The Dream Register

The manuscript usually called the Khwabnama — the register of dreams — is a small notebook in which Tipu Sultan wrote down dreams that struck him as significant, dated them, and in a number of cases added his own interpretation of what they meant. The entries run from the mid-1780s to within a few months of his death.

The crucial fact about it is negative: it was not published, not circulated, and not addressed to anyone. His revenue regulations, his military code and his diplomatic correspondence were all written to be read by others and to produce an effect. This was not. It is the one substantial document of the reign in which he is not performing.

After Srirangapatna fell on 4 May 1799, the palace was searched. Colonel William Kirkpatrick found the notebook among other memoranda in the Sultan's bedchamber — Habibullah, his munshi, was present when it was found and identified it. In April 1800 the register was presented to the Directors of the East India Company in London on behalf of Marquess Wellesley, the Governor-General whose ultimatum had begun the war.

It has been in London ever since, in what was the India Office Library and is now part of the British Library. The most private thing a ruler owned went into the archive of the company that destroyed him — which is why we can read it at all.

The recurring subjects are what you would expect of a man at war for most of his adult life, and a few things you would not.

Victory over his enemies. Many entries turn on the defeat of the English — whom he calls the Nazarenes — and of the Marathas and the Nizam. In the dreams these enemies submit, retreat, or are destroyed, often with the outcome presented as already settled elsewhere.

Visitations. He records seeing the Prophet, Ali, the companions of the Prophet, and Sufi saints, sometimes offering reassurance or instruction. For a ruler who named his state the Sarkar-i-Khudadad, the God-given government, these are not decorative: they are the private counterpart of a public claim.

Omens and reversals. Some entries are stranger and more domestic — encounters that turn out to mean the opposite of what they appeared, figures who change identity mid-dream, small incidents he clearly found unsettling enough to write down and puzzle over.

His own readings of them. The interpretations are often the most revealing part. He treats dreams as information about the unseen, to be worked out like intelligence from a distant province — which tells you something precise about how he understood the world he was operating in.

The register is used in two quite different ways, and it is worth being clear which is which.

As evidence of personality, it is unmatched. It shows a man of intense private religiosity, preoccupied with the war, confident of divine backing and — the detail that humanises him most — anxious enough about the future to keep looking for signs in his sleep. Whatever else he was, he was not a man free of doubt.

The register has had a second life in literature. Girish Karnad's play The Dreams of Tipu Sultan, written for the bicentenary of his death, uses the notebook as its frame — the ruler's inner voice set against the historians arguing over him. It is a fair instinct: of everything taken out of Srirangapatna in 1799, the notebook of dreams is the only object that lets him speak in the first person.

For the man these dreams belonged to, see The Person; for what else left the city that May, see Legacy & Memory.