I INTRODUCTION: ISSUES AND PERSPECTIVES
This paper was delivered as the Loyola College Endowment lecture at the Tirunelveli session of the South Indian History Congress, January 30-Feb 1 2009. The author thanks Dr G Chandrika, Reader, Department of History, Pondicherry University, for making valuable suggestions.Mark Wilks (1759-1831) remains a curiously neglected historian of the early nineteenth century, a period that saw the emergence of British paramountcy over India. As a soldier, Lt Col. Mark Wilks participated in several of the battles that were fought in southern India and was with General James Stuart when Tipu Sultan’s capital was stormed in May 1799. As a diplomat, Mark Wills, the Resident at the restored court of the Wodiyars at Mysore, was quite successful in bringing Mysore firmly into the grip of the administration of the Madras Presidency. Committed to the restoration of what was then regarded as an ‘ancient dynasty’ Mark Wilks had to deftly subvert powerful votaries of outright annexation of the territories of Tipu Sultan and he undertook a long range historical investigation that combined the principles of enlightenment historiography with the analysis and representation of the histories of states, cultures and societies that differ fundamentally from the prevailing notions of property, civil society and government. Wilks in his Historical Sketches of the south of India made a pioneering attempt to place the political structure encountered by the English in southern India in the historical context of the disintegration of the Vijayanagara Empire and in so doing laid the basis for a historical methodology that is still relevant in that the combined epigraphic evidence with the material collected by Colin Mackenzie: the weakness of the later corrected by the strengths of the former.
With Edward Said’s Orientalism and the consequent rise of post-colonial theoretical constructs, texts such as Mark Wilks’ Historical Sketches of the South of India are interrogated for traces suggesting ‘identity’, ‘ideology’ and more recently artifacts that “fashion” individuals. The methodological principle involved in such analyses in the elaboration of a discursive field linking within texts with a host of institutions, ideas and political and economic interests. Historians like Robert Orme, Mark Wilks, Mountsturat Elphistone and Grant Duff are generally viewed as ‘imperial historians’ whose works in the words of Burton Stein constitute a ‘trophy of domination’ (Stein 1985:387).
The highly charged military and political context in which these historians wrote their works, the Carnatic Wars, the Mysore Wars and the Anglo-Mahratta Wars lends credence to the view of Stein. All four of these early historians were participants in military engagements with Indian states and therefore their views were necessarily colored by their experiences. In her path breaking India Inscribed: European and British Writings on India’s 1600-1800, Kate Teltscher has used techniques of literary analysis in order to demonstrate the common assumption, strategies and imagery shared by early historian and travel writers that reflect the “anxieties of empire”. Linda Colley has added yet another dimension to the post colonial perspectives by arguing that the experience of captivity was central to the growing sense of English / British identity (Colley 2002:307).
An important intellectual factor in the history of the second half of the eighteenth century was the influence of the European Enlightenment particularly its engagement with historiography and the past. In scholarly interpretations of the writings of historians such as Mark Wilks the influence of the Enlightenment is hardly ever emphasized even though his monumental Historical Sketches of South of India bears three important marks of enlightenment historiography. Firstly, Wilks was able to reconstruct for the first time a continuous narrative of the history of peninsular India from the early thirteenth century by scouring historical materials in three different languages: Persian, Kannada and Telugu. Secondly, historical events such as wars battles, rise and fall of dynasties are placed in a context that is sensitive to both the structural features of continuity and the contingent features of change. Finally, Wilks sensitive to the Enlightenment project of comparative ethnography attempted to identify the linkage between ‘civil society’ and political power and in doing so created the concept of south Indian villages being ‘little republics’, a notion that entered western social and political theory through the writing of Karl Marx. The earliest description of rural agrarian communities of Mysore as ‘little republics” are found in Historical Sketches and Marx cites Wilks as his authority when the analysed the unchanging nature of Indian social formation that constituted the foundations for a despotic political order.
