soldiers and officials. This projection of a zealous Islam had to be carefully focused, primarily outside Mysore’s borders, to avoid unduly alienating the general Hindu population, but it could be effective if correctly implemented. Rewarding loyal Muslim officers and administrators with confiscated Christian and Hindu property likewise helped to reinforce a sense of common cause between Tipu and the Muslim elites upon whom he relied.
For centuries before Tipu Sultan’s reign, India had been a land of stunning cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity. For all the outward differences, the idea that political loyalty might be synonymous with religious identity had never been the accepted truth it was in Europe. With few exceptions, religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims, the subcontinent’s two predominant faiths, was minimal and sporadic, the exception rather than the rule. Muslim rulers, like the nizams of Hyderabad, were patrons of Hindu temples and active participants in Hindu festivals. Hindus likewise took part in Muslim holidays and ceremonies with little compunction. In the light of centuries of peaceful syncretism, Tipu Sultan’s more hardline actions may seem surprising, but the chaos of the expanding American War caused confessional boundaries to be drawn anew, hardening the line between Hindu, Christian, and Muslim.48
There is no reason to doubt Tipu’s genuine attachment to his faith, nor does the cynical use of religion for strategic ends preclude a real commitment to religion. Tipu Sultan was merely employing religion in the same manner and in response to the same fears that motivated religious chauvinism and sectarian violence in America and Britain. Just as Americans feared and targeted Native Americans on the frontier, freed slaves in the south, and loyalist and Catholic conspirators everywhere, and just as the British targeted French spies, Irish rebels, and Catholic traitors, Tipu Sultan targeted Kodava Hindus and Mangalorean Christians. Just as the American Revolution had given room and cause for religious and communal violence in the Atlantic world, the Indian theater of the war created the conditions necessary for religious persecution on a shocking scale. The legacy of such violence would endure for generations. The modern states of Kerala and Karnataka would continue to see heightened levels of communal tension and religious violence up to the present day.
Despite the rather self-justifying sanctimonious posturing of the British toward the rule of Tipu Sultan, and their post-war attempts to blacken his name, they were themselves hardly immune from charges of rapacious brutality. Both the British and French press printed regular accounts of British atrocities in India, coalescing around accusations of a massacre and mass rape of innocent Mysorean women at Anantapur in 1783. The reporting of the event was not disinterested (it first appeared in the Annual Register, a periodical associated with Edmund Burke and other opponents of the East India Company, and that had also published a glowing tribute upon Haidar Ali’s death), but the Anantapur massacre surely reflects the regularity of violence toward prisoners and non-combatants by both sides during the war.
For the common people, the frequency of war could be devastating even when they managed to avoid taking sides. Thus, in addition to the thousands removed into captivity, the Anglo-Mysore War also displaced thousands as they fled the theater of war for the safety of fortified t
owns and cities. In 1780, the artist William Hodges confronted such a train of refugees at Madras. Hodges was preparing to make a tour of the region, picturesque paintings of oriental scenes then being in fashion, but was:
interrupted by the great scourge of human nature, the great enemy of the arts, war, which, with horrors perhaps unknown to the civilized regions of Europe, descended like a torrent over the whole face of the country, driving the peaceful husbandmen from his plow, and the manufacturer from his loom . . . I was a melancholy witness to its effects, the multitude coming in from all quarters to Madras as a place of refuge, bearing on their shoulders the small remains of their little property, mothers with infants at their breasts, fathers leading horses burdened with their young families . . . every object was marked by confusion and dismay.
Hodges estimated that 200,000 refugees made their way into Madras in the space of a few days, fleeing in advance of Mysore’s invading army. These numbers were too much for Madras to accommodate, so many were resettled further north in the Northern Circars, which had recently become a British possession. It was not their war, indeed, it had begun in a part of the world of which they were probably only dimly aware, but as so often was the case, the peasants and craftsmen of the region found themselves refugees of an imperial struggle.49
The war ended almost alarmingly abruptly in the Indian theater. Though negotiations in Paris had been under way for a months, and Preliminaries of Peace signed at Versailles in February 1783, the vagaries of eighteenth-century communication meant that word only reached Lord Macartney at Madras at the end of June. For the British, peace could not come too soon. They had failed to strike when Mysore was in turmoil following the death of Haidar Ali, and in the year since had been fought to a stalemate by Tipu Sultan and his French allies. When word of peace arrived, things were looking very bleak indeed. British troops were under siege by the forces of the Marquis de Bussy at Cuddalore, and Tipu’s army was on the verge of taking another vital British position at Mangalore. They thus wasted no time in informing the French of the news from Europe, just in case they had failed to receive the message from Paris—Bussy caustically remarked that if the British position had been stronger they “would not have hesitated to conceal from us the news which they had received.” Letters were sent to Bussy and de Suffren, followed by commissioners tasked with negotiating terms. The French were well aware that their resources were far overstretched, and quickly came to terms with the British. Peace in India arrived on July 2, 1783.50
In March 1784 Tipu Sultan sent a letter to the French Governor of Pondicherry congratulating him on the news of peace between France and Britain and stressing that “this information has afforded us much satisfaction.” In private, however, Tipu was fuming over the peace. He had had the British on the ropes, ready to deliver the decisive blow when his erstwhile ally had agreed to peace. To Shah Allam, the Mughal emperor in Delhi, he presented an entirely different perspective on the end of the war with Britain. “This steadfast believer,” he wrote:
with a view to the support of the firm religion of Mahommed, undertook the chastisement of the Nazarene tribe [i.e. the British]; who, unable to maintain the war waged against them, solicited peace in the most abject manner. This is so notorious a fact, as not to require to be enlarged on. With the divine aid and blessing of God, it is now again my steady determination to set about the total extirpation and destruction of the enemies of the faith.51
