Linda Colley , 'Captives: The story of Britain's pursuit
of empire and how its soldiers and civilians were held captive by the dream of
global supremacy 1600-1850‘, 2003:
“...But Tipu, in the British imagination, was not just an
Asian Napoleon. He was also – as his own court rituals and chosen symbolism
proclaimed – a tiger prince, the personification of all that seemed to the
British dangerous and unpredictable about India. And it was partly as a tiger,
‘tearing in pieces the helpless victims of his craft, or his rapacity’, that
British propagandists now began describing him. This was something of a
departure. Back in the 1780s, even captive Britons had generally described Tipu
in moderate or even respectful terms. ‘He bore his success like a man
accustomed to victory,’ wrote a colonel who had been captured at Tanjore:
‘nothing haughty or imperious about him.’ ‘His manners were easy and affable;
his address and behaviour agreeable,’ recorded another British officer who was
brought face to face with Tipu after the fall of Mangalore. ‘Easy’, ‘affable’,
‘agreeable’: these are the sort of words that Jane Austen employed in her
novels to alert readers to one of her more acceptable gentlemanly characters.
And the use of code terms denoting an English gentleman in these early British
descriptions of Tipu is surely no accident. Nor was it accidental that – like
his father – Tipu was often described as pale-skinned. Robert Cameron, an army
lieutenant captured at Pollilur in 1780, customarily referred to the guards in
his prison as ‘blacks’. Brought before Tipu, however, he saw him as ‘fair, with
a pleasing countenance’. Another Scottish officer-captive of Mysore, Innes
Munro, was critical in his narrative of miscegenation in India lest it ‘give a
sallow tinge to the complexion of Britons’, but thought nothing of comparing
Haidar Ali approvingly to Frederick the Great of Prussia.58 Even in 1790, an
English observer could liken Tipu to Achilles, with all that this implied in
terms of martial valour and classical physique. As would always be the case,
non-Europeans of power, rank, and – in the case of Haidar and Tipu proven
military success – could deflect and correct a racially hostile European gaze
(and vice versa).
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, private and
public British descriptions of Tipu had darkened in every sense....”
“...From the 1750s onwards, tigers stalk the British
imagination. Sarah herself was mauled by a tiger in the early years of her
marriage to John Cuff. Her arms were permanently scarified by its claws. She
had another confrontation with the animal, when she witnessed one devouring the
pregnant Indian companion of a Company army officer. (Or was this perhaps an
addition by her ghost-writers worried at what was known about levels of
cross-racial sex in the Company’s legions?) Building on the horror of these
fierce encounters, Sarah’s publishers inserted a special appendix in her
captivity narrative describing the wild animals of India, of which the tiger,
they insisted, was by far the worst:
A tiger is one of the most ferocious animals that Nature has
produced; stately and majestic in appearance, yet cowardly and artfully cunning
in his actions; never openly facing his prey, but springing upon it from
ambush.
The tensions in this description are interesting and
suggestive. The tiger, in this version, is at once a magnificent beast and
lacking in courage, both dangerous and devious. Most of all, it is
unpredictable, as India itself seemed unpredictable. By this stage,
anthropomorphic tiger references of this sort had become common in British
literature and art. Before the battle of Plassey, however, Britons had known
little of tigers outside of wildly inaccurate images in ancient bestiaries and
books of heraldry. It was the conquest of Bengal that brought these animals to
their notice....”
विल्यम डालरिम्पल यांनी नाना फडणवीस आणि महादजी शिंदे यांचा त्यांच्या नव्या पुस्तकात करून दिलेला त्रोटक परिचय वाचण्यासारखा आहे....
Nana Phadnavis
1742–1800
Pune-based statesman and minister to the Peshwas, known as ‘the Maratha Machiavelli’. He was one of the first to realise that the East India Company posed an existential threat to India and tried to organise a Triple Alliance with the Hyderabadis and the Sultans of Mysore to drive them out, but failed to carry the project through to its conclusion.
