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Mushirul Hasan
I wonder if the practitioners of history would agree with Ranke's memorable phrase, "the writing of history is a matter of conscience". Probably not. True, the general level of historical scholarship in India has improved since independence, yet so many of us tend to be biased, prejudice-ridden and prone to implausible generalisations. "Remember your moral responsibility to our readers," admonished G.P. Gooch, a distinguished British historian. But, alas, so few pay heed to his sane and sober advice. And for so few is the single-minded pursuit of truth the goal.
Ideally, the reading of history should produce a certain temper of mind, a certain way of thinking and feeling about contemporary events, and their relation to the past and the future.
In reality, the agenda of Hindu and Muslim polemicists has been to perpetuate myths, create a set of icons to suit ideological predilections, valorise rajas and sultans in opposition to the Other, and romanticise certain periods of history to construct the mythicalimage of a "Golden Age". Such an exercise, aided and abetted by the colonial historians and spurred by the rise of nationalism, has led to a distorted version of the past, reinforced social, cultural and religious boundaries, and widened existing cleavages.
Thus renowned scholars like Nirad Chaudhuri conceded that "nothing was more natural for us than to feel about the Muslims in the way we did. Even before we could read we had been told that the Muslims had once ruled and oppressed us, that they had spread their religion in India with the Koran in one hand and the sword in another, that the Muslim rulers had abducted our women, destroyed our temples, polluted our sacred places. As we grow older we read about the wars of the Rajputs, the Marathas, and the Sikhs against the Muslims, and of the intolerance and oppressions of Aurangzeb."
I do not wish to comment on the extensive polemical literature demonising the Turkish or Mughal (not Muslim) rulers. Like so many liberal-left colleagues, stigmatised as"psuedo-secularists", I do not spend sleepless nights finding an alibi for their conduct. We feel indignant only when called upon to account for the demolition of temples or conversions that took place during the medieval period. Or, when Islam and the Muslim communities are portrayed in the light of the actions of some intolerant sultans. Please tell me how and why can Abdul Ali, a weaver in Bhiwandi, be held responsible for Mahmud of Ghazna's assault on Somnath? Why target him and others because his co-religionist, Aurangzeb, the son of Shahjahan, was belligerent towards the Hindus in the last quarter of the 17th century? Why should 110 million Muslims, born and brought up in this country, be given the choice to either go to Pakistan or qabaristan (graveyard) just because a ruler in the 16th century built a mosque on a disputed religious site?
Today, Karnataka is the site of an acrimonious debate with strong communal overtones. It centres on Tipu Sultan, one of the key figures in the mythological andhistoriographical constructions of the subcontinent. It all started early in 1990 when the BJP sought a court injunction to prevent the screening of a television serial entitled, The Sword of Tipu. The complainants argued that the series presented Tipu sympathetically, as a secular ruler, rather than the fanatical Muslim persecutor of Hindus they imagined him to be.
In recent weeks, VHP and Bajrang Dal activists have aired the same arguments to decry the state-sponsored celebrations to mark 200 years of Tipu's martyrdom. So that the battlelines are drawn between those who insist that the "Tiger of Mysore" was "a martyr to the cause of independence", and those who regard him as a tyrant and a Muslim bigot. My fear is that the southern states, so far untouched by the great communal debates that have raged in the Indo-Gangetic belt, would soon be embroiled in a protracted controversy.
Why should any other historian or I hold a brief for Tipu? My concern is to remind readers, for what it's worth, that theMysore ruler employed a large number of Hindus in high offices, gave generous grants of rent-free land to temples and mosques, patronised pilgrimage sites, including the great Math at Sringeri, and wrote to its Swami to pray for his success in war against "the hostile armies that have marched against our country and are harassing our subject".
Turn to any number of scholarly books, including one authored by my father, Mohibbul Hasan, to discover how Tipu's patronage to construct, say the massive temple at Sibi, gives the lie to the notion that Hindus, solely because they were Hindus, suffered discrimination or persecution at his hands. Also Kate Brittlebank's insightful comment in Tipu Sultan's Search for Legitimacy that Tipu's assertion of his identity as an Islamic ruler took place against the background of, and in harmony with, the syncretic religious practices of the south.
More generally, the historian C.A. Bayly has argued that prior to 1860 there was no identifiable "Hindu", "Sikh" or "Hindu"identity which could be abstracted from the particular circumstances of individual events or specific societies, and Tipu's attitude appears to confirm this. Other works on the interaction between Muslim, Hindu and Christian traditions in the south have identified a borrowing of symbols and ideas, a frequently shared vocabulary, and an interweaving of motifs within a common sacred landscape. Not surprisingly, these syncretic tendencies are unabashedly targeted by fundamentalists of all hues.
Yet, there is no reason for Tipu's admirers to elevate him to the heights of a Sufi or place him on a pedestal: he was, after all, no more than an able and energetic ruler. His territorial ambitions, rather than any nationalistic sentiment, led him to forge alliances with the French against the British. His generosity towards the Hindus does not make him "liberal" or "secular" in an age when these expressions made little or no sense whatsoever.
What is therefore required is a cool and dispassionate analysis of Tipu'sactions in the context of the turbulent decades of the 18th century in the south and the subcontinent generally. People often speak of `the verdict of history' and `the philosophy of history'. According to Gooch, there is no agreed verdict, only individual verdicts; no agreed philosophy, only a welter of conflicting ideologies. "Are there or will there ever be final answers to the questions prompted by our study of the human adventure? If so, they have not yet been found."
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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