The Persistent Colonial Gaze
Tipu’s Tiger, Then and Now
Amid protests in Minnesota and other major cities in the United States and abroad—in reaction to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless Black people before them—Donald Trump wrote a tweet on May 29th invoking a statement made by racist Miami police Chief Walter Headley in 1967: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”[1] In addition to the direct reference to Headley’s abhorrent phrase, Trump used the word “thugs” to describe the crowds that were taking to the streets to demand justice.
“Loot” and “thug”' are Anglo-Indian words that originate from Sanskrit and Hindi. “Thug” derives from the Hindi word thugna, meaning “to deceive” and from the Sanskrit word sthagi, “conceal”. The words “thug” and “thuggee” were adopted into the English language during the East India Company’s occupation of India in the 1800s, just before the British Crown seized full political control over the region. A 1906 British Medical Journal article, "Contributions to the Craniology of the People of the Empire of India" — which included photographs of supposed-thuggees’ skulls — stated that thuggees, "made it their business to frequent the great highways of India and become friendly with travelers, with a view to setting upon them and strangling them."[2] Much of what is known about the actual thuggees of colonial-era India is obscured by myth, but during the early to mid-19th century the thuggee strategically held a place as a bogeyman in the British colonial (and orientalist) imagination and was often evoked by the British to instill fear among other civilians in the region to encourage an embrace of a British system of education and political rule:
“In the literal war waged by the British on thuggee and in the symbolic battle for complete and controlling knowledge of the colonized that may be said in part to characterize Victorian imperialism, one finds that the more the British decode the secrets and rituals of thuggee, the more is revealed to them by captured bandits. As [historian] Thomas Richards has argued, “the production of certain kinds of knowledge was in fact constitutive of the extension of certain forms of power” (“Archive and Utopia,” 105). In early Victorian British India, this pattern of incremental acquisition of knowledge, occurring alongside the incremental acquisition of political power, reveals a determined ambition to conquer (and thus control entirely) the colonized subject through acquiring complete knowledge of that subject.”
Thugs stabbing the eyes and bodies of travelers whom they have strangled, preparatory to throwing them in a Well. Artist unknown, 1829–1840. Scan from Douglas M. Peers, India under colonial rule: 1700-1885. (Pearson Education: 2006). 80-81. Retrieved August 31, 2011 from the British Library.
For the imperial nation, collecting and anthropologizing go hand-in-hand with conquering and colonizing. Similarly, the word “loot,” derived from the Hindi word lūṭ—meaning “to break”—and from the Sanskrit word lunṭh — “to rob” — was used by the British during the 1800s to “distinguish Europeans from non-Europeans — the word’s ‘Eastern origin’ meant to denote an intrinsic inclination in ‘natives,’ their fundamentally avaricious, unruly character, and which therefore required the brutal civilizing violence of European colonial masters.”[3] Just as the threat of civilian looting was phantomized in the era of the East India Company and British empire, today (and for the last few centuries) in the United States and elsewhere, “the idea of black people looting a store is one of the most racially charged images in the white imaginary.”[4] Alongside this notion, in recent years the word “thug” has become “a nominally polite way of using the N-word” according to John McWhorter, associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He states: “When somebody talks about thugs ruining a place, it is almost impossible today that they are referring to somebody with blond hair.”[5]
The state and media have historically been quick to denounce civilian looting as violence, especially when it has overlapped with protests by (or crises that have predominantly affected) BIPOC. Yet the United States and global north have largely not even begun to acknowledge and contend with the historical and imperial looting that laid the foundations of their nations’ development and of modern-day capitalism: namely, the looting of land from Indigenous peoples and abduction of millions of people from Africa for the purposes of enslaved labor. Museums too, especially the “encyclopedic,” institutions of the global north, were built around looted objects—sacred objects such as vessels, tombs, idols, and temples—that were stolen from Indigenous and native peoples of colonized nations, often through violent means.
Image of East India Company Museum, India House, Leadenhall Street, London, UK. Tipu's Tiger can be seen to left. Charles Knight (Editor), London Vol. 5-6, 1841. 63.
