I was thereafter invited for talks and lectures at several places and during one such exposition on the Interregnum period of Haidar and Tipu, when I… - Vikram Sampath
" "I was thereafter invited for talks and lectures at several places and during one such exposition on the Interregnum period of Haidar and Tipu, when I began quoting verbatim some of the letters of Tipu, all hell broke loose in the hall. A section of the hitherto civilized audience broke up in sloganeering, hurling paper rockets at the podium and forcing the organizers to hurriedly terminate the session and usher me inside. Amidst the din, a man reached out to my bewildered and hassled father who sat among the audience with a terse message: ‘He is your only son, advise him well if you wish to have him around you for long!’ If this kerfuffle felt like a scene from a Bollywood film, it sadly was not, but was part of my father and my lived experience. The aggression of that evening stunned us, deeply impacting my mother’s already precarious health. In our naivety, we believed that historiography meant telling the truth as it was. But its intense sociopolitical weaponization was something that we were both unaware of and yet to be confronted with.
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About Vikram Sampath
Vikram Sampath is an Indian historian and author of four books.
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Towards the end of 1926, the first English biography of Savarkar titled The Life of Barrister Savarkar was published in Madras under a curious pen name ‘Chitragupta’. In Hindu mythology, Chitragupta is the accountant of Yama, the God of Death, who keeps a meticulous debit and credit account of every soul’s sins and virtues. There have been various allusions about who the author is—from Congress leader C. Rajagopalachari, the revolutionary V.V.S. Aiyar to Savarkar himself writing under a pseudonym. The identity of the author continues to remain a mystery.
By 1393 ce, the Sharqui dynasty had replaced the Tughlaqs with the centre of power in neighbouring Jaunpur. This further eclipsed the already diminished importance of Varanasi. The city hardly features in the annals of the Sharqui kingdom. Under Ibrahim Shah of this dynasty, the Atala mosque of Firoz Shah, which had been left incomplete, was completed in 1408. Construction of several other mosques was completed with stones and materials belonging to demolished temples from the fifth to fourteenth centuries. The Padmeshwara inscription mentioned above was transported all the way from Varanasi to Jaunpur to be set in the walls of the Lal Darwaza Masjid there. The masjid was built in 1447 by Bibi Raji, the queen of Sultan Mahmud Sharqui. Several stone pillars from the Gupta period were also used as stools in the mosque gardens.40 Hence, evidently, the debris of demolished temples was being carried to Jaunpur and steadily used in mosque construction.
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Tipu Sultan, in the early part of his reign i.e., 1783, is thus also seen as an arbiter between warring sects and also someone who permitted the procession and festivities at Melukote with pomp.29 Interestingly, this was barely a month or two before committing the cruellest atrocity on the same Sri Vaishanava community by massacring 700 families of the Mandyam Iyengars, who shared the same gotra of Bharadwaja with that of the Mysore Pradhans who were acting on Maharani Lakshmi Ammanni’s behalf.
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