In this paper we attempt an analysis of Mark Wilks’ Historical Sketches of the South of India with a view to uncovering the influence of the Enlightenment on his concept of historiography. We have examined Mark Wilks’ reconstruction of the early history of the Vijayanagarara Empire in order to demonstrate the lien critical method had on his approach to history. Secondly, we investigate Wilks’ treatment of the history of Mysore under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. Indian historians have excoriated Wilks for his “bitter invective” against these two rulers (Habib 1999: xviii). We argue, herein, that part of his denunciation of the Hyder-Tipu regime stems from the political context informing his work: a justification for the restoration of the Wodeyar dynasty under the subsidiary alliance with the East India Company. Finally, we examine the participation of the Indians in the establishment of the company raj. Individuals like Diwan Purnaiya who served both Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan and as Prime Minister under Krishna Raj Wodeyar possessed the ability to transcend regime change and retain agency at the time of rapid and momentous change.
II. MARK WILKS: A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Mark Wilks remains a shadowy figure in spite of having behind a historical masterpiece and several letters together with the correspondence between the Court of Directors and the Mysore Residency. Recently professor L.B.Thrower has pieced together his life in his From Mann to Mysore: the Indian Careers of Col Mark Wilks FRS and Lt Gen Sir Mark Cubbon. Based on private papers preserved in the Isle of Man and British library this book explores the life of Wilks and his nephew Mark Cubbon from a biographical perspective and there is little analysis of his historical scholarship and intellectual influences (Thrower 2006). The classical education Mark Wilks acquired at the Isle of Man is attested by his frequent references to Herodotus, Livy, Strabo, Nearchus and other Greek and Latin writers of antiquity. His life long interest in classical literature and scholarship made Wilks give the following piece of advice to his young nephew Mark Cubbon in a letter written on May 9, 1807.
I advice you above all things not to allow your classical education to slip through: in Greek you had not made sufficient progress to hold your own with facility, and although the first of languages it may go if you find it troublesome to recover (Thrower 2006:88)..
Apart from solicitous concern for Cubbons’ classical education Mark Wilks could always be relied upon to send his nephew octavo volumes of Greek works.
The classical education imparted to Mark Wilks destined him to one of the non conformist ministries like his famous namesake from Norfolk. However, a career in the East India Company was widely regarded as opening the wide doors of fame, fortune and prosperity, while the ministry would only lead to religious and spiritual solace. With the backing of Sir Henry Fletcher, Deputy Chairman of the court of Directors, Mark Wilks secured a cadetship in the Madras Army in 1781 when he was 21 and was commissioned officer in 1782. Since the Madras Army worked closely with the Political Department of Fort St. George cadets like Mark Wilks were trained in the Persian language and the retained a life long interest in Persian literature. Wilks published an English translation of the Persian poet Nasir-ud-din’s, Aklak-i-Naseri in the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society. The lengthy correspondence Mark Wilks had with Lt Col. William Kirkpatrick dealing with the nuances of Persian prosody provides evidence of his abiding interest Persian literature. Ability to read Persian was considered essential for superior office in the Madras Army as Persian become language of diplomatic correspondence by the middle of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century.
The Madras Army at the close of the eighteenth century was a patchwork of armed peasants drawn from the poorer, dry regions of peninsular India. The regiments constituting the Madras Native Infantry to which Mark Wilks was seconded consisted of troops that had fought in the two earlier Carnatic and Mysore wars (Wilson 1883:38). Co ordination of both strategy and logistics was the responsibility of the Military Board at the Fort. In 1786 Mark Wilks with the rank of captain was appointed Deputy-Secretary of the Military Board and in 1787 accompanied Barry Close on a diplomatic mission to Mysore. In 1788 Wilks was appointed Town Major and soon after became aide-de-camp to Col. James Stuart, becoming military secretary in 1794. After a brief furlough in England, Wilks returned and served as private secretary to Lord Edward Clive and it is the delicate mission’ undertaken by Wilks as Clive’s secretary with which William Darlymple’s White Mughals begins.
In 1803 when John Malcolm was sent as the agent of the East India Company to Basra, Mark Wilks was appointed Resident at Mysore and served as political resident until 1808 when he returned to England.
