Stuff The British Stole · ABC Australia and CBC

A Tiger and a Scream

·32 min·2 clips

Marc Fennell describes Tipu's Tiger, a wooden sculpture of a British soldier being mauled, with serene eyes that suggest he knows he's won.

Mark Fennell of ABC Australia visits London's Victoria and Albert Museum to see Tipu's Tiger, a wooden automaton commissioned by Tipu Sultan that plays organ-pipe screams and moves a British soldier's arms in mechanical agony when cranked, created as a defiant symbol of Tipu's hatred of the British. Historian Alice Proctor, who runs unofficial critical tours of British museum collections, introduces Fennell to the object and explains the institutional habit of calling colonial acquisitions contested histories to avoid saying stolen. The tiger was built in collaboration with French craftsmen, its mechanism of European manufacture while its jackwood body is Indian, embodying the Franco-Mysore military alliance. Harvard history professor Maya Jasanoff traces Tipu Sultan's 17-year reign in the second half of the 18th century, during which he built on his father Haider Ali's legacy of resisting the East India Company. Tipu lost two sons to British captivity after the Third Mysore War, and the British demonised both father and son using survivor accounts of forced conversion and humiliation. Indian MP and former UN Under-Secretary General Shashi Tharoor regards Tipu as a hero of anti-colonial resistance, though he acknowledges records of brutal persecution of Hindu and Christian subjects that has made Tipu politically divisive in modern India. Historian Zaria Masani argues the tiger survived precisely because it was sent to England, suggesting it might have deteriorated in India. Bhaktiar Ali Shah, a criminal lawyer in Kolkata and sixth-generation descendant from Tipu's tenth son, describes how his family was imprisoned until 1806 after the siege and then exiled, surviving in slow decline while families that sided with the British retained their titles and wealth. Tipu's intervention against Napoleon in Egypt in 1799 led the British to accelerate their siege of Seringapatam, where Tipu died in street fighting. Fennell ends by noting his own mother's family originates from Kerala, which Tipu colonised and where he killed approximately 100,000 people, making the object simultaneously a symbol of anti-colonial resistance and an artefact of a coloniser.

As heard by us

A museum tiger display opens into a focused history of empire, display, and theft.

The episode begins with a museum tiger display and then opens into a sharper meditation on possession, display, and the parts of history that get flattened once violent imperial objects sit behind glass.

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A tiger display opens into empire, violence, and the story behind objects in museum glass.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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