A Tiger and a Scream

This is an ABC podcast. Is I seem kind of dead? Like he should be screaming. I mean, the guy's being mulled by a tiger. Blood should be everywhere. But the floor is completely dry. And his eyes seem serene. His mouth curved to almost a smile. Like even in death, he knows he's one. It's intrinsically a kind of dramatic and very bloody event. The tiger's roaring, the man's screaming. It's shameless. It's so blatant. I mean if somebody literally dug your father's grave up and put it on display in his backyard, I mean, it's that kind of story you're talking about. On the 3rd of December 2019, London was sunny. I mean, bloody freezing. But the sky was this absolute crisp blue. You could see high above the city, three, four planes crisscrossing the sky. One of which, I'd be on in a matter of hours. The city was already decked out with tinsels and baubles and there were puffer-jacketed office workers cramming themselves into witsy department stores. And then, there was me. Virtually alone in this cavernous museum hall, struggling to understand why no one was taking notice of the almost life-size soldier with the dilated pupils of a career stoner lying supine as a wild orange tiger, plunged its fangs deep into the side of his neck. When we go to museums and we see these objects on display, we can sort of see the notes that they make as they're trying to tell those stories. Exactly which notes is history playing here. You can see the depths of interest. And when they were in the city, there was hand-to-hand fighting in the streets. The king is a bank who is standing on the roof and he has to suffer. People get defensive and they get uncomfortable and a lot of people walk away at that point. They see nothing wrong with their behavior. Everything that you take for granted about your history. You got a left here today. It's not necessarily true. That's probably the moment it occurred to me. The crime I was witnessing, it wasn't murder. It was theft. I'm Mark Vannell and this is Stuff the British Stole. How long you are staying, sir? I'm flying back tonight. Tonight? Tonight, yeah. I'm just driving around trying to get presents for my kids. I'm only shopping. So in some ways this whole thing starts a few hours earlier with me being interrogated by London cab driver. Who found my face, particularly the colour of it? Extremely confusing. You are also looking the ship may as from there. My mum is from Singapore but she's Indian and my dad is from Ireland. From Ireland? Yeah, so I'm a weird mixture of both. And you born in Australia? You moved from here to. No, no. And Australian citizen and I'm an Irish citizen and I grew up in Australia and I'm Indian ethnically but Mum came from Singapore so it's all of it. So you have listed a little bit more to open. You have been the art few months already. I think my mum can swear in Hindi and that's about it. She definitely can and it is brutal. It's also true that I tend to think of myself as the worst kind of ethnic. I don't speak any other languages. Now accents, no real understanding of my own history. That's it. I can cook and more importantly, I still count towards your diversity quota. I work for the ABC which is like the BBC but for Australia. You are like a reporter like a. I travel a lot to do. I interview lots of people around the world so that's what I do. I used to go to India as well. You know I've never been to India. Never been. No, I've never been. It's a price for me. Why not? I'll over the world you are travelling. Because it is your mum who planned. I know, it's terrible. I've never been. There's no real reason I've never been for some reason. And with my cultural shaming now complete, he drops me outside Houston station for the last meeting I have before heading to the airport. Of course. Hi. Thanks to me. I'm Alice. Lovely to meet you. This is the person that would lead me to watch a man being murdered by a tiger. She'd also send me to a dog kennel and a tattoo parlour but she doesn't know that yet and neither do I. What I do know is that accent sounds familiar. Did you go up in London? Mostly. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's the fact that I sound a lot like my parents. And where are your parents from? Adlet. Ah, that's what it is. That's what it is. Okay. We left Australia when I was very, very young and I grew up in Hong Kong. And then I've been in London most of my life. So I went to school here. I've studied here. And that's kind of part of the reason I've spent so much time in museums is moving here. My parents were like, "We're going to be in the heart of culture and history. So we're going to make sure you actually take advantage of that." Alice, a proctor. With an E, is a very different kind of historian. She specialises in the uncomfortable, which may explain why she wanted to meet in a library, which best way I know how to describe it is that it's halfway between Hogwarts and an actual horror movie. So this is part of the Welcome Collection. So it's a history of science and medicine. They have a bunch of bizarre and terrifying paintings of like 17th century medical procedures and stuff. There is a picture over there of a guy that appears to be flying off the chunk of his own flesh. And how would you describe that facial expression? Paint? Just a little bit. Alice gives guided tours, just not the ones that museums and galleries like. Basically, when I started doing