The second phase of Mark Wilks life began with his appointment as governor of Saint Helena, an island in the Atlantic Ocean. This island was one of several acquired by the East India Company in the seventeenth century when its sailing ships needed a port before beginning the long arduous and dangerous passage circumnavigating the Cape of Good Hope. The East India Company did not essentially trade in slaves, but its employees were not above indulging in that inhuman trade. Saint Helena was known to play host to slaving ships sailing across the Atlantic from the west coast of Africa. It appears that for sometimes towards the close of the eighteenth century slaves were being brought to Saint Helena from Bengal. The Indian Records series of Fort-William-India House Correspondence in its volume XIII p.225 contains an important document that sheds light on this trade. It must be mentioned that Mark Wilks, as Governor of Saint Helena, though he did not or could not outlaw slavery, seems to have taken a humanistic view and the tombstone of Samuel Ally, a freed slave at Kirby in the Isle of Mann provides a moving testimony to this fact (Thrower 2006:98).
Mark Wilks, as Governor of Saint Helena, was responsible for the safety and well being of its most illustrious inhabitant, Napoleon, the deposed emperor of France. The French Emperor seems to have held Mark Wilks in high regard. Henry Lowe, Wilks successor was a study in contrast and Napoleon seems to have had a healthy disregard for him. At Saint Helena, Mark Wilks continued the work associated with the Enlightenment inviting the famed botanist William Roxburg who had set up the botanical garden in Calcutta to help with the cultivation of cinchona obtained from South America at Saint Helena with the ultimate purpose of introducing commercial cultivation of India.
Upon this return from India, Mark Wilks settled in the Isle of Man where he owned the beautiful estate of Kirby. Having lost his son, John Barry, named for Col. Barry Close, Wilks remained a devoted parent to his only daughter, Laura. Scholarly recognition to study of south Indian history came in the form of a fellowship of the Royal Society and was the Vice President of the Royal Asiatic society for several years. His public service in the Isle of Man saw him being elected to the house of Keys in 1811 and in 1823 was elected Speaker of the House (Thrower 2006:98).
In this brief sketch of the life of Mark Wilks we have attempted to show the extraordinary career of a young man from the remote islands of the British Isles to high office. The East India Company provided both opportunities as well as challenges and by physically locating the spatial distribution of places associated with the life of Mark Wilks we may begin to appreciate the global reach the East India Company had acquired: Isle of Mann, London, Madras, Calcutta and Saint Helena. Mark Wilks make s a global perspective possible in that all the major events and personalities of the late eighteenth century intersected with his own individual biography (Ogborn 2008). The American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the Rise of Napoleon, The bitter contest with Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan in Southern India, public debate over slavery and the impeachment of Warren Hastings were all public events in the life of Mark Wilks and can illustrate the extent to which historical events shape and transform the lives and fortunes of ordinary mortals.
I
II. WILKS AND THE MACKENZIE COLLECTIONS
The influence of the Enlightenment on the canons of historical scholarship and the conventions of historiographical representation was considerable. Historical scholarship was being underpinned by whole panoply of devices, the footnote being one of them, whose purpose was the transparent evocation of evidence on which the narrative rested (Grafton 1998). Mark Wilks was among the earliest historians to use both literary and inscriptional evidence in his work. Unlike James Stuart Mill who used only English language records of the East India Company, Wilks integrated material from the traditional accounts preserved in the Mackenzie Collection in his narrative (Majeed 1992: 148). Political and military events analysed within the framework of an exact chronology, with lengthy analysis of land and property relations, together with detailed reflections of English interests in India, threatened first by the American Revolution and second by the Napoleonic aftermath seen through the prism of Balance of Power, are the outstanding features of Wilks’ historiography.
Quite early into his scholarly pursuit, Mark Wilks discovered the startling contrast between European conceptions of the historicity of human actions and therefore rationally apprehensible and Indian indifference to historical events and their consequences. To quote Wilks:
The department of ancient history in the East in so deformed by fable and anachronism, that it may be considered an absolute blank in Indian literature.(Vol I:xxv)
This important statement reflects the fractured historical consciousness encountered by the officials of the East India Company in that there was indeed a strong emphasis on the puranic mythology and its regional variants in providing the cultural resources for memory and representations the past. A more sympathetic interpretation of the same historiographical conundrum is found in the Textures of Time: Writing History in South India in which Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subramanyam point out:
A latent metaphysics animates each of these works and calls for analytical formulation, as is the case in any other historiographical text, from anywhere in the word.(Rao et.al.2001 252).
