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When Human Resources Development Minister Dr Murli Manohar Joshi suggested that there is a good reason to re-write history there was a wave of protest from our Leftists. It was a gut reaction. The Left just cannot accept the fact that what they dismiss as the "Saffron Brigade" can ever do anything right.
In our times, especially after independence, it has been the fashion, rightly or wrongly to treat Tipu Sultan as a national hero, as the man who opposed the British with becoming ferocity. Indeed, one of our earliest destroyers was named after the Sultan. It satisfied our urge to appear secular in the eyes of the Muslims. Unfortunately, if our secular Republic turned Tipu into a hero, that understanding is not shared by the Catholics of South Kanara, formerly at the western tip of the old Madras Presidency and presently the coastal district of Karnataka. The old district headquarters of South Kanara is Mangalore, now a flourishing port but a port of considerable importance even in the fourth quarter of the 18th century.
The Catholics of south Kanara are generally known as Mangalore Catholics to distinguish then from Goan Catholics. These Catholics, originally from Goa, migrated south for a variety of reasons such as escape from the perennial wars that plagued Goa, the tyranny of the Inquisition and the desire to retain Konkani, their mother tongue. By 1765, according to Alan Machado Prabhu, Christians in Kanara numbered about 58,000. This is a probably rough estimate and the numbers could probably have been higher. The Catholics were farmers and gentry and economically well-off.
At this point we hear of the rise first of Hyder Ali to the throne of Mysore and after his death, that of his son Tipu. Tipu was in the middle of a running battle against the British for the suzerainty of coastal west India, especially Kanara, but had thus far been frustrated. He had been humbled the first time he fought the British. Tipu believed that the British were being helped by the Kanara Christians. He decided to take revenge on them. The Imperial Gazetteer says that when in 1784 Tipu succeeded in driving the English out of Kanara, he was determined on both political and religious grounds to convert the native Christians to Islam. Whereupon he ordered the destruction of churches to wipe out every trace of Christianity. His troops then rounded up the Christians and had them sent to Seringapatnam (Shrirangapatnam, Tipu's capital). The number of people rounded up and sent to the Seringapatnam dungeons is disputed. It ranges from a low of 20,000 to a high of 80,000. Sir Thomas Munro who actually served in Kanara puts the figure at 60,000. Many of the Christians died en route to Tipu's capital out of hunger, sickness or sheer fatigue. Those who finally managed to reach Seringapatnam had no easy time either. A large number died of dysentry, cholera, small pox and other diseases. A few surrendered to Tipu. The majority suffered untold deprivations. Many were forcibly circumcised. Estimates put the loss of the Christian population to death, conversion and dispersal at more than 75 per cent of the pre-1784 figures, the property lost at over 90 per cent with 26 out of 27 churches demolished at Tipu's orders.
The came the Battle of Seringapatnam on the morning of 4 May 1799 when Tipu fell fighting. Tipu's murderous reign was finally over. Fifteen years after the Christians were forcibly driven out of their Kanara homes and held prisoners, they became free. In his book Saraswati's children, Alan Machado Prabhu writes: "To the communities kept captive in the confines of the island (Seringapatnam), to the Kanara Christians, as to the Nairs, the Coorgs, the prisoners, it must have been as the first thunder clap of the monsoon bursting upon a land dried in a long hot summer of discontent stretching 15 years, bringing the fresh heady breath of life and hope, renewing, stirring dull roots into a painful restoration of a community life, brutally destroyed. Now, finally, in the death of Tipu, freedom had come to return, however demoralised and dispossesed, with families dispersed and perhaps never to be reconciled, to homes and lands now in other shadows…" Of the 60,000 Catholics held prisoners, only some 14,000 finally returned to their 'homes', then occupied by outsiders. They had to appeal to Sir Thomas Munro for the recovery of their lands.
The Mangalore Catholics had known and experienced what religious tyranny meant. Their release from captivity in 1800 was a moment of great rejoicing. A hundred years later, in 1899, the Catholic historian Jerome Saldhana in his Outlines of the history of Canara was to write: "The deliverance of the people of Kanara from the tyranny and misrule of Tipu Sultan is the most important and happiest event in the history of their land… ushering in a golden era for these people". The returnees had prospered in the intervening hundred years.
It is just two hundred years since the Catholics in captivity returned to their homes. If, in the first hundred years they prospered, in the second one hundred years they have gone from strength to strength. They are now spread all over and are to be found in the far corners of the world in considerable numbers, whether in the United States and Canada, Australia and Africa, having distinguished themselves in many walks of life. Reviewing Machado Prabhu's book, Maxwell Pereira, a former top Indian official, writes of the Mangalore Catholics: "There are new lifestyles and a gradual alteration in their outlook. Far less community conscious today and much more concerned with the present and future rather than with the past, the ordeals of their ancestors affect today's Mangaloreans to a much lesser degree than it affected their great-grandparents a century ago. Not many in the younger generation perhaps are even aware of the dark chapter in their history."
But some of them apparently can't forget the past and a section of Catholic youth from Mangalore is planning to traverse the 200-mile route from Seringapatnam to Mangalore to re-trace the route their ancestors took by way of observing the 200th year of their freedom. The idea is not to give offence to any segment of society as much as to remember an important event in Catholic history of Kanara, that was full of suffering and sacrifice.
Not many Catholics live in Mangalore
any longer. But their memories are strong enough to remember the Battle
of Seringapatnam in May 1799 and the release of their ancestors from the
dungeons thereafter. The year 1999 marks the two hundredth anniversary
of a happy event, that, strangely enough, not many would care to remember
but equally cannot afford to forget.
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