S. L. Bhyrappa Quotes

Indira Gandhi, whose sole aim was to retain and remain in power, required the help of the Communists against her opponents that included the fast-growing Jana Sangh, and the ex-Congress combine of Morarji Desai, Nijalingappa, Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, Kamaraj and others. On their part, the Communists realized that they didn’t have enough strength to capture power on their own. They reasoned that putting their ideology in positions of power was a good alternative. Indira Gandhi thus helped the Communists infiltrate key institutions like the ICHR, NCERT, universities and the media. Additionally, Communist Russia exerted external pressure to make this happen. Nehru and his daughter had by then stooped to a position of weakness, which prevented them from taking a strong stance against Russia even in key domestic matters. Once the Communists were firmly entrenched in the nation’s key intellectual nerve centres, they began to shape the direction of these institutions following the model already laid down by Communist dictatorships like Russia and China. Now, Sonia Gandhi’s UPA Government is anyway dependent on the life support given by the Communists (Note: this article was written in 2008, during the first innings of the UPA Government. Communist parties supported the Government from outside.).

Mohammad Karim Chagla was born, raised, and educated in Bombay. He became famous as a lawyer and earned goodwill and respect as a man of integrity. He went on to become the Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court and retired from the position. He recounts in his autobiography, Roses in December that he was desirous of contesting the Lok Sabha elections. He wrote to Nehru requesting him to give a ticket from a constituency in Bombay. The Congress High Command acceded to his request. In its reply, it said that he would be given a ticket to contest from the Aurangabad constituency. In turn, he replied with, “I was born, raised, and I have served the public in Bombay. People know me well here. Why have you given me a ticket in faraway Aurangabad where I know nobody and about which I know nothing?” Nehru’s High Command retorted, “Aurangabad has a large Muslim population. Because you are a Muslim, you contest from there.”

R.S. Sharma, in Ancient India, New Delhi, 1992 Pg 11 writes: “The enormous wealth of the Buddhist viharas attracted the Turkish raiders. They were special targets for the greed of these raiders. The Turks killed numerous Buddhist monks. Despite this, several of them escaped to Nepal and Tibet.” The clever Marxists have tried to suppress a crucial fact here. By calling them Turks (a tribal name), they have tried to conceal the fact that these raiders were Muslims and that they destroyed the viharas motivated by their religion’s strictures. However, they also write that Buddhism in Ashoka’s time was destroyed by Brahmins who coveted dakshina. We do need to appreciate the shrewdness of these worthies who suppress the truth and create falsehood at the same time.

Tipu, who embarked on a long campaign of the Malabar and Coorg and left a brutal trail of forcible conversion of Hindus in its wake, refrained from trying a similar stunt in the Mysore region. He needed the support of Hindus after his financial humiliation in the Third Mysore War of 1791, which was when he had to submit his two sons to the British apart from surrendering a large portion of his empire. Therefore, in a move to placate Hindus, he gave a large donation to the Sringeri Shankaracharya Mutt. Our secularprogressives project this incident as an instance of Tipu’s nonsectarianism and religious tolerance.

The tactics of Marxists to capture power in all spheres and at all levels is no different from that of caste politics, which has proved to be a curse upon India. They appoint people sympathetic to their ideology in universities, infiltrate print and television media with their fellow travelers, write glowing reviews of books written by authors loyal to their ideology, sideline authors who hold opposing or alternate views, organize ideologically-motivated seminars and camps to attract young minds to their side, exert influence on the Government to give out awards to people who follow their ideology…they have done this in a systematic manner. Critiquing a literary work by using ideology as the yardstick is the method of literary criticism that Marxists introduced in India. By doing this, they feel they have destroyed traditional measures and conceptions of literary criticism such as Rasa (Feeling or Emotion), Dhwani (Suggestion), and Auchitya (Appropriateness).

Truth for the Communists is the position the Party takes. This holds true for values like art and ethics. We don’t need to explain this to people who have read books published by Communist Russia on these topics and sold at dirt cheap prices.