In Sara Drake’s penny dreadful-style comic, “Tipu’s Tiger,” the titular late-18th century automaton and pipe organ from India springs to life and roams the halls of a museum, acting out an “anti-Colonialist revenge fantasy.”[6] In reality, Tipu’s Tiger remains housed in a glass vitrine in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. Created for Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in India from 1782–1799, its wood exterior is carved and painted to represent a tiger devouring a nearly life-size figure of a soldier of the British East India Company. The object is one of the best-known works in the V&A and its image has been reproduced on endless museum gift shop memorabilia, from postcards to stuffed toys. Its acquisition, as an object obtained through plunder, has long been glorified through historical paintings and writing throughout the UK and Europe.
Tipu's Tiger, 1780s or 1790s, Mysore, India. Museum no. 2545 (IS). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The acquisition of Tipu's Tiger was the result of a raid on the Sultan’s palace and his subsequent murder by British soldiers on May 4, 1799, led by General Sir David Baird, 1st Baronet GCB. Tipu Sultan had a well-known hatred for the British, so the looting and capture of his automaton was a symbolic victory for the East India Company. Indeed, during the era of the British Raj the hunting of actual tigers became a popular sport, representing “not just the political subjugation of India, but also a triumph over India's environment.”[7] Describing the discovery of the automaton, an aide to the Governor General of the East India Company wrote: "It is imagined that this memorial of the arrogance and barbarous cruelty of Tippoo Sultan [sic] may be thought deserving of a place in the Tower of London.”[8] Tipu’s Tiger was first displayed in the reading-room of the East India Company Museum and Library at East India House in London before it was transferred to the V&A in 1880. Early displays of the object allowed visitors to operate the organ by turning its crank; its screams would emanate through the halls to the great dislike of many visitors. Upon the death of Sir David Baird, his wife commissioned an enormous oil painting venerating him through a scene in which Baird surveys Tipu Sultan’s death, entitled General Sir David Baird Discovering the Body of Sultan Tippoo Sahib after having Captured Seringapatam, on the 4th May, 1799, by Sir David Wilkie (1839). While the painting is in the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland, it once hung not far from the automaton at East India House.[9]
Sir David Wilkie, General Sir David Baird Discovering the Body of Sultan Tippoo Sahib after having Captured Seringapatam, on the 4th May, 1799, 1839. Oil on canvas, 348.50 x 267.90 cm (framed: 398.30 x 322.70 x 20.00 cm). Presented by Irvine Chalmers Watson NG 2430. Photo: Antonia Reeve
No official repatriation request has been made for Tipu's Tiger to return to Bangalore, where the Sultan’s palace is still intact, though a small replica of the object sits inside the palace today. In the wake of movements for Black lives taking place across the globe, many of the world’s major cultural institutions released statements expressing their need to do better to combat systemic racism and deal with the legacies of their colonial pasts. The Victoria and Albert Museum did so as well, stating, “We want to bring a new urgency and transparency to the colonial histories connected to V&A collections and British cultural history. This work must continue so that the past is confronted, understood and reflected upon.”[10] In 2009 the V&A posted a series of videos about Tipu’s Tiger to the museum’s YouTube channel. In one video, a conservator and a specialist with knowledge of ancient and 18th-century instruments test the keys out. The specialist then proceeds to play a familiar tune on the automaton; a song that rings out clearer than any statement of intention that the museum could post to its blog, website, or its social media channels: Rule Britannia.
[1] Barbara Sprunt, The History Behind 'When The Looting Starts, The Shooting Starts,' NPR.org, May 29, 2020.
[2] Lakshmi Gandhi, What A Thug's Life Looked Like In 19th Century India, NPR.org, November 18, 2013.
[3] Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, “Looting”: The Revolt of the Oppressed, Hyperallergic, June 5, 2020.
[4] Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting, The New Inquiry, August 21, 2014.
[5] Interview between Melissa Block and John McWhorter, The Racially Charged Meaning Behind The Word 'Thug', NPR.org, April 30, 2015.
[6] Sara Drake, RP-28: Rotland Dreadfuls Vol.2 No.5, Rotland Press, 2016.
[7] Erin Anderson, Catch a Tiger by the Tail, Material Matters / Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, University of Delaware, March 22, 2019
[8] Susan Stronge, Tipu's Tigers (London: V & A Publishing, 2009), p. 40.
[9] Phyllis G. Mann, "News and Notes," Keats-Shelley Journal. 6, 1957. 9–12. JSTOR 30210016.
[10] Tristram Hunt, Black Lives Matter: Race and Equality at the V&A, V&A Blog, June 4, 2020.
