The Wooden Tiger in London That Eats a British Soldier

There is a wooden tiger in a London museum, close to life size, crouched over a British soldier in a red coat with its jaws at the man’s throat. Work the handle in the tiger’s flank and a small organ hidden inside the body wheezes. The soldier’s arm lifts and drops. He is meant to be groaning.

The thing is called Tipu’s Tiger. It is an automaton, a mechanical model that moves when you crank it, made for Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, who used the image of a tiger killing a European the way other rulers used a coat of arms.

British troops found it in the music room of his palace after they stormed Seringapatam on 4 May 1799 and killed him. It reached London in 1800, went on show at East India House, and passed to the museum that became the V&A in 1879.

How it got there involves paperwork, demolition, and preservation, all by the same hands.

The things with British addresses

Provenance, the record of where an object came from, is unusually clear for this material, because the men who took it kept records.

The same siege took Tipu’s library, roughly 2,000 volumes in Persian, Arabic and Indian languages. Most of them went to the Company’s own college at Fort William in Calcutta. A selection travelled on to East India House in London in 1801, and from there the Company handed volumes out to Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews and the King. About 540 volumes in the British Library can be positively identified as Tipu’s.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s golden throne, sheets of gold worked over a core of wood and resin by the goldsmith Hafiz Muhammad Multani, was lifted from the Lahore treasury when the East India Company annexed Punjab in 1849. It reached the V&A by way of Calcutta and the Company’s India Museum and has sat there since 1879. The same treasury surrendered the Koh-i-Noor, which has a story of its own.

The crown of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, left India after the rebellion of 1857. Imperial treasures were auctioned in Delhi, and an officer who had fought in the siege, Robert Tytler, bought the crown and shipped it to England in 1860. Tytler offered it to the Crown through the Secretary of State for India. Prince Albert took the offer up, the crown went to Windsor for the Queen to look at, and she bought it along with two throne chairs for £500 in 1861. It sits in the Royal Collection as RCIN 67236.

The Amaravati Marbles are around 120 limestone sculptures and inscriptions from the Great Stupa at Amaravati in Andhra Pradesh, a domed Buddhist shrine among the largest in ancient India. Walter Elliot dug there in the 1840s, and the bulk of the stones went to the British Museum in 1859, where they have a gallery to themselves.

The Sultanganj Buddha is the largest substantially complete copper Buddha known from its period, about 2.3 metres tall and over 500 kilograms. Railway workers turned it up at Sultanganj in Bihar in 1861. An industrialist named Samuel Thornton paid £200 to ship it to England. It has stood in Birmingham since 1867.

The men paid to divide up a palace

None of this was a scramble by soldiers with sacks. After a conquest the army appointed prize agents: officers whose job was to collect the captured treasury, value it, and share out the proceeds among the troops by rank. The V&A’s own record for Tipu’s Tiger calls the Seringapatam division the conventional practice of the period.

At Delhi in 1857 the machinery ran at full stretch. Prize agents issued permits to plunder. Floors and walls of houses and mosques were dug out for hidden valuables. The takings were piled up in the emptied palaces and auctioned, the money going out by rank again. The historian William Dalrymple calls the prize system legalised looting, and the phrase is precise: there were forms, valuations, receipts and a clear line of authority.

The Koh-i-Noor was loot dressed as a treaty. This was loot dressed as accountancy.

Most of it never reached a display case. Lahore’s silver furniture and jewelled work went under the hammer in 1849, Delhi’s imperial treasure in 1857 and 1858, and the Red Fort’s copper gilt domes were stripped and sold. Gold gets melted and jewels get reset. What sits in British museums survived intact by luck, a poor guide to the size of what left.

The palace that became an army base

After the British retook Delhi in 1857 they turned the Mughal imperial palace inside the Red Fort into a garrison. The private apartments went. So did the service quarters, the gardens, and the screen along the river that tied the marble pavilions together. Barracks went up in the space.

