‘The Greatness of Tipu Sultan’

“I submit that men like Akbar, Dara Shikoh and Tipu Sultan qualify as heroes not as villains.

“The more I read about Tipu, the more I am impressed with his rich personality.

“… (Tipu Sultan) was the only prince who died fighting the British.

“Tipu did not content himself with fighting the British…he forbade forced labour for public works and torture of suspects. He introduced prohibition; he forbade felling of trees; he tried to set up a school every four miles. When he found that effluents from an ammunition factory were polluting the river Kaveri, he had the factory shifted. Here was a model ruler for environmentalists.

“Almost alone among Indian princes, Tipu had a world view.

“With the death of Tipu, Indian independence had been extinguished for a century and a half.”

*****

Nope, those are not quotes from the revised chapter on Tipu Sultan that the new Congress government in Karnataka will be slipping into textbooks savaged by the BJP government. Nor even the last gasp of Tipu’s court historians.

Those words were written – and published – by K R Malkani, a founder-member of the BJP and its vice-president for some years. You’ll find those quotes on pages 204-207 of his book India First. (Publisher: Ocean Books, 2019).

Kewalram Ratanmal Malkani was no closet dissident in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He was one of its more important ideologues. And its top journalist. Malkani worked for a while in The Hindustan Times (while also writing in the Organiser weekly) in the 1940s. He would later join the Hindutva stable full-time. He was the longest-serving editor of the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser -- 35 years – and was, for much of that time, also the editor of Panchjanya, its Hindi counterpart, and of the magazine Motherland. No one else in the RSS has ever climbed those heights since. In the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the media recognised him as the main spokesperson in English for the BJP.

Viewed besides Malkani’s RSS credentials, those of a B C Nagesh seem puny and feeble. Nagesh who? Well, he was the Minister of School Education and Literacy in the recently routed BJP government in Karnataka. The man who led the charge to expunge Tipu and Bhagat Singh from the state’s textbooks.

Malkani’s book with the piece on Tipu has a foreword from no less a luminary than Hindutva hero L K Advani. In it, the former Deputy Prime Minister of India calls Malkani “an outstanding journalist” for whom “journalism has not been just a profession; it has been a commitment to a cause” and that he himself “had my apprenticeship in journalism under him.”

Hard to imagine someone, anyone, writing or speaking that way about Nagesh or anyone else of the textbook tukde tukde gang.

Nor has the RSS anywhere disowned Malkani. In fact, on November 18, 2022 – on the eve of his birth centenary – quite a few people gathered at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) in Delhi, to pay him tribute. Among them, the present crop of Organiser editors and journalists. And also others like Swapan Dasgupta, veteran journalist and BJP spokesperson.

So how did Malkani – revered as a journalist and expert on history within his own Hindutva fraternity – come to write such a piece that appears in his book India First?

Rewind to circa 1990.

Actor-Director Sanjay Khan had just got his serial The Sword of Tipu Sultan off the ground. Its first episode (it ran to 60 in all) was aired by Doordarshan in February 1990. Audiences found it riveting. It was dubbed into Telugu, Bengali and Tamil. And was carried over the next decade on several other television channels. Subtitled and dubbed versions were also aired in Britain, Indonesia, Mauritius and elsewhere.

There was the inevitable backlash to a serial that did not demonise and caricature Tipu as a butcher of Hindus. And there were some noisy protests.

Malkani was asked – by a few party leaders, among others – to watch some episodes of the serial and pass judgement. It is not clear from India First, when exactly he crafted the particular piece I’ve quoted – titled The Greatness of Tipu Sultan. But Advani’s foreword to it is dated January 26, 2002. (That is, six months before he became Deputy Prime Minister). And the author’s preface simply says 2002. So, we know that it was written sometime between the 1990s and end-2001.

A few friends of mine and I ran into Malkani during that period, in connection with the anti-WTO movement in the early 1990s. Major sections of the BJP (then in opposition) were vociferous in their criticism of the Dunkel Draft. Scathing in their attack on how the emerging WTO would impact India and other Third World nations. Malkani remained true to those positions always, unlike many in his party. This was no liberal, but an implacable Hindu fundamentalist. A man who declared that the “Manu Smriti is one of the greatest works of mankind.”

The same K R Malkani had also been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1962. He was one of the earliest to be arrested from his home and jailed for the entire duration of the 1975-77 Emergency. After that collapsed, he would serve as General Secretary of the Editors Guild of India in 1978-79.

In one of our few interactions, Malkani, an amiable man if hardcore Swayamsevak, even mentioned he would be looking at the serial. The article The Greatness of Tipu Sultan published in the book which first came out in 2002, was the outcome of his enquiry into
the serial.

Embarrassingly, his findings came when the BJP was in power and could have exploited an anti-Tipu verdict from him to great effect. The fact is, also, that Malkani, who died in 2003 while serving as Lt Governor of Puducherry, was a man of letters and thought. Not a goon of the variety that brought strife to Karnataka for years over Tipu, Bhagat Singh, the hijab, and other issues.

He read a lot on Tipu Sultan and was impressed by what he learned about that implacable foe of British imperialism. Malkani’s closing to his piece on Tipu is touching:  

“If he so desired, Tipu could certainly have bowed to the British and survived as a prince – as another His Exalted Highness. And today, his great-great-grandsons would not be pushing cycle rickshaws in the streets of Calcutta.

“But Tipu preferred death to
dishonour.”

(The writer is a senior journalist and Founder-Editor, The People’s Archive of Rural India)