Haidar Ali, Tipu Sultan, Goa, and Kanara Christians: Blog

Tipu adopted a very different policy from Haidar’s, one that caused much anxiety to Goa and his own Christian subjects. Many superficial and biased reasons have been offered for this. Here is a plausible explanation: Tipu’s antagonism towards Christians arose in his effort to establish his legitimacy to rule his sultanat-i-khudadad, the ‘God-given state’.  

Haidar, acutely aware of his humble origins, that of a common soldier, had not attempted to legitimize his rule by either the accepted symbolisms of Indo-Muslim rulers, or non-Muslim kingdoms. He maintained the Wodeyar as nominal king, while keeping him a closely guarded prisoner within his palace with a paltry allowance. Haidar maintained a tight control over finances, administration, and the army, and the personal loyalty of his close confidantes; he did not need to consolidate his rule employing the accepted symbolisms of power.

With Tipu, it was different. His rule almost ended in his very first year of assuming the musnad in December 1782 on Haidar’s death. During the investiture ceremony itself, he heard of the treachery of Sheik Ayaz, a Nair convert slave whom Haidar had appointed the governor of Bednur. He defected to an English army from Bombay that had invaded the west coast.  

Tipu recovered Bednur and much of the captured territory, but got stuck for eight months before the decrepit fort of Mangalore, defended by a small English force. Before the fort could be retaken, the monsoon struck a devastating blow to his cavalry, his French allies abandoned him, and in Srirangapatna his senior officials backed by the Wodeyar attempted a coup. English fleets appeared off Mangalore, exposing his vulnerability from the sea, while an English force tore through his southern province, took Coimbatore and Palghat, and threatened Srirangapatna. That same month saw a potentially dangerous revolt in the army. In December, the English captured Kannur, the capital of his ally, the Bibi. 

Tipu urgently needed to firmly establish his authority and legitimize it in the accepted traditions of kingship. The majority of his subjects being Hindu, Tipu chose as his emblem that employed by the Hoysalas and the Cholas, the tiger. The tiger emblem dominated court iconography, and he depicted his tiger as devouring the ghandaberunda, the double-headed mythical emblem of the Wodeyars. It also involved patronizing temples within his core region, seen as symbolizing the authority of the state, by giving them dana or gifts in age-old tradition. 

He then employed the traditions of past Indo-Muslim rulers to extend his authority over his Muslim subjects, who constituted about 5% of the population.  One of these was the need to convince them of his capability to defeat his greatest enemy, the Europeans, also identified as nasrani or Christians, bitter enemies of Islam for over a 1,000 years. His policy required that he project himself as their inveterate enemy. An accommodation was made with the French whom he needed in his struggle against the English. Tipu’s vocabulary in describing these two European nations is revealing. In his narrative of the retaking of Bednur, in which the French allied with him, he calls them by their nationality, while terming the English as nasrani, a term that depicts them as religious enemies. 

Unfortunately, he also uses this same term to describe his own Christian subjects. They paid grievously for it.  

In March 1784, having signed a peace treaty with the East India Company, he arrested and deported to Srirangapatna the sultanat-i-khudadad’s entire Christian population. Describing it as a glorious year, Tipu says they numbered 60,000. Of these, about 33,000 came from Kanara, 7,000 or so having escaped. The rest were Kannada and Tamil speakers. Of those taken from Kanara, about a third succumbed to disease within the first year, and another third, those below 20 years, were forcibly converted to Islam and incorporated into the lashkar-i-ahmadi, the corps of chelas or military slaves. He moved his army to Goa’s border and closed his ports to Goan shipping, and ordered the destruction of Christian churches within the sultanat-i-khudadad. Clause 70 of his Revenue Regulations specified that Christians found within his territories were to be apprehended and sent to Srirangapatna, and their property confiscated. 

This was in the tradition by which victorious Indian rulers, Muslim or otherwise, destroyed or desecrated temples patronized by their rivals to emphasize their triumph. Tipu’s court history depicts the arrests and the conversion of the Christians as a great victory over the nasrani, without specifying that the nasranis arrested were his own subjects, and not Europeans.  

Goa had great strategic value to Tipu. Its port took his offensive capability by sea so much closer to Bombay. Besides it offered one more avenue for receiving men and armaments from the French. Further, it offered a very defendable territory from which to threaten the Marathas, who regularly invaded his territories to collect chauth, from the west. In 1786, in the war against a Maratha-Nizam alliance, his armies crossed the Tungabhadra. The nearness of Tipu’s army to Goa’s borders sent rumours flooding the Goan capital that Tipu, with the aid of French troops, would soon attack Goa. In August 1787, Goan authorities discovered and suppressed a conspiracy of priests and military officers, mainly from Bardez, to overthrow the government. Tipu was suspected to have had a role in it. Padre Gonsalves, the main conspirator, was believed to have travelled through Malabar and Kanara and developed contacts with Tipu’s officials there. 

Goa’s problems with Tipu subsided only in 1788 when he turned his attention to reforming his Malabar province. Meanwhile, Tipu’s second embassy to France received a clear message from the French king, acting on the Pope’s instruction, that he wished an end to the persecution of the Christians. Tipu sent an embassy to Goa, perhaps seeking some sort of support for his coming war with the English, where he promised the archbishop to rebuild the churches at his cost. He never kept it. 

Tipu lost half his territories when he suffered a humiliating defeat in 1792 in a war with an English-Maratha-Nizam alliance. In the following years, he re-organized his truncated sultanat-i-khudadad as he prepared for a further confrontation with the East India Company. Meanwhile, he found an ally in Napolean whose strategists advocated the necessity of capturing a port on India’s west coast as a means to cut off England from exploiting India’s wealth; the only suitable one was Goa. Napoleon ousted the Ottomans from Egypt and sent a feeler to Tipu. But, the French fleet in the Mediteranean was destroyed and Napoleon himself made a precipitate retreat from Egypt.

The arrival of a pirate Frenchman, Ripaud, in Mangalore in 1797, fired Tipu’s latent hopes again. Ripaud told Tipu that a large French force was stationed in Mauritius and it could be used to attack the English and drive them out of India. Tipu immediately sent ambassadors to Mauritius and proposed an alliance for a joint attack on the English and the division of conquered territories. 

The embassy was a disaster. Just 99 Frenchmen arrived in Mangalore. It provided the excuse for the East India Company’s new governor-general to attack Tipu. On May 4, 1799, Tipu was killed and the sultanat-i-khudadad ceased to exist. 

Tipu’s hostility towards the Europeans led him to attack their Christian identity as well. As a natural development, it extended to his own Christian subjects resulting in their arrest, loss of property, deportation to Srirangapatna, and incorporation of the younger generation into the service of the government. In effect it was an attempt to erase their Christianity identity and replace it with one aligned to state policy, namely Islam.