Tipu Sultan was the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in South India. In 1782 C.E. Tipu Sultan succeeded his father Haidar Ali to the throne of Mysore. His and his father Haidar Ali's incessant opposition to British expansionism in India led to a series of four wars between the two powers and in the course of the last Anglo-Mysore war, he fell fighting near the breach at his fort in Srirangapattana on May 4, 1799 C.E. Tipu Sultan was among the most creative, innovative and capable rulers of the pre-colonial period in India. Tipu also excelled in taking the best of European military methods and combining them with the best of Mysorean military traditions. His innovations in areas as varied as agriculture, irrigation as well as revenue and social reforms were unparalleled for Indian rulers of that time. The Mauludi calendar discussed here was also an innovation devised through his efforts.
With the spread of Islam across the world, the Hijri calendar was adopted by Muslim rulers for dating religious as well as secular events. However, the Hijri calendar is a lunar calendar which consists of 12 months that are based on the motion of the moon, and because 12 lunar months is 12 x 29.53 = 354.36 days, the Islamic calendar is consistently shorter (11 Days) than a solar year. So, wherever there were traditions of using a solar/luni-solar calendar as in India, the use of the Hijri Era was inconvenient to the subjects. As an example, because 31 lunar years were equal to 30 solar years and the revenue was collected on the basis of lunar years whereas the harvest depended on the solar ones the farmer would in theory have to pay tax 31 times on each harvest when the actual number of harvests was only 30.
Tipu had a unique answer to this problem. He instituted a new calendar that he named ‘Mauludi’ sometime between January and June 1784. The new era which he introduced consisted of twelve Luni-Solar years of twelve lunar months. While in the traditional Islamic Hijri year, the shortage of eleven days as compared with the solar year was not regularised, Tipu adopted the principle of intercalary months from the Hindu Panchanga (calendar) prevalent in Mysore in order to make his calendar agree with the solar year.
This new calendar did not have its first year from the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina as in the Hijri calendar (622 C.E.) but from the year of his Birth, which was held by Tipu Sultan to have taken place in 572 C.E. Tipu believed that starting an era with the date of birth of the Prophet was a signal of strength rather than starting an era with the date of his flight. The word Mauludi is derived from ‘Maulud-i-Muhammad’ which in Arabic translates as ‘Birth of Muhammad’. Another name for this calendar was also ’Muhammadi’.
The Mauludi calendar was for all purposes a replica of the Hindu calendar system as followed in Mysore then and to this day. This calendar like the Hindu calendar was divided into cycles of 60 years each with each year being given a different name . The digits of the four numerals that constituted any Mauludi year read from right to left unlike the Hijri year which reads from left to right. This was done to prevent Mauludi years from being mistaken as Hijri.
The Mauludi year began regularly on the same day as the Indian luni-solar year, i.e. on ‘Ugadi’ day each year. This day was also the New Year day in the Mauludi calendar. As the months of Tipu’s new system were Indian Lunar months, the days of the month were simply equivalent to ‘tithis’ or lunar days. Each Mauludi month began and ended on the first and last day of its corresponding Hindu calendar month. For eg. the first month of the Mauludi calendar was Ahmadi which corresponded with Chaitra of the Hindu calendar, second month Bahari which corresponded to the Hindu month Vaishakh, the third month Jafari or Taqi corresponding with Jyeshtha and so on till the last Mauludi month Rabani that corresponded with Hindu month Phalguna.
The ‘adhika masa’ months in certain years of the Hindu Calendar to compensate for the difference in days between the lunar and solar year were also incorporated into the Mauludi calendar. For eg. ‘adhika Vaishakh’ would become ‘Zaid Bahari’ with Zaid the name given for ‘adhika’.
Only one major difference comes to mind here. The Hindu calendar by virtue of it being an extremely accurate calendar also takes into account the difference in the motion of the Sun and moon thereby introducing the days of ‘Tithi Vridhi’ and ‘Tithi Kshaya’. This is absent in the Mauludi calendar. Thus, a Mauludi month though beginning on and ending with the corresponding Hindu calendar month has a continuous succession of days from the first till the last day of the month.
The calendar was used extensively in the administration across the Mysorean state. All correspondence within the boundaries of the Mysore state contained only Mauludi dates, the use of the Hijri date being almost done away with there on official documents. When letters were send to states outside Mysore the dates in the letters were provided in both the Mauludi calendar as well as the local calendar at the recipient’s location.
For eg. Letters to the British and Nizam always had the dates mentioned in Mauludi as well as Hijri. Letters to the Marathas would have dates in both Mauludi as well as Hijri or Samvat era as well. The letters to the Sringeri Mutt, though within Mysore’s borders had dates in Mauludi format as well as in the Hindu Panchanga format. Tipu’s Dream Register, which was maintained by and private to the Sultan also has dates only in the Mauludi format which means that the Sultan even in private use preferred this calendar system over others. However his subjects continued with the use of their own calendar systems that they had always been accustomed to.
The death of Tipu Sultan on May 4, 1799 also saw the use of this calendar coming to an abrupt halt as its use was entirely driven through his authority and its relatively short presence was not enough to place this system in public use.
The memory of the method and use of this calendar remained only till the early years of the 19th C as there were still people around then who had used this calendar in Tipu Sultan’s time. But as time passed the use of this calendar was forgotten and this is apparent from the mistakes seen in dates in William Kirkpatrick’s translation of a large body of Tipu Sultan’s letters to his officials published as early as the year 1811 C. E. Here, Kirkpatrick a scholar of Persian himself, in the preface complains about the difficulty in relating the Mauludi calendar to the Gregorian one.
On account of the obvious difficulties in studying the Hindu Panchanga first and then using it to formulate the Mauludi calendar there was no ready reckoner available for relating Mauludi to the Gregorian dates and vice-versa. This Mauludi date conversion tool will hopefully be useful to researchers anywhere who are looking at documents from that period in Mysore all of which use only the Mauludi calendar.
The dates were verified against information from three very important documents. The first were the Mauludi-Gregorian dates from translated letters mentioned in James Salmond’s work published in the year 1800 C.E. The second was Tipu Sultan’s Dream register itself which here Tipu always mentions the day of the week with the Mauludi date. This week day was used as a check of authenticity when the tool gave out the equivalent Gregorian date. And thirdly, Tipu Sultan’s letters to Sringeri, all of which mention both the Mauludi and Mysore Panchanga dates. This converter tool has passed these 3 tests.