Not much ingenuity is required to grasp the divisive political agenda that prompted D H Shankaramurthy, Karnataka Minister for Higher (!) Education, to declare recently that all references to Tipu Sultan should be deleted from school textbooks since Tipu was ‘anti-Kannada’. The minister, a senior state-level BJP leader, reportedly stated that ‘glorifying Tipu’s achievements in school textbooks was not in the interest of students’. Tipu’s use of the Persian language for administrative purposes, supposedly in preference to Kannada, rendered the ruler ineligible as a subject of historical study.

This rather crude articulation of what amounts to a project for the communalization of the history of late 19th-century south India was put forth at a function organized by the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti. The Samiti has been spearheading a campaign against NCERT textbooks, as a continuation of the endeavours by Murli Manohar Joshi and J S Rajput to incorporate in textbooks a version of history that was acceptable to the Sangh Parivar.

The attempt to make Tipu Sultan part of a communal discourse is not new. It may be recalled that a virulent campaign was launched in 1989 against the screening of Sanjay Khan’s TV serial Sword of Tipu Sultan, based on Bhagwan Gidwani’s book of the same title. The opposition to Tipu was at that time in terms of his having acted as a cruel and fanatical anti-Hindu ruler during the course of his invasion of Malabar. The main source used for substantiating such an assessment of Tipu was the well-known Malabar Manual (1887) compiled by William Logan, a British official posted in Malabar.

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