Here rests in peace the Tiger of Mysore son of Hyder Ali Dakhini Duval ( riyasat) e Karnataka and Fatima.
Sultan e Shahidan, jaan e Wali, Tipu Sultan.
Hyder Ali is identified as a Dakhani ( belonging to Deccan) and of the state of Karnataka.
Tipu Sultan was the first Hindustani ruler to recognise the threat that the British East India company posed to Hindustan. Calling him a nationalist etc would not be correct as Hindustan of those days wasn’t the nation that India is today.
Big and small empires and kingdoms made up the region.
Tipu Sultan’s kingdom was one of those.
Tipu’s greatness lies in his ability to recognise the need for new technology & adopt European methods for warfare to oppose the British, and recruiting French in the army. With French help he introduced European economic, industrial and farming methods to Seringapatam, built a network of new roads, formed a State Trading Company with ships and factories located across the Middle East and established sericulture. Mysore silk is famous even today.
Thanks to four Anglo-Mysore wars and threats to trading settlements such as Madras, Hyder Ali and then Tipu’s victories and treatment of British prisoners, Tipu became a ( if not most) villianous man in Britain.
News of his death was celebrated throughout the island.
Called the Tiger of Mysore, Tipu Sultan’s symbol was the tiger and was used in all his royal and personal objects. The tiger head on his throne is in the Windsor collection. His clothes show tiger stripes, his mausoleum is painted with tiger stripes and the grave cover is also a cloth with tiger stripes.
Coincidentally the British emblem is a lion. The Seringapatam medal, awarded to those who had taken part in the siege, depicts a rampaging lion mauling a supine tiger.
Acc to Kate Brittleback “With Tipu gone, the Company was able, in his own words, to ‘fix [its] talons’ ever deeper into Indian soil.”
Tipu Sultan was the third generation of his family to be born south of the Vindhyas Anda son of the soil. The narrative of a Muslim ruler was British rhetoric which was a “result of the old animosity between Christendom and Islam, which had begun with the Crusades” writes Brittleback.
This mausoleum was built by Tipu for his father in Lal Bagh and Hyder Ali Dakhani sleeps in the middle flanked by Tipu on the left and wife Fatima on the right.
It’s structure resembles the Ibrahim Ray a of Bijapur, of course it’s much smaller with an attached mosque called Masjid e Aqsa
There’s a sense of peace and piety and everyone there showed a great deal of reverence.
#tipusultan