the tours, they were like proper undercover secret tours, which means that most-- Undercover is Dorian, I love it. Most of the museums didn't find out about me until I started getting like press attention. So for a lot of them, by the time they knew what I was doing, it was sort of too late to stop me. They're not wonder, why is this girl with the funniest dry and axe? I'm wondering around with a group of people around her. Like did they know-- Did they just think you had a magnetic personality? They thought I was just a regular tour guide, right? You know? And so I knew that you could do this because I've been a regular tour guide and people would look at me and they would think, "Oh yes, she's a nice white girl with an art history background. She's probably an official educator. It'll be fine." And no one would actually stop and listen to what I was talking about. But when people did stop to listen at places like, say, "The British Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum or the V&A for short, some of the oldest collections on Earth. What did they hear?" Specifically about the stuff that people don't want to talk about, which is colonial history, the kind of darkest parts of empire and imperialism. You know, there'd be these objects on display that have really violent histories. And no one would mention that and also objects that have, quote unquote, contested histories. Or. Yeah, there's a euphemism. Right, exactly. And so a lot of museums use this term of contested histories as this way of kind of glossing over what's actually being contested, which is that nine times out of ten, they were stolen in very violent circumstances or taken as part of looting after conflict, that sort of thing. How many objects would you say sit in British institutions that you would classify as stolen? So it's actually impossible to put a number on it because most estimates would say that a gallery like the British Museum or the V&A or one of those other institutions, usually they've got about five to ten percent of their collection on display at any given time. So there is so much stuff that's not on show and often it's really hard to even kind of access the catalogs of the stuff that's not on show. So we honestly don't know how many hundreds of pieces there are that might be contested. And that is when Alice mentions the tiger. Basically it's a life size wooden tiger, mooring a life size wooden man dressed in the uniform of the East India Company. So it's very, very unsuttle. And when you crank the handle, it sort of makes screaming and groaning noises. Super classy. It's incredible. The tiger has a name, Tipu's Tiger, named after a very real Indian ruler by the name of Tipu Sultaran. The tiger was his personal symbol. And a bad ass one at that. So the way Alice tells the story. The tiger was first found back in 1799 and this Tipu character was at war with the British. It seems he was killed in the British take-hissity and then the British soldiers. Go absolutely wild for three days, destroying stuff, looting stuff. And only after three days is order restored. And the official looting can begin. Official looting, apparently being an accepted thing. And so when the official looting starts, they find this tiger and it's made of wood. So it's not got any material value. Whereas stuff like Tipu's throne is broken down because it's made of gold. And it's more valuable in for its material than for its design. So the tiger survives in this very weird way because people don't think it's valuable enough. And they say they're going to send it to London to be put on display. Over the years, Tipu's tiger ends up bouncing to a few different British museums and libraries. It goes down particularly badly at a library. So they have all these letters in the archives of students who are like, "I'm trying to use your library collection but people keep coming in and making the tiger raw." And it's really disruptive to my studying. And for a while, they think about taking it off open display because people are fainting in horror at the sight of it because apparently it's so frightening. So it's got this very weird history once it comes to the UK. And now it's in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which is a design museum. In case you're wondering, fainting in horror was the exact moment I decided that even with the rapidly closing window to get to Heathrow Airport, I had to see this thing. Which brings us to the beginning of this episode. Me alone in a cavernous room at the Victoria and Albert Museum watching a near-life-sized British soldier made from Indian Jackwood being murdered by the badass personal symbol of Tipu Sultan. Honestly, standing there, all you want to do is smash open that glass and crank this faded brass handle just so you can hear this sound. So about 11 years ago, the V&A invited a classically trained musician to attempt to play the tiger. They posted it on YouTube, which is where this clip comes from. They even opened up the tiger's guts, and inside it reveals this row of copper-colored pipes where his ribcage would be, and leather bellows. Lungs, really. Pumping out these musical screams. The wildest part? As he plays, the mangled British soldier's arms automatically fly out in agony. This is not a musical instrument. This is a fuck you. What the hell happened to this Tipu guy? Why would he want to make something like this? I have kept travel