How Tipu Sultan Tried To Wipe Out Mysore And Replace Its Kannada Heritage With Islamic one by renaming it to Nazarabad and Razing the whole city to the ground
Tipu Sultan’s attack on Mysore was not limited to political control. He attempted to destroy the old identity of Mysore itself. The Kannada Hindu Identity.
First, Mysore was razed to the ground.The old city connected to the Wodeyars, the palace, the temples, and the older Kannada Hindu memory of the kingdom was brought down. This was not renovation. This was destruction of the old capital which had hundreds of years of legacy of Vijayanagara and Wodeyar rulers.
Then the stones of the old palace and temples were removed. The palace of the Mysore Rajas and the temple structures of old Mysore were treated like construction material. The visible heritage of Mysore was broken apart and carried away.
Those stones were used for Tipu’s new fort near Mysore. And this fort was not even useful for defending the country. It was a costly, cruel, and useless project that caused suffering to the peasants and labourers. Mysore’s palace and temples were destroyed for a fort that did not even properly serve Mysore.
The old fame of Mysore was pushed aside through Nazarabad. That name was not Kannada. It was not rooted in the old cultural identity of Mysore. After razing the city and stripping its palace and temples, Tipu tried to stamp a new Islamic Persianate identity over the old Kannada capital just like how he did for majority of the places which had it's local Kannada names stripped and replaced with foreign names, namely Islamic.
If this project had fully succeeded, the Mysore we know today would not have existed in the same form. The old palace memory, the temple heritage, the Wodeyar connection, the Kannada identity of the capital, and the name Mysore itself would have been buried under Tipu’s replacement project.This was an attempt to wipe out old Mysore from the ground up. Destroy the city. Strip the palace. Remove the temple stones. Build a new fort. Give it a new name. Push the old Kannada Hindu memory into the background.
The Wodeyar family also suffered under this same order. The old royal house of Mysore was reduced to humiliation. The family was stripped, confined, neglected, and the young Raja was left in a miserable condition. The dynasty that represented old Mysore was treated like an unwanted remnant.So this was not just about buildings. It was about identity. Tipu went after the city, the palace, the temples, the name, the royal family, and the memory of old Mysore itself.
The Fourth Anglo Mysore War finally ended Tipu’s rule. After his defeat, the old Mysore order was restored, the Wodeyars returned, and Mysore survived instead of being buried under Nazarabad.
Today Mysore still stands with its Kannada heritage, its palace memory, its Wodeyar legacy, and its civilizational identity because Tipu’s project failed.
Source :
https://archive.org/details/journeyfromMadr1Hami/page/67/mode/1up