This previous Sunday, November 10, the 274th (or 273rd) birthday of Tipu Sultan was celebrated peacefully in his erstwhile capital, Srirangapatna, amid heavy safety. The safety was mandatory as a result of Tipu has grow to be, in recent times, a polarizing and politicised determine, with successive state governments casting him alternately as monster and Messiah. Even the date of his delivery is disputed – there’s little settlement on whether or not it’s November 10, November 20, or December 1, or whether or not that occasion occurred in 1750 or 1751.
Be that as it could, one well-documented truth about Tipu is that he commissioned, round 1795, the well-known Tipu’s Tiger, a mechanical automaton constructed by native craftsmen utilizing native supplies, probably with inputs from French engineers. It featured a painted wood tiger mauling a person who, judging from his costume, was decidedly European. The hole toy housed numerous mechanisms that had been labored by the turning of a crank deal with. Every time it was turned, one of many man’s arms moved up, seemingly in a (futile) bid for self-defence, whereas the bellows inside pushed air out of the person’s throat and several other openings within the tiger’s head, producing what gave the impression of a wail of misery from the person alongside a growl from the tiger. Symbolic of the self-styled Tiger of Mysore, the tiger was as massive as life; the hapless European just a bit smaller.
Tipu’s Tiger might properly have been a product of Tipu’s fancy, meant to encourage him after his defeat within the Third Anglo-Mysore Warfare in 1792, following which he not solely misplaced half his kingdom however was obliged to surrender two of his sons as hostages to Lord Cornwallis. However there’s a standard concept that the visible of the tiger attacking the soldier was based mostly on an actual incident that occurred later the identical yr.
On 21 December 1792, so the story goes, the goodly ship Shaw Ardaseer, certain for Madras, stopped to tackle cargo at Sagar Island, located on the mouth of the Hooghly in Calcutta, on the level the place the Ganga meets the Bay of Bengal. On the ship was 17-year-old Hector Sutherland Munro, a ‘cadet for Madras’ who had solely arrived in India on the eighth of November. Alongside along with his fellow cadets, younger Hector went ashore to strive his luck at searching deer, however was unsuccessful. The social gathering had simply sat down on the fringe of the jungle to eat a meal once they heard, within the phrases of eyewitness Capt Henry Conran, ‘a roar like thunder,’ and noticed ‘an immense royal tiger spring on the unlucky Munro.’ In a second, continues Conran, Munro’s head ‘was within the beast’s mouth,’ and it had raced into the jungle, carrying Munro with it. Conran and the others shot on the tiger and killed it, however Munro couldn’t be saved.
Conran’s sensational prose, and the truth that younger Munro was the son of the celebrated Normal Sir Hector Munro, the hero of the Battle of Buxar (1764) and the seize of Pondicherry (1778), and one of many essential gamers within the Second Anglo-Mysore Warfare (1780) towards Tipu‘s father Hyder Ali, ensured that the story went viral in England, even perhaps inspiring William Blake’s well-known 1793 poem ‘The Tyger.’ Provided that his sons had been being held in Calcutta on the time, the story virtually actually additionally reached Tipu. Within the aftermath of the Fourth Anglo-Mysore Warfare, through which Tipu was killed, Tipu’s Tiger, which had little intrinsic however a lot emblematic worth, was carried again to England in triumph, and put in, in July 1808, in East India Home on Leadenhall Avenue.
In the present day, Tipu’s Tiger sits behind glass on the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, the place it has lengthy been, in line with the museum’s web site, ‘one of many V&A’s hottest displays.’
(Roopa Pai is a author who has carried on a longtime love affair together with her hometown Bengaluru)
