Srikantia wrote to say that the Gazetteer mentioned no such incident and, as a historian himself, he was certain that nothing like this had taken place. Prof Srikantia added that both the prime minister and the commander-in-chief of Tipu Sultan were themselves Brahmins. He also enclosed a list of 136 Hindu temples which used to receive annual grants from the Sultan's treasury.
It transpired that Shastri had lifted this story from Colonel Miles' History of Mysore which Miles claimed he had taken from a Persian manuscript in the personal library of Queen Victoria.
When Dr Pande checked further, he found that no such manuscript existed in Queen Victoria's library. Yet Dr Shastri's book was being used as a high school history text-book in seven Indian states, Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. So he sent his entire correspondence about the book to the vice chancellor of Calcutta University,