Mark Wilks preferred to read the material, particularly the documents collect from the Mackenzie Collections, against the grain, accepting as evidence “facts” corroborated from inscriptions.
The eighteenth century antiquarians and historians encountered a genre of historical material that was novel in that European antiquity was unaware of its existence. These were the copper plate engraved inscriptions whose discovery during the course of Col. Colin Mackenzie’s surveys led to the recognition that such records offer a window into the past. Yoking the elusive events of the past to the iron frame of time, disciplined by the use of a calendar, arranged in a linear direction, was the ideal of the Enlightenment and Mark Wilks clearly embraced this ideal:
These ancient documents are of a singularly curious texture; they almost always fix the chronology, and frequently enfold the genealogy and military history of the donor and his ancestor, with all that is remarkable in their civil instructions, a religious reforms; and the facts derived from these inscriptions are illustrated by a voluminous collections of manuscripts, which can the trusted with confidence so far as they are confirmed by these authentic documents (vol I: xxv).
In a letter dated 12 November 1809 to William Kirkpatrick, Mark Wilks referred to the immense problems the encountered in reconstructing the early chronology of south India and those stemming from the calendar introduced by Tipu Sultan (Mss Eur F 228:21). With the assistance of Abbas Ali, “field munshi” of Hyder Ali, Wilks hints at the preparation of a memorandum which is unfortunately lost. Synchronizing dates using the Adick or intercalary month that fell in the eleventh or twelfth month of the lunar calendar did lead to inconsistent chronology and hence CP Brown remarks:
Lt Col Mark Wilks in his Historical Sketches has given the genealogy of the rayar of that country but his dates are a riddle to me, they do not accord with any known reckoning and he does not expound his method (Brown 1853: preface).
Erroneous dates abound in Historical Sketches but Wilks attempted to bridge the gulf between chronological confusion and historical exactitude.
The foundation of Mark Wilks historical scholarship rests on the collection of material assembled by Col. Colin Mackenzie. Known as the Mackenzie Collection this assemblage of documents transcribed by nearly 20 Indians assistants has been neglected by historians as a source of history, primarily due to the fact that these records contain an impossible blend of fact, fiction and fanciful narration. In recent years this “Imperial Archives” as Nicholas Dirks terms it has been viewed as colonial “Britain’s most extensive engagement with Indian history”( Dirks 2002: 82). The instrumental logic animating such surveys his spelt out clearly by Bernard Cohn when he argued that the “Surveys” and the knowledge gathered from surveys was transformed into “textual forms” that was “deployed by the colonial state in fixing, bounding and settling India”( Cohn 1997: 8).
Both Nicholas Dirks and Bernard Cohn align themselves firmly with Foucault’s idea that ability to mark, see, observe and represent is inscribed with relations of power and dominance, the very basis of colonialism. This view, the dominant view in the post-colonial discourse on India, is misplaced in that it does not engage either with the individual agency or the larger cultural and intellectual world that existed out side of the micro world of colonialism. The issues of identity have become dominant in the field of post colonial theory and the encounter between England and South India is reduced to fashioning and articulation of identities. A G Hopkins in a critique of post colonial perspectives has pointed out: “The new skepticism has enabled researchers to retreat from the hard political and economic questions that were once central to imperial history. Modes of production have been replaced by modes of discourse; ideas have become material forces; material forces has once understood have become epiphenomena”(Hopkins 1999:199).
The genre of historical materials used by Mark Wilks has been termed Karanam historiography. The manuscripts collected by Mackenzie and his assistants like Kavali Venkata Rao and Booria were late eighteenth and early nineteenth century renderings or redactions of late Vijayanagara prose texts recording the life, adventures, valor and political and ritual transactions of powerful warrior lineages link to the nayakas. Karanam historiography was not self consciously reflective but it did possess a structure, usually the genealogy--vamsavali--of the nayaka family, its incorporated diverse elements like wars, migrations, wonder stories, titles (birudas) awarded and danas (gifts) performed. Representing history in this form also provided a template for legitimacy in that such documents reflect on the wider domain of south Indian politics.
