© BnF
Abstract: In 1797, Frenchmen serving Tipu Sultan, ruler of the South Indian kingdom of Mysore, held a series of meetings in his capital. They elected officers, swore republican oaths, drafted rules of discipline, and planted a tree of liberty. After Tipu’s defeat, British officials published the meetings’ French minutes and an English translation under the name “Jacobin Club.” That name has shaped how the episode has been understood ever since.
What did these revolutionary rites mean in the service of a sultan? Reading the minutes closely, this talk follows the movement of political language and ceremonial practices from the French Indian Ocean colonies to Mysore. It examines how the assembly sought to govern its members and represent itself to Tipu’s court, while asking what the surviving record (and its British translation) allows us to know about the encounter. The episode offers a way to think about revolution beyond Europe and the uses of political rites in the globally connected setting of eighteenth-century South Asia.
About the Speaker: Arik Moran is Senior Lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Haifa. A historian of South Asia, he works across archival research and ethnography to study political authority and its representation. He is the author of Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland: Rajput Identity during the Early Colonial Encounter (2019). His current research examines revolutionary ritual and diplomacy in Tipu Sultan’s Mysore.