The battle lines were drawn early on and views were sharply divided
As 2015 draws to a close, whether it be the episode about Tipu Mastan, the saint or Bajirao Mastani, the consort, our take away should be: May the communities trade in love and not war, as the New Year dawns upon us!The writer has been a foreign correspondent based in Colombo. The saint was called “Tipu Mastan” and the young son of Hyder Ali got to be called Tipu long before he succeeded to the throne to be designated a sultan. The Karnataka government’s move to mark Tipu’s anniversary in a big way provided the fuel. Wronged by his brother as much as by history, we haven’t been fair to the man either. Tipu Sultan, the “Tiger of Mysore”, provided easy grist to the mill. The battle lines were drawn early on and views were sharply divided.The decision to celebrate Tipu Sultan’s birthday proved good enough to spark a controversy in 2015. For everybody he was “Tipu” and has been so since.Tipu, too, like Aurangzeb, was fanatical about prohibition.
The present government, in its apparent zeal to purify the past of its unwholesome influences, decided to rechristen the road dropping “Aurangzeb” by the wayside, as it were.Sadly for the bigots of our time, the truth is that both versions are equally true. The year witnessed two excellent Pakistani productions of a play based on Dara’s life that were brought to Delhi and played to full houses here in June and again in September. History does not present itself in sharp and clear black and white — but in multiple shades of grey. History has a way of getting back at the puritans and the prohibitionists. The moral is not hard to draw. The British, when they laid out Lutyens’ Delhi as the future capital, remembered to name one of the city’s major roads after Aurangzeb. The plays invoke the scale and intensity with which the imperial Mughals played the games of power. On being asked the reason, the emperor complained that though he had ordered total prohibition throughout the empire, everybody seemed to be imbibing the spirits except two people — the emperor himself and the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid.
But the irony is that for all his zeal for prohibition, the sword of Tipu, which lay in the British museum after Tipu had died in battle, was bought at an auction and brought back to Mysore, a little over a decade ago, by, who else but, a liquor baron.If Dara could not make it to the 2015 headlines from the front door, Aurangzeb managed to sneak in through the side door. Especially so, when it comes to forcing puritanism down people’s throats.The multiple shades of grey were also invoked by eminent Hindi playwright Surendra Verma in his Mughal Mahabharat — a compendium of four plays, three tragedies and a comedy.There is yet another page from the life of Aurangzeb that the narrow-minded bigots of all hues might like to read and ponder. He was the innovator who developed rocket science, the patriot who forged fresh alliances to win freedom from the British and the secularist who funded the construction of temples and regularly consulted brahmin astrologers before contemplating a move. So, of Tipu, one could say with Shakespeare: “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.
Mr Verma, winner of both the Sahitya Akademi and the Sangeet Natak awards, has dealt with the succession struggles of the later Mughals. At the end of it all — if one could draw some consolation from it — Aurangzeb himself died in total repentance. Dara’s 400th birth anniversary on June 20, 2015, passed largely unnoticed. Needless to add, Mr Verma’s plays have a bearing on contemporary society and politics as well. But nobody cared to call him by his proper name, in his lifetime or later. He acquired this sobriquet from a local saint that the family of Hyder Ali, his father, were devotees of.Finally, it is time one puts the record straight on Tipu as well. Tipu Sultan was either the villain who put thousands of Hindus and Christians to sword, and ordered many more to be converted to Islam or, he was the great hero — an emancipator who lived ahead of his time.”As the tempers were running high on either side of the imagined fault line debating Tipu, nobody seemed to remember the birthday of another famous son of the soil and a scholar to boot, Dara Shikoh..In a year that saw the lynching of a man on the outs******ts of Delhi for his alleged food preferences, it was inevitable that some others, including a few long dead royals, would be raised from their graves, as it were, to fuel the divisive debate.
Tipu was not how the guy was supposed to be known as. His proper name was Sultan Fateh Ali Khan. He is wholesale airless pump bottles the author of Sri Lanka: A Land in Search of Itself. Needless to add that his orders on this were flouted with as regularly as in the case of the Mughal.Francois Bernier, the French traveller, one day called on the emperor and found him looking morose. In the end, nobody complained. Bernier later added his own observation to this narrative. However, there is a lesson from the life of Aurangzeb that nobody could miss and all rulers should remember. In an ironic twist, it was our neighbours to the west who sort of reminded us of the man. That was true of Tipu Sultan as much as of any complex and powerful personality who has left a mark on the pages of history. This Bollywood blockbuster is about a Peshwa brahmin warrior and his Muslim consort.
He had done nothing right in his life, he regretted in a couple of letters he wrote from his death bed — and even blamed his teacher for not having taught him the right things. He had visited the Shahi Imam a few days earlier, he wrote, and personally presented him a bottle. Which other royal would you get to call by his nickname Equally, it may be for the best that we are closing the year with Bajirao Mastani. For all his pious puritanism, Aurangzeb could be so cruel as to behead brother Dara, put his head on a platter and send it to his father in prison. And when the father, the erstwhile emperor and the great builder, died a few years later, Aurangzeb ordered his servants to bury him during nighttime without any of his family or friends being present
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