Mark Wilks recognized the utility of such records and in the true fashion of Enlightenment historian used the Mackenzie manuscripts to “illustrate the civil, military and religious institution.”(Vol I: xxv). In the eighteenth century history moved beyond the limits of political and military events to investigate the larger world of society and economy--civil society--as that domain came to be called. Wilks reconstruction of the early history if the Vijayanagara Empire is entirely versed on the Mackenzie Collection as the reproduces the Vidhyaranya myth in the account of the foundation of Vijayanagara (vol I: 18).
In a letter dated November 4, 1809, Mark Wilks states in some detail the literary material used, and refers to a History of Mysore compiled by Purnaiya (Mss Eur F 228:21).. In the same letter he refers in passing to “intelligent and experienced Hindus who possessed journals or family manuscripts” (Mss Eur F 228: 21). A red book given to Mackenzie is stated to be “a great treasure”. It is obvious that in the 200 years since the compilation of the Mackenzie Papers, several of the records have been lost. Wilks also refers to a History of the Wodeyars which was written in Kannada language that was translated into Persian in 1798 at the behest of Tipu Sultan (vol I: xxi). Wilks was able to use the Persian version. This material eventually found a place in the Mackenzie Collection as it was passed on the Colin Mackenzie by Kirkpatrick, one of the commissioners for Mysore appointed by the Earle of Mornington. Apparently at the time of the sack of Srirangapattinam, the archives of the Mysore Kingdom were destroyed. Wilks refers to Kaditams, cloth books, on which royal records were written. From the references given by Mark Wilks it is possible to conclude that south Indian kingdom in the century and a half after the fall of Vijayanagara, had begun to record historical facts in an orderly manner, farming the basis of what historians now regard as the Karanam historiography. The Mackenzie collection offers or glimpse into the material such as Maisur Arasu Purvabhyudhya that reflects on the rise of the Wodeyars to prominence in the penumbra of Vijayanagara decline.
Mark Wilks’ approach to the history of Mysore was framed by two significant events--the rise of Vijayanagara Empire in the middle of the fourteenth century and the usurpation of Hyder Ali that linked the History of the region with the larger domain of Islamic states and polities. For an understanding of the Turkish and Mughal periods of the Indian history, Wilks relied on the chronicle of Ferishta.
There is an important insight with which Wilks begins his analysis of the Vijayanagara Empire: the formation of regional languages and the politics of empire. “The ancient divisions of the country may be traced with great probability by the present limits of the spoken languages than by any other guide which in easily accessible....” The reason for the emphasis on language can be traced level to the belief prevalent amongst the philosophers of the Enlightenment that a common spoken language was the consequence of a shared history. Thus esentialising language Mark Wilks observed:
Identity of language may safely be admitted to prove identity of origin; and in the absences of more direct evidence constitutes a criterion of political union, less liable to change from the influence of time than any other test that can be proposed (vol I:5)..
The European Enlightenment confronted the tangled question of the ‘origin of nations’ by positing a dyadic link between language and ethnicity. Mark Wilks in the passage cited in the previous paragraph was merely reflecting the scholarly consensus of his day. Projecting the spread of languages--Tamil, Telugu and Kannada--backward to the medieval past, Mark Wilks merely reified the process of identity formation based on linguistic affiliation, the enduring basis for an imagined linguistic grouping back into the Vijayanagara past. In attempting a homology between language and nation Mark Wilks was merely echoing the sentiments ofFrancis Whyte Ell, his Madras based contemporary (Trautman 2006:113).
Wilks perception of Vijayanagara Empire as a “barrier to the progress of the Mohammedan arms”, was further elaborated by Robert Sewell in his the Forgotten Empire. This view is essentially derived from the traditional literary accounts preserved in the Mackenzie Collection, in which the foundation of the Vijayanagara Empire is attributed to Vidyaranya a sage under whose influence Hari Hara and Bukka are stated to have acted. As in the case of language, discussed earlier, here again we find a tendency towards reification, this times of religion. Recent historical researches have demonstrated that religious identities in Vijayanagara were complex and multi vocal (Raghotham 2002: 139).
