Epilogue

This epilogue seeks to situate the histories of Tipu Sultan and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III within the contemporary representations of Tipu Sultan and the Wodeyar lineage in order to show the lasting effects of Tipu Sultan and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III in the cultural memory of Mysore and the stakes that their legacies continue to have for people today who invest part of their own identity in these kings. It examines how debates over these kings are still ongoing in public forums, such as social media, newspaper stories, and the current political climate of India, and how they influence democratic elections.

Portraying Devotion

Through patronage, Krishnaraja Wodeyar III and his court constructed a cultural memory of devotion that cemented the identity of the Wodeyar lineage as the “ancient Hindu Rajahs” and displayed the king and his Wodeyar predecessors as ideal king-devotees. To supplement his acts of charity, Krishnaraja III commissioned a host of paintings and sculptures that display the king participating in royal devotional rituals in the palace and worshipping in various important temples throughout the region. These images were placed alongside older sculptures of royal patrons at key pilgrimage sites throughout the Mysore kingdom and identified with former Wodeyar kings, creating a visual genealogy of devotion that permeated the sacred landscape of southern Karnataka and situated the entire Wodeyar lineage in an unbroken line of regional devotionalism. In doing so, Krishnaraja III and his court constructed dynastic continuity through representations of devotion and redefining Indian kingship through a devotional lens.

Displaying Power

This chapter examines the visual media from Krishnaraja Wodeyar III’s court that present a different perspective on royal power rooted in Indian understandings of sovereignty. The chapter focuses on the visual culture of Krishnaraja III’s court and how it was employed to display an alternative to colonial hegemony. Given the vast corpus of visual material that was produced in the Mysore court during Krishnaraja III’s reign, it focuses on the large mural complex in the Rangamahal as an exemplary production of this display of power while drawing on similar imagery in the literary and artistic traditions of his court with occasional reference to others from northern and southern India to build a context for the practice in this early colonial period.

The King of Seringapatam

The focus of this chapter is on two texts—the Book of Haidar (Haidar Nama) and the History of Haidar (Nishan-i Haidari)—that relate Tipu Sultan’s genealogy. Of particular interest is the incorporation of tropes from the local southern Karnataka and Kannadiga genealogical tradition that demonstrates how Tipu Sultan and his court acted as adept curators of the historical tradition, constructing a narrative of succession that placed Tipu Sultan as the pinnacle of the kings of Shrirangapattana and its divinely elected ruler. By careful and selective use of the genealogical materials from the courts of his predecessors and through the construction of genealogies of his own family, the court of Tipu Sultan created a complex view of sovereign succession in which both the biological body of the king and the body politic were united as a result of his biological uniqueness and his divine election.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to the history of the Mysore kingdom and the courts of Tipu Sultan and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III. It investigates the kingdom’s development before and during the British colonial encounter in order to show the historical circumstances that led to the rearticulation of sovereignty in the late early modern and early colonial period. This chapter frames the period under discussion as a time in which the Mysore courts searched for their sovereign identity, which became intimately connected to religious idioms and the kings’ royal devotion. Lastly, this introduction provides an overall outline of the book and its major arguments.

Divine Warfare and Diplomacy

This chapter examines warfare and diplomacy during Tipu Sultan’s reign as a means to understand the complex constructions of religious fidelity and infidelity in his court. The first section explores the murals of his summer palace, the Dariya Daulat Bagh, in order to demonstrate the position of warfare in his political thought from early in his reign, when his regional dominance was at its height and his sovereign authority unquestioned. These murals portray Tipu Sultan’s holistic vision of sovereignty in which diplomacy, piety, and war coexist and substantiate one another. These murals, especially the understudied portraits on the palace’s eastern wall, correlate religious fidelity with Tipu Sultan’s political allies and infidelity with his rivals. The next section interrogates Tipu Sultan’s proclamations of jihad, or holy war, in his correspondence with international political bodies during the brief armistice between the Third and Fourth Anglo-Mysore Wars.

The Sultan, the Sufi, and the Guru

This chapter examines the process of devotional continuity as a way of situating kingship within Tipu Sultan’s reign. Tipu Sultan made claims about his relationship to the divine and thereby about his sovereignty. The Mysore king enacted many of the same devotional practices as his predecessors in the region, patronizing regionally significant dargahs, temples, and mathas that had been associated with royal devotion. The primary focus of the chapter is how Tipu Sultan performed his succession as the king of Bidanuru by sponsoring goddess rituals at the Shringeri Matha and through his devotion to its jagadguru, who Tipu Sultan claimed was responsible for the agricultural and military stability of the Mysore kingdom. This is read alongside Tipu Sultan’s devotional relationship with Gisu Daraz, the Sufi saint patronized by the Bahmani kings of Gulbarga and the Adil Shahs of Bijapur, who visits Tipu Sultan in his dreams.

Mapping New Sovereignty

This chapter begins with a pilgrimage undertaken by a Mysore priest named Subbarayadasa under the patronage of Krishnaraja Wodeyar III; it argues that this pilgrimage was a ritual that articulated a new form of sovereignty through the demarcation of domain. The pilgrimage is discussed within the context of Vedic and Puranic imperial rituals that served to constitute sovereignty and structured territory through similar movements through space. In the early colonial period in Mysore, the radical alteration in political structure necessitated a change in the understanding of sovereignty and territory in which Indian sovereignty became grounded in the sacred landscape of India. This can be seen in the details of Subbarayadasa’s pilgrimage and in a collection of murals that commemorate the journey. This process resulted in the construction of a sovereign “geo-flesh” of India and laid the groundwork for nationalist political ideology and theory in modern and contemporary India

Restoring an “Ancient Hindu” Family

This chapter examines the vamshavalis, or genealogies, from the court Krishnaraja Wodeyar III. These texts worked within and through modes of historiography from both India and Europe, incorporating innovative structures, styles, and methods from their colonial counterparts. The genealogies, however, remained rooted in the local concerns of sovereignty in which devotion and divine authority were central, but these themes were reframed, and the lineage was shaped through the scope of linear human history. Blending Indian and European modes of historiography, the genealogies of Krishnaraja III are uniquely early colonial Indian histories composed and produced in relation with, response to, and reaction against European modes of political theology, governance, and meaning making. In a period when the king was bereft of administrative and military power, kingship and succession were removed from claims to the “right of conquest” and from the physical process of biological succession.