Mahadji Scindia
1730–94
Maratha chieftain and statesman who was the most powerful Indian ruler in northern Hindustan for twenty years, from the 1770s onwards. Badly wounded at the Battle of Panipat in 1761, he limped for the rest of his life and became hugely fat, but he was a shrewd politician who took Shah Alam under his wing from 1771 onwards and turned the Mughals into Maratha puppets. He created a powerful modern army under the Savoyard General Benoît de Boigne, but towards the end of his life his rivalry with Tukoji Holkar and his unilateral peace with the East India Company at the Treaty of Salbai both did much to undermine Maratha unity and created the conditions for the final Company victory over the Marathas nine years after his death.
('The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire', २०१९)
आता ही दोघे- विशेषतः नाना जे इंग्रजांच्या भारताला गुलाम करणाच्या वाटेतील सर्वात मोठा काटा होते- ब्रिटिश जनतेसाठी सेलिब्रिटी कधीच बनली नाहीत आणि त्यांच्याबद्दल तेंव्हा आणि आजही ब्रिटिश समाजात अज्ञान आहे. पण टिपूची गोष्ट वेगळी....
Ruth Scobie, History Today, December 2019:
“…Tipu, Sultan of Mysore, was the Company’s most formidable
military enemy but also one of the most recognisable figures in British popular
culture. Stories circulated in newspapers about his many wives, the luxury of
his court, his vast ambition and his alliances with pre- and post-Revolution
France. In 1792, the Sadlers Wells musical Tippoo Saib celebrated – a little
prematurely – his defeat, while sentimental engravings depicted the Company’s
hostage-taking of his two young sons. A bigger wave of melodramatic pictures in
1799 imagined Tipu’s death in the siege of Seringapatam and the finding of his
corpse in the ruins of the fallen city. The Company funded and promoted its own
propaganda about Tipu, including reports of torture, forced circumcisions and
the cruel executions he had ordered carried out on British prisoners. ‘Nature
shudders at the thought of Indian ferocity, as of late practised in the East by
the orders of that sanguinary tyrant, the Nabob Tippoo Sultan’, sobbed the
Gazetteer:
‘Grant us the indulgence of an hour! – on our knees we
implore it!’ – said two brave officers (General Matthews’s brother and another)
– ‘No! not a moment!’ was the answer; and their throats were cut from ear to
ear!
By the late 1790s Tipu’s effective if unsubtle image as a
Gothic villain was so well established in the British imagination that he
appeared in popular novels. In the Minerva Press’ The Beggar Girl and her
Benefactors, Tipu imprisons and threatens the heroine’s father for several
volumes, ‘feasts on their agonies, and drinks their tears’.
Tipu’s celebrity sometimes also reflected a more ambiguous
Orientalist fascination with pleasure and luxury. ‘La Robe a la Tippoo Saib’,
according to the World in 1788, was ‘a new sort among the ton’, with ‘a very
long train, after the Eastern manner, of Citron green taffaty, spotted with
rose colour’ and ‘a plain rose colour taffaty petticoat, cut in points at the
bottom’. A printed paper board for ‘The New Game of Tippoo Saib’, now in the
British Library, shows a turbaned ‘sultan’ surrounded by colourful floral
motifs. As Charlotte Smith joked in her comedy What Is She?, ‘the Bengal tyger,
the amours of Tippoo Saib, or some secret history of a Nabob’ all sold well.
Tipu’s celebrity fitted into the Orientalist tradition of fictional and
fictionalised despots – but it also confirmed this tradition and gave it a
‘real life’ figurehead. Tipu, to a British public who knew him through all this
print and performance, came often to seem a figure of gossip and entertainment
– a commodity to be consumed…”
Clockwise from top left: 19th-century Staffordshire pearlware (photograph © Myrna Schkolne); Karen Thompson’s ‘Death of a Species’ (2013); Michell and Napiorkowska’s ‘Sauce Boat Inspired by Tipu’s Tiger’ (1976); the V&A’s mechanical organ.
courtesy: LRB, January 2018
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