Historical Sketches of the South of India published first in 1810, made a realistic attempt at placing Vijayanagara history in a universal framework. Like his famous contemporary, Edward Gibbon, Wilks also identified the rise of Islam as a powerful force that shaped the course of history and he placed the predatory expeditions of Malik Kafur and Ulugh Khan in the context of the expansion of the Delhi Sultanate, Again, presaging the argument of the Richard Eaton, Wilks saw the emergence of the Bahamani Sultanate and Vijayanagara as part of the same historical process and not as a reaction to the former.
The explanation of the Delhi Sultanate south of the Deccan is perspicaciously viewed by Wilks as a consequence of the expansion of the Mongols and the threat they posed to the Islamic polity. South India provided the wealth with which the Mongols were “bought off” as Wilks put it, quoting Ferishta as his source. The resultant redistribution of wealth in Mongol heartland is captured thus:
It is a curious fact that the plunder of the south India was thus transformed by a double process to be buried in the plains of Tartary (Vol I: 23).
In fact Mark Wilks points continuity between the Mongol invasion of 1398 under Taimur and the eventual establishment of the Timurid House in India under Babar merely a century later.
Marks Wilks, like any contemporary of the Enlightenment was attracted to the characteristic differences in the forms of civil society and royal power in India and Europe. Caste and Despotism were invoked as literary tropes to explain and rationalize the apparent unchanging nature of the Indian society--vegetating in the teeth of time--in the purple prose of Karl Marx. Rejecting the then widely accepted theory of environmental determinism, Wilks argued that despotism, by which he meant absence of “civil liberty” was the result of the absence of written law and the infusion of religion in purely secular maters of civil society and its functioning. As Wilks remarks:
The affairs of the government, of judicature and of police down to the most minute form of social and domestic intercourse, are all identified with religious observances, the whole is sacred and unchangeable ( vol I :27).....
The despotism springing from the union of “divine and human code” generates its own countervailing tendency through dynastic changes--incessant revolutions as Wilks termed them.
Vijayanagara Empire is therefore seen as the outcome of the force of despotism clashing with the expansionist zeal of the Islamic Delhi Sultanate. Yet Wilks rightly recognizes that the power and élan exuded by Vijayanagara was fragile and uncertain; recent historical researches have confirmed the insight of Wilks.
The external appearance of the general government was brilliant and imposing, its internal organization feeble and irregular; foreign conquest was a more fashionable theme than domestic finance at the court of Vijayanagarar...
A splendidly monarchy with uneven and limited capability to extract and deploy resources, human and fiscal, is now the prevailing paradigm of Vijayanagara historiography.
The fall of Vijayanagara in 1565 and the rise of “little kingdoms” like the Wodeyar Kingdom of Mysore is seen by Mark Wilks as setting the stage for a new phase of state formation in peninsular India, in that kinship and community linkages provided the impetus for the growth of polities that were expansionist in proportion to their ability to tap into the emerging military labor market and fiscally extractive in their desire to maximize fiscal resources to sustain their military establishments.
The Mysore kingdom under the Wodeyar and the regimes of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan are examples of such states.
The sources consulted by Mark Wilks and the traditional narratives collected and assembled in the Mackenzie Collection admit the conclusion that in the eighteenth century history writing had begun making inroads in south India. The century that witnessed unprecedented levels of military violence, migrations, contests over sovereignty, both in Madras and Bengal, increasing integration of Indian handicraft industry into an emerging ‘global economy’ and, of course, rise of new forms of political organization and legitination, also saw new and novel forms of anchoring collective memory to written records and social identity. Genealogies and the like were invoked for settling land right claims inams and descent was seen to confer legitimacy to succession. Therefore one level at which disputes were fought over was that of history, a contest, as it were, for the past.
