The erstwhile Governor of Orissa and Member of Rajya Sabha, the Late Mr. B.N. Pandey was doing a research on Aurangzeb Aalamgir in 1928, he came across a line:
Three thousand Brahmins committed suicide because Aurangzeb forcibly wanted them to embrace Islam.
Mahamahopadhyaya, Dr. Haraprasad Shastri, Head of the Department of Bengali and Sanskrit in Calcutta University, was its author.
source of information
Dr. Pandey asked him to inform him of the source of information on the subject. After two reminders he wrote that he had taken it from the Mysore Gazette. Dr. Pandey then wrote a letter to the V.C. of the Calcutta University and requested him to inform him on the subject. Prof. Shri Kantiya, who was compiling the Gazette of Mysore, in turn, informed Dr. Pandey that no such incident took place.
He also wrote to say that the Prime Minister of Tippu Sultan was a Hindu Brahmin named “Ponayya”.
Tippu’s Commander-in-Chief was also a Hindu general named Krishna Rao.
He was good enough to despatch me a list of 156 temples that were recipients of annual contribution from Tippu. Photostats of 30 letters were also sent to him which had been, from time to time, been sent to Jagatguru Shankaracharya of Shivaneri Math, with whom Tippu maintained very cordial relations.
According to a tradition maintained by the rulers of Mysore, Tippu Sultan used to take breakfast after a visit of the Ranganathji Temple.
According to Prof. Shri Kantiya, Dr. Shastri might have lifted the false story from the book Col Maiks, known as “Taarikh-e-Mysore”. His claim was he had taken it from a personal library of Queen Victoria. Inquiries revealed the library has no such book.
Origin of mischief
Dr. Shastri’s mischievous book had been ultimately withdrawn from the syllabus of West Bengal, Assam, Bihar, Orissa and Rajasthan.
In the meantime the damage had already been done.
Do you know that he Father of the Nation had written in “Young India”, his paper dated Jan. 23, 1930? He wrote the Mahatma: “Fateh Ali of Mysore (Tippu Sultan) has been presented as a murderer, suggesting he was an extremist, who wreaked hell over his Hindu subjects. It is wrong.
His relationship with his Hindu subjects was quite cordial.
The Archaeological Department of Mysore has three letters in its possession. They were written in 1793. In one of them, acknowledging receipt of the previous letter, Tippu asks the Shankaracharya to do “tapassaya”, make prayer for peace in the interest of the whole world.
At the end of the letter Tippu asks the Shankaracharya to return to Mysore because presence of the pious ensures rains; there is good grain production and welfare comes in.
Lands gifted
The Mahatma’s Young India further says: Tippu gifted lands and other costly things patiently to Shrivenkatraman “Shrinivas” and Shriranganath temples. Some Hindu places of worship were situated around the palace. What the Mahatma’s weekly underlines is: the ringing tones of temples never disturbed Tippu.
He disdainfully refused to lay arms before the British. When dead bodies of the Awadh soldiers were being searched, Tippu’s body was pond with his swords in his hand. It was with this sword that he was fighting for the freedom of his motherland. “One day’s life of a lion is far better than a hundred days life of a fox.” A couplet written in his memory says: Death under blood-raining skies is far preferable than life under insults, jibes and ignobility!