Malabar

Malabar was not Tipu Sultan's conquest. Haidar Ali took it from 1766, and Mysore ruled the coast — interruptedly, contestedly — until the Treaty of Seringapatam handed it to the East India Company in 1792. Much of what is attributed to Tipu Sultan there belongs to a twenty-six-year occupation he inherited at the halfway point.

The province mattered for the same reason Coorg did, but more so: pepper, teak for the dockyards, and the ports through which Mysore traded with the Gulf. It was also politically unlike anywhere else Mysore ruled — a landscape of Nair chieftaincies under nominal overlords, with a large and long-established Muslim Mappila population on the coast, and a caste order that European and Mysorean observers alike found extraordinary in its severity.

Mysore attacked the Nair chiefs as a matter of course: they were the armed political class, they resisted, and they allied with Travancore and with the Company. Campaigns against them were repeated and punitive. Fortified houses were destroyed, families were deported, and large numbers of Nairs and others fled south into Travancore, whose ruler sheltered them — one of the direct causes of the Travancore crisis that began the Third Anglo-Mysore War.

Mysore also attacked the customary order those chiefs sat on top of. Its administration in Malabar interfered with matrilineal inheritance, with the ritual disabilities imposed on lower castes, and with the rules governing dress — measures presented by Mysorean sources as reform, experienced by the Nair elite as an assault on their world, and welcomed by some of those beneath them. Whether to call that religious persecution, social revolution or conquest administration is precisely what is argued about.

Conversions took place, on a scale nobody has reliably measured, and under conditions where the line between coercion and advantage is not drawable at this distance.

The Mappilas of Malabar were Muslims — a community centuries old, not converts of the Mysore period. When they rose against Mysore, Tipu Sultan put the rising down by force, and Hasan records that several thousand of them had to be massacred before the province was subdued.

This is the single most useful fact on this page. A ruler conducting a war of religion in Malabar had no reason to destroy the Muslim population of Malabar. A ruler holding a rebellious province had every reason, and did it. The pattern that fits the record is that Mysore attacked whoever contested its authority on the coast, and that the coast contested it constantly.

Readers who want the scholarship rather than the argument should go to Stephen Dale's Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier (Clarendon Press, 1980) on the Mappilas, and to Susan Bayly on the religious landscape of the south. Both treat Malabar as a society with its own long history rather than as a stage for a story about Tipu Sultan.

The consequences of the flight to Travancore are covered in the Third Anglo-Mysore War, Malabar's place in the economy in The Economic State, and the wider question in Religious Policy.