LOL! The new trend of putting Tipu Sultan & Runjeet Singh is the new level of intellectual dishonesty. This thread is an entire whitewash on character of Tipu Sultan. While his role to keep British away should be studied, it is important to know that he was no ‘Hindu loving’ man. https://twitter.com/advaidism/status/1329665193312354304
In this thread I attempt to debunk some LIES circulated about Tipu & after reading it you will never talk about Tipu and Runjeet Singh in same breath.

1. Tipu Sultan and his father were no real “sons of the soil” of Mysore as they hailed from a migrant Arab tribe (Quraish).
As such when Tipu rose to throne he looked for legitimacy from Muslim empire. In 1782, Tipu dispatched an embassy to Constantinople seeking confirmation of his title to the throne of Mysore from the Sultan of Turkey.
For example, Tipu addressesed the Khondkar as Padshah-i-Ahl-i Islam [“King of Muslims”] (I. Husain, 2001, p. 20).
Tipu’s plea to the “King of Muslims” to empower the “True Religion” makes it clear that he sought the support of Turkey, an ally of the English-
-an adversary of the French, as the liberator of the Muslims and thereby made himself a co-jihadist ruler (I. Husain, 2001, pp. 40-42).
Mir Hussein Kirmani (1980) points out that “the Sultan had a great aversion to . . . Hindus and other tribes,” built a mosque in every town, and appointed a muezzin, a moula, and a kazi to each (pp. 154-155). Tipu urged his army commander in Calicut on December 14, 1788:
Two years later, he boasted his conquest of Calicut in a missive to Syed Abdul Dulai:
In his letter of February 10, 1799, to the Grand Seignior of Constantinople Tipu claimed that “near five hundred thousand of the infidels of the district of Calicut, Nuzzuraband, Zufferabaud, and Ashrufabaud . . . have been converted at different times” (Martin, 1837, p. 30).
In a military manual titled Fat’hul Mujahidin (Victory of the Holy Warrior), he also declared a “Holy War . . . against the English,” who were alleged to have “converted many Muslims . . . [and] enslaved many Muslim women and children ” (Habib, 1999, p. xxv).
Tipu appointed Hindus to positions of trust and responsibility as indeed did the Mughals and other regional Muslim rulers. It is, however, doubtful that appointment of Hindus to responsible posts followed any principle other than sheer common sense. Source- Sharma, 1991
No or Zero qualification was needed for Muslims in Tipu’s rule. Francis Buchanan (1762-1829) found out, that Tipu appointed even illiterate Muslims as Asophs [Lord Lieutenants] who were “entirely sunk in indolence, voluptuousness, and ignorance” (Buchanan, 1999, p. 167).
A lot of people talk about him visiting the math & wearing a ring with inscription of Ram, but all studies on Tipu reveal that he was very superstitious & hence carried out such rituals. Denys Forrest (1970) has observed.
Tipu destroyed at least three Hindu temples: the Harihareswara temple at Harihar, the Varahaswami temple at Srirangapatnam, and the Odakaraya temple at Hospet. In the Tamil land and in Malabar, he earned the sobriquet of “a Brahman-killer and a despoiler of south Indian temples”
These findings are well documented by Brittlebank, 1997, pp. 125-126; and Logan, 1887/2000, p. 449) in their works on Tipu and advent of English.
Portuguese traveler Fra Paolino da San Bartolomeo (1748-1806) described his forced conversions, circumcisions & merciless massacre of Hindus and Christians as
Major Dirom (1794) days that Tipu Sultan’s “cruelties were, in general, inflicted only on those whom he considered his enemies,” one cannot condone or overlook his penchant for sheer gratuitous bloodletting (p. 250).
His orders to punish the inhabitants of Coorg, guilty of committing “excesses” at Zufferabad, by murdering or imprisoning them and then “both the slain and the prisoners . . . to be made Musulmans [that is, circumcised]” (Kirkpatrick, 1811)
Tipu’s sword bears an admission inscribed on it: “My victorious sabre is lightning for the destruction of the unbelievers.” He publicly claimed himself to be a descendant of Prophet & his avowed aim was “to restore the religion of that prophet by destroying all infidels.”
His own writings (Sultan-ut-Tawarikh and Tarikh-I-Khudadadi) speak eloquently of his religious fanaticism He even dreamed of either converting or conquering the infidel lands. As a contemporary estimate has it,
He invited Zaman Shah to attack the Mughal capital of Delhi because the Emperor Shah Alam had “reduced the faith to . . . weakness” (he had become a pensioner of the powerful Maratha leader of Gwalior, Mahadji Shinde, ca. 1730-1794) and the letter of invitation concluded as
Amal Chatterjee’s postcolonial analysis of the creation of 18th-century India in colonial imagination posits that Tipu “was at once the bogeyman, the proof that Indian rulers were duplicitous tyrants and proof that . . . any powerful Indian ruler was ultimately an evil despot”
The hubbub over the Indian national television (Doordarshan) serial “The Sword of Tipu Sultan” (1989) based on a colorful characterization of the man by a popular fiction writer Bhagwan Gidwani demonstrates the curious interplay of communal politics and academic polemics.
The television docudrama presented Tipu as a patron of the Hindus and a patriotic martyr who died fighting the imperialist English. This serial incensed some historians and numerous lay viewers, and continues to do so.
Tipu Sultan was no nationalist freedom fighter, the novelist Gidwani’s sentimental description of Sultan notwithstanding. Admittedly, Tipu was an inveterate enemy of the English. But “his alternative to the English was not some kind of Great-India, the alternative was the French”
It is time we arrived at a reasonably realistic assessment of Tipu Sultan. If it is fair to maintain that Tipu was an energetic, assiduous, and industrious ruler and an immensely brave soldier, it is also reasonable to consider reports of his haughtiness and hubris.
Something tells me that an enemy of of enemy is a friend to most people but that’s not how History is studied. If you are fair and want to learn, make it outright facts or shut up. This said the British accounts demonise Tipu & as a result of that Indian historians glorified him.
But now that we are no longer victims of slave mentality, we can slowly uncover the layers of Tipu as well. The post colonial and post modern accounts of Tipu are good to study these layers of Sultan.
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