Representations of precolonial androgyny and the figure of Tipu Sultan in Gidwani and Karnad

This article re-examines Tipu Sultan beyond colonial and nationalist representations that hyper-masculinize him as either predatory or benevolent. I use the term hyper-masculinization to describe a representational stratagem in which Indian rulers are depicted in lopsided extremes: either as excessively violent and aggressive or conversely as overly compassionate and weak. Such single-dimensional representations sideline the wider cultural meanings of masculinity associated with the traditional Indian conception of androgyny. This study fills this gap by arguing that Tipu’s personality is far more profound and many sided and can be better apprehended through the hitherto overlooked conception of androgyny, understood in Ashis Nandy’s work as a marker of masculinity in pre-colonial India. Here androgyny is not a form of gender ambiguity but a culturally bounded ideal of balance that sacralizes political agency, controlled violence, and creativity. Drawing on Ashis Nandy’s conceptualization of Indian masculinity as well as Hindu and Islamic metaphysical worldviews, I argue that Indian fictional writings such as Girish Karnad’s The Dreams of Tipu Sultan and Bhawan S. Gidwani’s The Sword of Tipu Sultan can be read as presenting Tipu as an androgynous sovereign. In doing so, these texts stand in sharp contrast to the colonial demonization and nationalist romanticization of Tipu as a hypermasculine individual. While neither Karnad nor Gidwani may have explicitly set out to recover the medieval Indian ideal of androgyny, my reading illustrates that their representations lend themselves to an interpretation of Tipu as an androgynous figure whose rulership sits at the intersection of south Indian Islam and Hindu ksatriyahood reflecting a balance of protection and force, benevolence and wrath. While existing corrective scholarship is valuable, it does not engage with Tipu’s symbolic and gendered self-fashioning or read his struggles against the British through the lens of androgynous kingship. This study extends the discussion on the sultan by introducing a perspective that illuminates alternative modes of kingship rooted in the religious and cultural imagination of eighteenth-century India.