They finally offered to surrender and were given an option of either a ‘voluntary profession of the Mahommedan faith, or a forcible conversion, with deportation from their native land. The unhappy captives gave a forced assent, and on the next day, the rite of circumcision was performed on all the males, every individual of both sexes being compelled to close the ceremony by eating beef.’

But it was not only the Brahmans, who were thus put in a state of terror of forcible conversion, for, in this same month, a Raja of the Kshatriya family of Parappanad, also "Tichera Terupar (Trichera Thiruppad), a principal Nayar of Nelemboor (Nilamboor)” and many other persons, who had been carried off to Coimbatore, were circumcised and forced to eat beef. The Nayars in desperation, under those circumstances, rose on their oppressors in the south, and the Coorgs too joined in.

Tipu ordered that ‘40,000 captives, unhappy families of the Koorg country and other parts of the Mallabar Coast are to be circumcised [converted].’

The manner in which he [Tipu] behaved to the inhabitants of Calicut was horrid. A great part of them, both male and female, were hung. He first tied up the mothers, and then suspended the children from their necks. The cruel tyrant caused several Christians and Heathens [Hindus] to be brought out naked, and made fast to the feet of his elephants, which were then obliged to drag them about till their limbs fell in pieces from their bodies. At the same time, he ordered all the churches and temples to be burned or pulled down or destroyed in some manner. Christian and pagan [Hindu] women were compelled to marry Mohammedans. The pagans were deprived of the token of their nobility, which is a lock of hair called kudumi; and every Christian, who appeared in the streets, must either submit to be circumcised, or be hanged on the spot. This happened in the year 1789, at which time I resided at Verapole [Varapali in Travancore]. I had then an opportunity of conversing with several Christians and Pagans, who had escaped from the fury of this merciless tyrant; and I assisted these fugitives to procure a boat to enable them to cross the river which runs past that city. This persecution continued till the 15th of April 1790.

Official pressure is said never to have been more consistently brought to bear upon the Hindus than in the reign of Aurangzeb. In the eastern districts of the Punjab, there are many cases in which the ancestor of the Musalman branch of the village community is said to have changed his religion in the reign of this zealot in order to save the land of the village. …. Many Rajput landowners in the Cawnpore district, were compelled to embrace Islam for the same reason to save the family property from confiscation. In other cases, the ancestor is said to have been carried as prisoner or hostage to Delhi, and there forcibly circumcised and converted. It should however be noted that the only authority for these forced conversions is family or local traditions and no mention of such is made in the historical accounts of Aurangzeb’s reign. It is established, without doubt, that forced conversions have been made by Muhammadan rulers, and it seems probable that Aurangzeb’s well known zeal on behalf of his faith has caused many families of Northern India (the history of whose conversion has been forgotten) to attribute their change of faith to this, the most easily assignable cause.

‘Having circumcised them,’ Tipu ordered, ‘you must enroll them among the faithful [make them Musalmans] . . . if any of those should escape, you will come under our displeasure.

To begin the so much desired work of the conversion of the Hindoos and to seize on the Brahmins, ... and make them examples to the other inferior castes, in becoming Mussulmans, by suffering circumcision and being compelled to eat beef: accordingly many Brahmins were seized in or about the month of July 1788...

A letter written by the President and the Council of Surat on 22 January, 1668, suggests a rather ingenious method of making converts. The factors state that trade had been largely obstructed by the fierce bigotry of Aurangzeb and his persecution of the Hindus. If a Muhammadan had no desire to discharge his debt to the bania and if the bania demanded the payment of the same, the Muhammadan would lodge a complaint to the Kazi that he had called the prophet names or spoken contumaciously of their religion, produce a false witness or two, and the poor man was forced to circumcision and made to embrace Islam. Several persons had been thus served to the great terror of all. This king not at all minding anything of his kingdom gives himself wholly upon the converting or rather perverting the banias.’ Forcible conversion of the Hindus at Surat, at last drove them to plans of migrating from Surat to Bombay. The English, however, turned down their request. The Hindus then closed their shops at Surat and eight thousand of them marched on to Broach to the emperor who was supposed to be there. What became of their appeal we do not know.

...had not the negociations to that end been interrupted in consequence of a resolution formed by Tippoo (in the combined view of indulging his zeal as a Mahommedan, and at the same time rooting up as he fondly might imagine, the causes of that aversion which the Malabar Hindus had hitherto shewn to his government) to attempt the forcible conversion of all his Hindu subjects in Malabar to the Musulman faith ....