Although they would have hardly cared to admit it, many among the British establishment in India and in Britain would have reluctantly agreed with Tipu’s damning assessment of the situation in India. The news of Pollilur, especially coming as it did in the same year as the defeat at Yorktown, and subsequent British defeats in India had, according to Lord North, the prime minister, “engaged the attention of the world . . . and had given rise to so much public clamour and uneasiness.” Parliament passed measures calling for an end to any further attempts at territorial conquest. At the same time, public perceptions of the native powers of India, and of Tipu Sultan’s Mysore in particular, were changing dramatically as well. The Tiger of Mysore, and the animal that was his namesake, became an object of imperial fear. The Governor of Madras admitted, “The Indians have less terror of our arms.” The end of the American Revolution thus brought with it not only the loss of the American colonies, but a new sense that the British Empire in India was overstretched and vulnerable, wounded prey to the emergent predators of Mysore.52
While the British faced peace with acrimony and grim relief, Tipu Sultan responded with the righteous anger of a man betrayed. Mysore had made an alliance with the French based on the understanding that a large army and a strong naval contingent would be sent to southern India with the goal of sweeping the British from the region entirely. Instead, Tipu received delays, excuses and undermanned operations. The large army promised by the French did not materialize for months after the conflict began, and when they did finally arrive, the allies quarreled incessantly, with Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan complaining of French high-handedness, over-cautiousness, and failure to engage the British or follow up victories by attacking weakened British forces. Bussy, in turn, castigated Mysore’s leaders as unreliable “brigands and tyrants,” and suggested that the French would have been better off making alliances with the Marathas or the Nizam of Hyderabad instead of Mysore. After this catalog of disagreement and disappointments, just when the tide seemed to be turning and the British seemed hemmed in and vulnerable, on the cusp of victory the French had merely melted away at the first word of peace in Europe. Not only had Bussy sent word to the French troops aiding Tipu in the siege of Managlore to abandon their posts, but even French officers serving directly in the Mysore army—Lally and Boudenot in particular—were commanded to withdraw. What was worse, the French had negotiated a peace with Britain without so much as informing Tipu, let alone advocating for Mysore’s interests in the final armistice agreement. Tipu attempted to continue the siege of Mangalore on his own, but his French advisors merely stood aloof, and eventually Bussy wrote directly to Tipu pushing him to make peace with the British. The British at Madras were refusing to return French territories seized during the war until Tipu’s army left the Carnatic, so there was real pressure to persuade Tipu to come to terms, even if peace was not in Mysore’s interest. Bussy himself recognized the betrayal, admitting that the peace would procure “little advantage” for the French and would make it “difficult to preserve the reputation and glory of the nation.”53
Developments within Mysore itself seemed to confirm the rationality of British defeatism and Mysorean confidence. The second half of the eighteenth century saw the flowering of a veritable military revolution in the lands of Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan. With vast agricultural resources, the potential for a great power had long been present in Mysore, but the extraction of the revenue needed for modern military investment had been hamstrung by the reliance on local hereditary landholders. Under Haidar Ali and his son, Mysore began the process of centralization by levying taxes directly on the peasantry and collection by salaried government officials (a system later adopted by Sir Thomas Munro in Madras). Tipu saw clearly the importance of a diversified, though state-directed, economy and set about replicating British commercial and industrial practices, founding a monopoly trading company that established factories in Muscat and elsewhere, and encouraging sericulture and the domestic sugar industry. Increased trade and greater central state control over revenue in turn allowed for increased investment in the military and military technology. European instructors were employed, military manuals translated and printed, European-style drilling introduced, and a system of feudal levy of troops was replaced by the rislas system that reorganized the Mysorean army into standardized units. Tipu also recognized that European technological superiority was largely responsible for French and British successes in India. With this in mind, he invested in iron production, cannon foundries and gun-making, supplying his army with cutting-edge artillery
and flintlock muskets every bit as good as those of his British rivals. Mysore under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan was not some backward oriental kingdom, but a centralized, modern, expansionist, imperialist state with significant revenue and a well-trained, well-supplied army of nearly 150,000 men (not to mention a further 180,000 militia men). If the British thought they could merely step into the gap left by a declining Mughal Empire, they were sorely mistaken. Mysore was the most dynamic power in India, and its ruler had vowed to drive the British into the Bay of Bengal.54
On the surface, then, the end of the Second Anglo-Mysore War seemed to signal a new balance of power in southern India. For the British the war had been something of a disaster. The British army suffered its worst losses since the seventeenth century, British troops joined the Mysore army in droves, the cities seized from the French were all returned and a vigorous, modernizing, anti-British Indian state had emerged as a serious rival to British interests. Britain’s resources of men and money had been perilously overstretched, and her power in India, as elsewhere, exposed. It seemed clear to most observers that further expansion was not in the interests, let alone the reach of the East India Company, and even retaining the territories it held in 1783 might prove a challenge in the years to come. What they could not know, or at least failed to realize, was that 1783 would represent a nadir of British fortunes and a highpoint of Mysore’s power and influence. Rather than a harbinger of a new Indian order, the Indian theater of the American War would fundamentally undermine and destabilize native resistance to British encroachment. Had the news of peace failed to reach Madras in June of 1783, had the French not been so slow to act, had Tipu not done so much to destabilize his relationships with other princely states, the American War might have spelt the end of British expansion rather than the calm before the storm, the last missed chance to prevent Britain’s conquest of India.
To Begin the World Over Again Page 35