Tipu also changed the original names of entire cities and towns: Brahmapuri became Sultanpet, Kallikote became Farookabad, Chitradurga became Farook yab Hissar, Coorg became Zafarabad, Devanahalli became Yusufabad, Dindigal became Khaleelabad, Gutti became Faiz Hissar, Krishnagiri became Phalk-il-azam, Mysore became Nazarabad (today’s Nazarbad is the name of a locality in Mysore city), Penukonda became Fakrabad, Sankridurga became Muzaffarabad, Sira became Rustumabad, and Sakleshpur became Manjarabad. Does all this reflect Tipu’s nationalism, his religious tolerance, and his love for the Kannada language?

During the Indian freedom struggle, wandering bards, minstrels, and those who sang lavanis used to sing rustic songs that glorified Tipu at street corners, in marketplaces, and fairs. These semi-literate and illiterate people had no knowledge of history. They were patronized by Muslims, especially Muslim merchants and businessmen who gave them bakshish. In the same vein, some playwrights wrote plays glorifying Tipu as a great patriot based on the sole fact that he had fought against the British. Thus informed, the audience and general public began to believe that this was the true picture of the historical Tipu Sultan. Post-independence, our Marxists, vote bank politicians, and religiously-driven Muslim writers, artists, playwrights, and filmmakers portrayed Tipu as a patriot and a national hero. Real history died. The British were depicted as heartless villains for taking two sons of Tipu as hostages. Girish Karnad, who adheres to this tradition of painting Tipu as a national hero takes up this hostage episode in his play and makes Tipu mouth this highly revelatory dialogue of sociology: “A new language has come to our land. A new culture. Angreji! A culture that takes children aged seven—eight as war hostages.”

When Tipu looted the Mysore Palace in 1796, he ordered to burn all the valuable and rare books and manuscripts, palm leaves that contained priceless handwritten notes to cook horse gram for his horses, and other files kept in the palace library. There are plenty of references in, for instance, the Malabar Manual by William Logan about the cruel military operations and Islamic atrocities of Tipu Sultan in Malabar—forcible mass circumcision and conversion, large-scale killings, looting and destruction of hundreds of Hindu temples, and other barbarities like gang-raping helpless women. There are hundreds of such incidents mentioned in various documents. It is impossible to reinforce nationalism based on the false picturization of History.

Sultan Muhammad Bin Tughlaq’s exploits in slave-taking was infamous even in faraway lands. Shihabuddin Ahamad Abbas notes the Sultan’s enthusiasm in this regard as follows: “the Sultan’s ardour in waging war against Kashmir was unabated. The number of prisoners that he took was so staggering that everyday, thousands of slaves were sold at abysmal prices (Masalik-ulabisar fi Mumalik-ul-amsar. Translated in E.D. 111 Pg 580, S.A.A Rizvi, India in Tughlaq’s Time). And it was not just in war. Tughlaq had a fancy for buying and collecting a huge number of foreign and Indian slaves. In every war or an expedition to put down rebels, the number of Kafir female-slaves that the Sultan rounded up was so huge that, as Ibn Battuta writes, “on occasion, a large number of female prisoners were rounded up in Delhi. The Nazir sent me ten of them. Of them, I returned one to the person who brought them to me. But he was not satisfied. My companion took three small girls. I don’t know what happened to the rest of them (Ibn Batutta, ibid).