diaries for trips I've taken. Throughout my whole life, and the first one that I have is from the age of five. I write down that I've gone to the V&A, and I saw a funny object of a tiger killing an Englishman. No! Yeah. You're kidding. That's amazing. It makes a huge impression, even if you're like a five-year-old kid, being put in front of this. You're hearing the voice of Maya Jazzinot. Recording, and here we go. I'm a history professor at Harvard University, and I teach and write on the history of the British Empire. Where does your interest in India begin? Maya's interest in India begins with my birth because I am myself half-India. My mother is from Calcutta, and immigrated to the United States as a girl. Maya has also become somewhat obsessed with this tiger, and the man who owned it. Tipu Sultan was a prominent ruler in South India in the second half of the 18th century. He was one of the fiercest opponents of continued British expansion in the Indian subcontinent. I feel like you've done this before. I actually haven't, but I can whip it out. So Tipu made a kind of fetish out of the tiger. The tiger, of course, is indigenous to India, so his soldiers wore uniforms that had a kind of tiger stripe on them, tigers on the palmles of his swords, and just sort of tiger motifs everywhere around him. It was his badge. I can't find real photos of Tipu, but the illustrations that we do have show a slightly chubby, strong-drawered man with a turban and a delicately coiffed moustache. Always upturned. But what the pictures don't tell you is that this man spent every second of his 17-year-round court in a series of strange balancing acts. The story of Tipu Sultan is one of a man who found himself between two superpowers, two huge revolutions, and between two generations, his father, and his sons. So for starters, Tipu Sultan spent his life carrying out someone else's unfinished business. The business of his dad. A man called Hyder Ali. The two of them, I think, need to be understood together to some extent because Tipu was really building on what his father had started. And what his father had started was a dynasty. An opulent one, too. From the southwest coast to deep inland, they themselves were Muslim leaders, but they ruled sometimes brutally over both Hindus and Christians. They overthrew existing leaders, and they were on a hunt for more land, more people, and more power. And in the course of doing this, run into some of the other powers that were interested in grabbing a piece of the action. And those powers included most notably the East India Company. The East India Company. In effect, a commercial army in service of the British Empire. Hyder found himself in conflict with the East India Company repeatedly in a series of wars, which resulted in, among other things, him taking a whole bunch of captives from the British army and holding them in the capital city of Saringa Patam. By the time Tipu's father Hyder Ali had died, and Tipu himself assumed power, the British, they were angry, very angry. Hyder Ali died, Tipu Sultan inherited the throne, and with it inherited this legacy of being in an up and coming kingdom that had successfully defeated the British and was holding British officers in captivity. And the British started to kind of build up this whole rhetorical picture of these people as these Muslim despots. And it was fueled by accounts that were coming from the captives from Saringa Patam, who came out with these tales of things like, "I was forced to dress up in women's clothes and dance before the king." And out of all of this emerged this kind of demonization of these two figures, Hyder and Tipu, as people to be feared, because they actually had beaten the British. Even to this day, there are so many competing narratives about Tipu Sultan. Hyder remains one of the most controversial figures in Indian history, and right now, a deeply political one too. I just get you to introduce yourself and what you do for a living. I'm Shashi Farour, I'm a third member of the Indian Parliament. I had a 29 year career of the United Nations, ending as under Secretary-General under Gelfi Yannan. I have published 20 books with two more do-outs before the end of the year. And I'm an amateur fan of modern Indian history. Pretty sure after 20 books, you no longer qualify as amateur, but we'll let that one slide. What happened to have a slightly unfashionable view in India today, that he was a hero. And that's largely because he was a resolute anti-colonialist. I say it's a slightly unfashionable view because there are also a lot of accounts, both in terms of British records, which may be biased, but also folklore and tales passed down the generations of his rather gruesome persecution of large numbers of Hindus and Christians, which have not endeared him to descendants of those communities. Literally as Shashi and I talk, there is a campaign effort within India to remove Tipu from parts of the school syllabus because of his massacring of Hindu subjects. And yet, curiously, for very Hindu politician Shashi Tarur, I would on the whole regard him as someone whom Indians buy large of very good reason to be proud of. Mysore was a formidable state, extending across the largest portions imaginable of southern India, people of his kingdom of Mysore, enjoyed the highest standards of living in the known world. The perk of the income was higher than the highest European power of