How much came down is argued over, and you should distrust anyone who hands you a clean figure, because popular accounts circulate very different shares of the fort. A large part of the inner palace was destroyed, though the exact share is disputed. The pattern is clearer than the arithmetic: the marble pavilions on the river side mostly survived in damaged form, while the ordinary fabric between them, where people actually lived and worked, did not. Nayanjot Lahiri’s study of the revolt in Delhi and its afterlife, published in World Archaeology in 2003, is the careful account.

The city’s mosques were treated as captured property. The Jama Masjid, Delhi’s great congregational mosque, was confiscated and used as barracks for British and Sikh troops, and a proposal to demolish it outright was overruled. It was handed back to Delhi’s Muslims in 1862, with conditions.

And then the same empire started saving things

This is where the simple version of the story falls apart.

In 1861, four years after the Red Fort was gutted, the colonial government founded the Archaeological Survey of India. Alexander Cunningham, an army engineer turned archaeologist, put the idea to Viceroy Canning and became its first surveyor, then its first Director General when the survey became a full department in 1871. His teams recorded on the order of 725 sites and pushed Indian archaeology from private treasure hunting into a state discipline.

In 1904 Viceroy Curzon drove through the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act, passed on 18 March that year. It gave the government money for repairs, officers to spend it, powers to protect and buy monuments, and control over the antiquities trade. Every protection order on an Indian monument today descends from it.

The restoration was real. At Sanchi, John Marshall’s teams worked from 1912 to 1919, steadying the Great Stupa, lifting fallen gateways and railings back into place and opening a site museum in 1919. At Ajanta, British copyists spent decades on the cave paintings: Robert Gill made about 30 large copies and 25 of them burned in an 1866 fire at the Crystal Palace. John Griffiths and his Bombay School of Art students made roughly 300 more between 1872 and 1885, sent them to London, and lost many of those to another fire in 1885. What survived is at the V&A.

India inherited that machinery in 1947, and the ASI now protects somewhere between 3,600 and 3,700 monuments of national importance.

So “the British erased India’s monuments” is not true, and repeating it does the real record a disservice. What happened is stranger and harder to fit on a placard: plunder, destruction in particular places for particular reasons, and preservation, all from one state, with the preservation never quite selfless. Curzon’s gardens at the Taj Mahal swapped Mughal flower beds for English lawns, which most visitors now take for Mughal. The Ajanta copies were themselves a removal. The British case that the Amaravati stones had to leave because the site was already being quarried for lime was an argument made by the people making the decision, with some truth in it, and it should be read that way.

One panel that left and came back

The whole story fits inside one object: the Orpheus panel.

Behind the emperor’s seat in the Diwan-i-Am, the hall of public audience at the Red Fort, the wall was set with pietra dura work: coloured stones cut to shape and fitted flush into marble. Twelve of those panels were prised out after 1857 and taken to the V&A. One shows Orpheus, the musician of Greek myth, playing to the animals.

In 1903 they went home. Curzon campaigned for their return, an Italian craftsman named Menegatti rebuilt the throne recess, and the panels were set back into the wall they had been cut from. You can stand in Delhi and look at them.

The regime that took them out is the regime that put them back, forty-six years later.

What is actually owed

The argument is live, and it is now a legal one more than a moral one. The British Museum Act of 1963 bars the museum’s trustees from permanently parting with objects except in narrow cases: duplicates, items too damaged to be useful, items unfit to keep. Handing back anything contested would take an Act of Parliament, a convenient thing for a museum to be able to say.

Returns are happening anyway, around the edges. In 2022 Glasgow Life Museums agreed to send seven objects back to India, six of them taken from temples and shrines in the 19th century and one bought after a theft. The handover was held that August, and the objects passed to the Archaeological Survey of India, the body founded by the empire that took them.

Which leaves the tiger. It is still in London, still crouched over its soldier, still one of the most photographed things in the building. Tipu built it to say something to the British, and it has spent two hundred years saying it to them in their own capital, in a room they built for it. Wherever it ends up, nobody should pretend it wandered there.