Western historians who began to write India’s history by following the European historical method have paved us a good path. But their scholarship was fuelled by an ulterior motive. They had already developed the following narrative: Indian culture is the Vedic culture. The creators of this culture were Aryans, who came into India from abroad. They destroyed the native culture and established themselves here. Thus, everybody who came thereafter were alien invaders. At one stage the Muslims came. Now, the British have come. Therefore, if somebody argued that the British weren’t native to India, they had a readymade response: neither are you. This was institutionalized in universities, and the media. English-educated young men and women carried this perception, too. This narrative also informed that the Rg Veda, held sacred by the Aryans was composed by them when they were outside India. This narrative severed the spiritual bond that connected Indians with India. The result was that over hundred years, Englisheducated Indians suffered a sense of alienation. This narrative also germinated and escalated the discord among some Indians who saw themselves as the native Dravidians whom the invading Aryans subjugated. Those who understand human nature well know that it is easy to beget enmity and that when it is proved that the enmity is based on false reasons, it is still difficult to let go of ill-feeling.

I have always been interested in sociology, psychology, history and allied subjects in the humanities. I have done some reading in these. Philosophy is the subject of my profession. Aesthetics was the topic of my doctoral research. However, my proclivity made me turn to writing literature, writing novels specifically. As long as I can remember, my mind has dwelled on the nature of the relationship between truth and beauty, and literature and truth. What is the nature and extent of the freedom that a writer has in recreating an actual historical character, information about whose life and times is based on literary, archeological and other evidences? This question has bothered me at every step. The preface to The Real Tipu written by S.D. Sharma has further intensified my thoughts: “Tipu Sultan has recently leapt from the pages of history to the television screen. This has naturally aroused curiosity about him and his times. It has also caused great controversy. This is because several—especially, people from Kerala—hold the view that the real Tipu was not the same person that is being depicted in the Doordarshan serial. The serial, based on Bhagawan S. Gidwani novel, The Sword of Tipu Sultan is a book filled with falsehoods. It is a narrative that wrongly portrays factual historical events. Doordarshan’s serial has given us a gift that is far from the truth. This controversy made me study Tipu Sultan in detail. When I learnt the truth about him, I was aghast.”

Tipu actually wrote to the Afghan king Jaman Shah and the Caliph of Turkey to invade India and establish the rule of Islam. In his infamous sack of the Mysore palace in 1796, he rounded up the entire palace library containing invaluable ancient Hindu palm-leaf manuscripts, inscriptions, papers, and books, and ordered them to be burnt as fuel to boil gram, which was then used to feed horses.

When the Leftists began to occupy the Government’s Education department, the History department, and the departments of history, sociology and literature, the media adopted a studied ignorance. When Murli Manohar Joshi, the NDA’s HRD Minister began to introduce changes that emphasized Indianness in our education, these Leftists raised a shrill cry. His changes included things like teaching the contribution of ancient India to science, and beginning classes with the Saraswati Vandana. The media projected this as a major calamity. Congress party workers and social-equality champions took out rallies and raised slogans predicting doomsday for India. Now, when the UPA Government’s Arjun Singh has embarked on a project of severely re-Marxifying education, none of these worthies have raised a word of protest. The media, especially the English media, has been highly supportive of this. The Congress party, whose only aim is to remain in power, has completely lost even the semblance of intellectualism. It remains in blissful slumber content and secure in the knowledge that it can borrow intellectualism from the Left if and when required. However, it has followed the policy of economic liberalization because of its realization that its past experiment with socialism brought India to the brink of bankruptcy. However, the Communists who have accepted this have been unable to break away from Marxism from which they derive their very identity.

The fact that some politicians in their speeches, praise Tipu as the “son of Kannada” is nothing new. Kannada was the official language of the state when the Wodeyar dynasty ruled the Mysore kingdom. However, Tipu replaced it with Farsi. However, as someone who hereditarily hails from a family of village accountants that reported to the Old Mysore State’s Revenue department, I am well-versed with the tax paperwork. Thus, Farsi administrative terms like “Khata,” “Khirdi,” “Pahani,” “Khanisumari,” “Gudasta,” “Takhte,” “Tari,” “Khushki,” “Bagaaytu,” “Banjaru,” “Jamabandi,” “Ahalvalu,” “Khavand,” “Amaldaar,” and “Shirastedaar” that are still in vogue were introduced during Tipu’s time.