the time of the Dutch. Very well-armed, high technological capacity, rockets, which the British actually subsequently stole. He was an extremely effective general, a leader of troops in battle, who won more wars than he lost. But eventually, Tipu did lose the third Mysore war against the British. And the price was far higher than he was bargaining for. One of the stipulations of the peace that was struck between the East India Company and Tipu was that two of Tipu Sultan's sons would be taken hostage by the British. Not just any British leader, mind you. And those two sons were received by the at the time, the commander of the British forces, Lord Cornwallis, who a few years earlier had gained some notoriety here in the United States as the person who lost the battle of Yorktown, and with it concluded the American Revolution on American terms. Anyway, there he pops up in India a decade later, and he takes these sons of Tipu Sultan. So the guy that failed to stop the American Revolution was not going to let this Indian warlord have his. So he held on to Tipu's sons. Do we know how Tipu reacted to the abduction of his children? You know, there's probably something more specific, but suffice to say there was a fourth Mysore war. So you can imagine that Tipu had gone through a fair amount of humiliation at British hands. So I think it's fairly understandable you could see the depth of hatred that Tipu felt. But Tipu wasn't the only one who hated the British. That's where our other superpower steps into the picture. And that is the French. So this connection with the French is really important to the story of Mysore's ascent and above all, I think it's demise. So in the 1790s, Britain and France are engaged in a huge global war, the Revolutionary Wars. And as a piece of this war, they are skirmishing in India. And Tipu just waged himself between them. Tipu helped the French and the French helped Tipu. He actually explored the idea of an alliance that would throw the British out of India. So they had French advisors and soldiers even who came and drilled their own troops and taught them new tactics and doubtless raconduettes for certain kinds of technology and certain kinds of maneuvers, which meant that to the extent that there was a technological gap between Western and Indian forces at that time, which wasn't huge even to begin with, that gap was flattened. And not just methods to wage war. The French also supplied other technologies, including technology to make. Music. Tipu's tiger is pretty fascinating for a whole bunch of reasons. But one of them is that the manufacture of it is clearly Indo-European. That is the wood that it's made out of is Indian wood. That part was manufactured in India, but the mechanism inside that creates these noises is of European manufacture. This is how Tipu's tiger came to be. The embodiment of Tipu's rage against the British and the alliance between France and Mysore, the same alliance that was about to be Tipu's undoing. And now a surprise appearance from a little known historical figure, somebody who, in less than a year, would become an icon of the French Revolution. Enter Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon, at the time, an up-and-coming general in the French Revolutionary Army, invades Egypt. For him, Egypt is a staging post on the way to India. Napoleon writes to Tipu Sultan and says, "Here I am in Egypt, you know, ready and waiting. I'm going to send over my 10,000 men to come and join you and chase the British away." Well, that letter that Napoleon wrote was intercepted by the British off of Jeddah. The British jumped on the excuse or pretext, if you will, to go after Tipu. In May of 1799, the East India Company surrounds Seringa Patam and they decided to go for it. They bombarded the thick fortifications and broke holes in it and set up their ladders and went running over and into the city. And then when they were in the city, there was hand-to-hand fighting in the streets and among the dead that was discovered in a heap of bodies by one of the gates of the city at the end of this action was that of Tipu Sultan himself. Court between the superpowers of France and Britain between Cornwallis, a veteran of the American Revolution and Napoleon, soon to be leader of the French Revolution, their lies, the Tiger of Mysore. Well, Tipu Sultan's fort was, I think, the end pretty much of any meaningful Indian resistance to steady British expansion. He was the last substantial monarch to be willing to fight the British. How do you think Tipu would feel about his Tiger sitting in the British institution? A statue that had been prepared essentially for him to actually demonstrate his contempt for the British to actually be in British hands would have been a great pleasure. And would have been the ultimate act of humiliation. So he would have been pretty upset about that. I think Tipu would be quite pleased because he was a very vain man. Someone who sees the Tiger immediately wants to get drawn into the story about Tipu. So you have millions of people from around the world getting drawn into that story that would never happen if it was, say, in Bangalore which you would now be the capital of the Mysore state that he once ruled. Dr. Zaryam Asani is a historian who was raised in India only to end up at Oxford University in the UK. And as more people like Shashi Tharoor argue for the return of Tipu's Tiger to India, Zaryam