Forcible conversion was the other alternative to death for a non-Muslim. The ultimatum was given to the population of a village either to embrace Islam or to face death. Most Hindus and Sikhs preferred death to the shameful surrender of faith, and died, sometimes fighting and at other times with great tortures, at the hands of the sadist religious zealots of the Muslim League. Such women as could not be abducted or dishonoured, generally escaped this shame by immolating themselves. Thoha Khalsa village, of which an account will follow, is a classic example of such sacrifice of life on the part of 93 Sikh women of that place. This, the best known incident of its kind, however, is not the only one. In scores of places, both during the March attacks and the post-partition attacks on Hindus and Sikhs, women immolated themselves to escape dishonour at the hands of the maddened and ferocious lusting Muslim mobs. Those who were forcibly converted were, if they were Sikhs, shaved off and circumcised; the Hindus too were circumcized, even the grown-ups. The women converts were generally given in marriage, if they were unmarried or widows, to Muslims, the Nikah ceremony being performed by some local Maulvi. A large number of such shaven Sikh converts to Islam arrived as refugees in March, 1947 in Amritsar, Patiala and other places, from Rawalpindi and the Frontier Province. (81)

The people were brought to such a state of obedience that one revenue officer would string twelve khuts, muqaddams and chaudharies (all Hindus) together by the neck and enforce payment by blows. No Hindu could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver, tonkas or jitals, or of any superfluity was to be seen. These things, which nourish insubordination and rebellion, were no longer to be found. Driven by destitution, the wives of the khms and mukaddims went and served for hire in the houses of the Musulmans.

The Company’s Resident at Calicut Sir Francis Gordon too had confirmed reports that the forces under Lally and Khan had received ‘orders to surround and extirpate the whole race of Nayars from Kottayam to Palghat.’

The country we had to traverse was an impenetrable jungle of trees and reeds. The Sultan ordered that every one in the army, great and small alike, should carry a hatchet to cut down these obstacles. When the camp was struck, he set out on horseback towards the forest together with his soldiers who felled the trees from morning to noon ... they resumed cutting trees till the evening. All the infidels found in the jungle were taken prisoners; they had stakes sharpened at both ends and made the prisoners carry them on their shoulders. Each was accompanied by his wife and children, and they were thus led to the camp. It is the practice here to surround the camp with a palisade, called a katkar and having four gates. They make a second katkar around the king's habitation. Outside the principal enclosure, they raise the platforms about three feet high, and light fires on them at night. Slaves and sentinels spend the night here, each holding in his hand a bundle of very thin reeds. When the infidels approach for a night attack on the camp, all the sentries light their faggots, and thanks to the flames, the night becomes as bright as day, and the cavalry sets out in pursuit of the idolaters. In the morning, the Hindus who had been made prisoners the day before, were divided into four groups, and each of these was led to one of the four gates of the main enclosure. There they were impaled on the posts they had themselves carried. Afterwards their wives were butchered and tied to the stakes by their hair. The children were massacred on the bosoms of their mothers, and their corpses left there. Then they struck camp and started cutting down trees in another forest, and all the Hindus who were made captive were treated in the same manner.

However, taking war hostages was a tradition practiced by Muslim rulers who ruled India. Either Girish Karnad is ignorant of the fact that the British merely followed this existing tradition or he has deliberately suppressed it. Mir Jumla, a general under Aurangzeb defeated and looted the entire treasury of the king of Assam. And he didn’t stop there. He demanded more money and took the king’s sons and a daughter as ransom till the king brought him the money. Mir Jumla also took the sons of the king’s feudatories, Burha Go Hen, Baar Go Hen, Gad Gonia Pukhan, and Bad Patra Pukhan as war hostages. This fact is recorded by Saqi Mustad Khan in Masir-i-Alamgiri, which is Aurangzeb’s authorized biography (5th Al Hijra 1072, which corresponds to 5 January, 1663). During the Mughal rule, every Rajput king had to station at least one son in the Badshah’s court as a sign of respect. The undertone of this arrangement was clear to both parties—the son was a glorified hostage ensuring obedience from Rajput kings. This custom was inaugurated by Akbar and continued thereafter. A Rajput ruler defeated in war had to marry his daughter off to the Mughal king—a wife but nevertheless a permanent hostage. Most Rajput kings agreed to this because of their vanquished status. Maharana Pratap was the lone exception. He refused to send his son to Akbar’s court. When Khurram, who later styled himself as Shahjahan, rebelled against his own father and failed, the father Jahangir, took his son’s sons—his own grandsons—Dara and Aurangzeb as war hostages. But Cornwallis who took Tipu’s sons as hostages treated the boys with the care and propriety that befitted royal heirs, something that none of the Muslim rulers did under similar circumstances. If Muslim war hostages were non-Muslim, they were compulsorily converted to Islam. Now, what was the condition laid down for taking Tipu’s sons as hostages? After he was defeated in the war, Tipu agreed to pay a certain sum of money to the British according to the terms of surrender. But his treasury was nearly empty. Neither did he have anything he could pledge until he could obtain the money. However, could the British merely believe his verbal promise? The British didn’t originally intend to take the young boys as hostages. And once throughout the time they held the boys hostages, they were treated with care and courtesy.