The Wodeyar kingdom of Mysore claimed its political legitimacy to its emergence as a principality during the heyday of Vijayanagara Empire. Mark Wilks recounts the charming story of a damsel in distress who was rescued from an inappropriate marriage that was preserved in a Mackenzie manuscript (Vol I: 39). Such stories are found distributed across the political landscape constituted by the poligars. In the case of the Mysore kingdom we have the added dimension of a pastoral community--the idaiyar--emerging to political strength and prominence. Thus the rise of the Mysore kingdom was a consequence of the fall of Vijayanagara though for political reasons the fiction of allegiance to the rulers of Penukonda, Vellore and Chandragiri was preserved with decent reverence. The rise of the Mahrathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad and the French power in south India are traced in some detail by Mark Wilks in order to prepare the background for the cataclysmic fall of Srirangapatinam in May 1799.
Mark Wilks was appointed political resident in 1803 and seems to have started collecting material for his great work soon after. Wilks was suited for this assignment having worked closely with the Mackenzie survey. Lord William Bentinck had requested Wilks to prepare a report on the revenue interior administration and resources of Mysore, as a follow up of the survey undertaken by Colin Mackenzie in 1799. The detailed statistical abstract of income and expenditure which figures as part of the report is based on information collected by the Mackenzie survey (Robb; 1998:205).
The defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799 brought to the fore the issue of partition or annexation of the territories of the erstwhile Sultans. The English policy towards Tipu Sultan and earlier toward, Hyder Ali was based on the realization that the Sultanist regime was implacably opposed to the ambitions both territorial and economic, of the company. The defeat of Lord Cornwallis at York Town in 1776 and the fall of Britain’s Atlantic empire with the material assistance of France perhaps made Tipu Sultan seek French assistance. An embassy was sent to Versailles in 1787. Tipu”s aim was to seek 3000 French Soldiers who would be paid a fixed salary by the Sultan Lafont 2000:168). Further, the French were to receive commercial privileges. The French revolution of 1789 broke out before these objectives could be achieved. Tipu Sultan was aware of Napoleon’s presence in Egypt and sought his help. The East Company alert as it was to the situation in Europe respondent by creating ring of the states whose appetites were whetted by a vague promise of territory carved from the kingdom of Mysore. The Maharattas and the Nizam of Hyderabad were roped in to form a Triple Alliance against Tipu Sultan. Mark Wilks was objective in this assessment when he stated that the policy of Cornwallis was “calculated to produce a war with Tipu Sultan, than an open defensive alliance”(Vol II: 378).It would be interesting to analyze company policy towards ‘native states’ in the context of prevailing notions of English statecraft predicated upon the balance of power. The correspondence of the Earl of Mornington makes it clear that even as the company was protesting its firm alliance with the Peshwa it was at the same time encouraging Scindhia; this wedge in the Mahratta confederation was to lead to the collapse of Mahratta power in 1818.
The options before the East India Company adverting to the erstwhile territories of Tipu Sultan were two fold: annexation or restoration. Thomas Munro, then Collector of the Ceded Districts was a powerful voice against the restoration of the Wodeyars. Barry Close and Mark Wilks amongst others were advocates of a different policy: restoration of the Wodeyar family, with territorial compensation to satisfy the Peshwa and the Nizam. At one level the entire History of the South of India can the read as a retrospective defense of the policy of restoration most strongly advanced in the council of Fort Saint George by Josiah Webbe.
Burton Stein in his outstanding biography of Thomas Munro does not refer to Munro’s role in the settlement of Mysore, following the fall of Srirangapattinam (Stein: 1998). In a Minute dated June 10, 1799 Thomas Munro provided a series justification for the outright annexation of Mysore. In this minute there is the realization that an eventual conflict with the mahrattas was inevitable, together with a realistic assessment of their mode of warfare. Munro was stinging in his remarks on the policy of restoration:
No political advantage can be gained by dragging the descendant of the Rajahs of Mysore from his obscurity and placing him an the musmud, unless we suppose it to be me to divide only a part of the country, in order that we may, by excluding the Nizam extend our own influence over the rest (Gleig vol I:233)..
Further, Munro was opposed to the idea of investing a six year old boy with the crown. Instead of restoration, Munro argued for a partition of Mysore between the company and Nizam, implying thereby that Mahratta hostility could be assuaged temporarily with the cession of Anaigondi, adding that they “might not the perfectly satisfied” (Gleig vol: 233).
