Reconstructing the Image of Tipu Sultan in Girish Karnad's The Dreams of Tipu Sultan

Abstract

This paper scrutinizes the alternative image of Tipu Sultan created by Girish Karnad in his 1997 play The Dreams of Tipu Sultan. Girish Karnad has treated a controversial historical figure, Tipu Sultan, in this play. He portrays a positive image of this ruler of Mysore. In doing so, he has greatly deviated from the conventional image of Tipu Sultan constructed and propagated by colonial hegemony. Tipu Sultan is branded as a notorious ruler by the Europeans to justify the colonial legacy. But, Karnad has endeavored to restore his image convincingly us ing historical documents, records and other sources and has created a counter-discourse as well. This paper aims to focus on how Karnad has challenged the colonial narratives by offering a counter-narrative from the perspective of the colonized. It shows that Karnad's purpose behind this is not only to create the history of the colonized but also to bring the marginalized "Other" from the periphery to the "center". In order to do so, a postcolonial approach of the politics of representation is applied in this paper to analyze this text.