Fall of a tyrant, or heroic last stand? Tipu Sultan and the moral undercurrent in historiography

Abstract

ABSTRACT What does morality have to do with history? Should the past be pluralised as a heuristic category? Might we disengage common representational tropes from historical events otherwise remembered in mutually contradictory ways? This study attempts to answer these questions by narrowing in on the contested legacy of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1750–1799). Tipu is remembered today both as a proto-anticolonial figure who died fighting the East India Company (EIC), and a Muslim tyrant who colonised a mostly Hindu southern India. This martyr/monster duality finds expression in contending portrayals of his death in combat against the British in 1799. Tipu’s ‘last stand’ becomes the pivot of this discussion where I will demonstrate how the past is used to envision moral victory from conflict by its presenters in comparable events like the Battle of Pollilur (1780) and the Battle of Alamo (1836). This means, I contend, that the past being exploited for various ends is split from itself at the moment of its enunciation; replicated and reproduced in accordance with the ideological exigencies of its presenters. I will argue that this calls for a paradigmatic shift from the Rankean ideal of what really happened to how what supposedly happened is told; who tells it; and for what purpose. Through this proposed model, I will elaborate how the historical ‘fact’ becomes ‘meaningful’, and how morals and history, history and fiction, colonial and anticolonial, are closer to each other than apart.