The boy king placed on the throne was under the direct authority of his divan, Purnaiya. Mark Wilks provides little information about their able administrator who began his career as a shresttidar under Hyder Ali rose to the position of a finance minister under Tipu Sultan and was trusted with a contingent of horses and troops which was garrisoned as Satyamagalam. Purnaiya himself was not above inflating his importance in the administration of Hyder Ali by recounting an intimate conversation he is said to have had with the Sultan (Vol II: 121). Mark Wilks earlier while writing his Report paid Purnaiya handsome tribute for husbanding the resources of the truncated Mysore kingdom. In the Historical Sketches he states the commercial regulations of the Tipu Sultan, al Siraijiya, were administered by Purnaiya.
In History of Tipu Sultan by the well known historian, Mohibbul Hasan, Purnaiya is depicted as an individual whose loyalty to Tipu was suspect. Mark Wilks, however, does not provide even a hint of the changed loyalty of Purnaiya and being a contemporary and one with whom Purnaiya shared a good rapport we may safely expect him to record such a happenstance. The silence with respect of Purnaiya’s alleged treachery suggests that there was little truth in the theory of internal subversion as the cause for the defeat of Tipu Sultan. Mark Wilks makes no mention of the alleged plot of 1797 in which Mir Sadiq, Purnaiya and Qamar-ud-din Khan were said to have been involved. The failure of Purnaiya to intercept the troops of General Harris cannot the attributed to any mala fide intent and even Mir Sadiq, the diwan, was actually killed in the battle along side Tipu Sultan. Wellesly, the commander-in-chief, writing to his brother, the then governor general, mentions the death his Sadiq and in no way implies that he had in anyway assisted the investing army ( Brittlebank 2003:201).
Historical records pertaining to the days immediately following the death of Tipu Sultan provide a fairly good indication of the non involvement of not the actual innocence of Purnaiya and Qamar-ud-din Khan. In a letter written by General Harris dated May 13, 1799 just over a week after the fall of the Srirangapatinam the general observes:
This morning Purneah, who has so long been at the head of the principal departments of the Mysore government and enjoyed the confident of the late Sultan, paid me a visit, having arrived last night from the army which remained under his command (.Dispatches of Lord Morington:7).
This letter certainly proves that Purnaiya enjoyed the confidence of Tipu Sultan and if there was any secret correspondence prior to this meeting General Harris would most certainly have known. Moreover, the proposal that Purnaiya made was certainly unorthodox: he advocated the crowning of Fatheh Hyder as the king. Had Purnaiya been a party to the conspiracy against Tipu, it is highly unlikely that he would have sought the throne for his son. Another letter quoted by Kate Brittebank states:
I think it is very immaterial whether Futteh Hyder and Purneah come or not. At all events I have got his family of his latter, which is tolerable security for his behaviour (Brittlebank: 2003)..
The fact that Purnaiya’s family was held hostage to ensure his good behaviour suggest that he was not party to any conspiracy against Tipu Sultan.
In the Interest of historical accuracy there is one single solitary document in the form of a memorandum to lord Mornington that states that Mir Sadiq and Purneah would become useful instruments in establishing a new government. This document clearly established possible fault lines in the administration of Tipu Sultan. It certainly does not make Purnaiya complicit in an act of Treachery.
We have argued in this paper that the influence of the European Enlightenment formed an important aspect in the historiography of Mark Wilks. We have demonstrated that he effectively used both literary and other sources in his narrative. We have shown that the Mackenzie Collection formed a vital corpus of information on which Mark Wilks mounted his reconstruction of the History of Mysore. In his treatment of the history of Vijayanagara, we have drawn attention to the use of the concept of oriental despotism and have tried to contextualize the notion of despotism in the political discourse of the eighteenth century. The concept of history embodied in Mark Wilks work is quintessentially derived from the Enlightenment.
We have situated the book within the larger context of debates within the ruling circles of the East India Company on the issue of Tipu Sultan and his dominion after 1799. Further we have looked at the role of Purnaiya in order to answers a question that has dogged south Indian historiography.
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