thinks there's parts of this story that were missing. I mean, I'm all for certain objects that are of great iconic values, say religious value, being returned with something like Tipu's Tiger, the reason it survived is that it was shipped off to England and conserved and preserved. How did being in India would have just fallen to pieces eventually because no one would have been particularly interested for a couple of hundred years. But Indian politician Shashi Tharoor disagrees. There's something wrong about stealing items that belong to another people and then self-righteously claiming you look after them better than those who are entitled on them would. I mean, if somebody literally dug your father's grave up and put it on display in his backyard, would you feel that morality wasn't his side? I mean, it's that kind of story you're talking about. There is no tradition of museums in Indian culture. Pre-colonial India had no museums. So, I think this is very much a Western fascination with antiquity that was transplanted to a country like India. I don't think it has that unique value and I think if it were returned to India now, it would just be another nationalist sort of icon to be displayed somewhere of, you know, an Indian tiger eating a British soldier. I don't think that anyone would particularly be interested in the history beyond that. Except there is at least one person for whom it would mean much more than that. It took us a little while to track him down, but eventually we managed to connect the call. This might seem like a weird question, but after all these years, do you think of yourself as royal? No, I don't think of myself as royal. I feel I have not done anything much. I am an ordinary person. I just happen to be in the family. My name is Bhaktia Ralisha. Sixth generation descendant of Tipu Sultan from his Tenth son. By day, Bhaktia Ralisha is a criminal lawyer in Karkara. It amazes me that even five generations or six generations down the line, people still want to connect and people want to know about him. So I just feel that what kind of charisma that man must have had, that still has a ripple effect on us, till date. People still want to connect. They still have that kind of an aura about him, which kind of wraps up on us. But the way Bhaktia tells a story, being a descendant of Tipu, wasn't always a good thing. He was martyred in 1799. His family was kept as business. They were kept as business till about 18006. So that is how our family came here. Bhaktia describes how the family were restricted from interacting with the locals all going back to Mysore. They were exiled. Somehow we survived. We were left here to die. It's been a decline for the family from those times. How do you feel about that? How do you feel about that decline? Very unfortunate. All those people who went against the British, they are in bad shape in India. People who work with the British, they still have their royalty and everything. Even today, as usually happens, once a king is vanquished and his entire family has to suffer. So there are unfortunate times when we are with the family. History is personal. It's messy. And sometimes in ways that we don't necessarily expect. So remember earlier when I said that Tipu Sultan ruled, sometimes brutally over Hindus. What I didn't realize is that apparently includes my own family. Never been. No, I've never been. It's a surprise for me. Why not all over the world you are traveling? Somehow it is your mum who planned. My mum's family does go back to India. Generations of Nairs were raised in the coastal regions of a place called Kerala. Kerala, which was colonized by Tipu, not by the British, by Tipu, who massacred about 100,000 local people, transported many to slavery with the heat practice slavery quite widely. My own Indian ancestors were almost definitely subjects of Tipu Sultan. I mean Tipu's tiger belongs as much to me or you I think as it does to someone back in Mysore. Whether he was a war criminal or whether he was a great leader, the heritage is there belongs to all of us. I did actually make it to the airport that day. Let me tell you there's something about handing over your passport to make you really consider. Who it is you belong to? To tell you the truth, I don't actually have a definitive opinion on British colonialism. But as an Australian who's a bit Indian, a bit Singaporean, a bit Irish, I do know that I wouldn't exist without it. And depending on where you're listening to this, there's a pretty good chance that you wouldn't either. In that library, Alice told me about four other objects. There's this whole kind of history of undescribed violence. Trajic. Thousands of people are murdered. Surprising. You are weak. This is your fit. Some very strange objects from different corners of the earth. And they tell a story. The story about how you and I ended up with the world that we have today. It's the story of us. Told through some stuff. The British stole. Stuffed the British stole was produced by Zoe Ferguson and myself. The executive producer is Amruth Asli and Julie Browning is the head of society and culture, mixing by Martin Perolta. If you want to know more about Alice Proctor, she's written a book called The Whole Picture, which is available now. This is a production of ABC R.N. It was created and written by me. I'm Mark Fnell and he is a hint for next episode. It wants to hug you. See ya. [BLANK_AUDIO]