टिपूचा वाघ

कोरलेली आणि पेंट केलेली लाकडी आच्छादन वाघाचे प्रतिनिधित्व करते ज्यात जवळच्या आयुष्यातील युरोपियन माणसाला वाचवले जाते. वाघाच्या आत असलेल्या यंत्रणेत आणि माणसाच्या शरीरात माणसाचा एक हात सरकतो, त्याच्या तोंडातून एक रडणारा आवाज निघतो आणि वाघापासून कुरकुर करतो. याव्यतिरिक्त वाघाच्या बाजूस एक तडकाफडकी खाली घसरते ज्यामुळे 18 नोटांच्या छोट्या पाईप अवयवाचा कीबोर्ड उघडला जातो.
टीपूचा वाघ मूळतः टीपू सुलतानसाठी म्हैसूरच्या राज्यात (आज भारतीय कर्नाटक राज्यामध्ये) सुमारे १७९५ च्या सुमारास बनविला गेला होता. टीपू सुलतानने आपल्या शस्त्रास्त्रे, त्यांच्या सैनिकांच्या गणवेशावर वाघांचे स्वरूप नियोजित पद्धतीने वापरले. त्याच्या वाड्यांच्या सजावटीवर. त्याच्या सिंहासनावर सोन्याच्या आच्छादलेल्या बहुधा अशाच जीवनाच्या आकाराचे लाकडी वाघ होते; इतर मौल्यवान खजिन्यांप्रमाणेच हा ब्रिटिश सैन्यात भाग घेतलेल्या अत्यंत संयोजित बक्षीस निधीसाठीही तुटला होता.
७१.२ सेमी उंच आणि १७२ सेमी लांबीच्या ऑब्जेक्टच्या एकूण परिमाणांसह, तो माणूस कमीतकमी आयुष्याच्या आकाराच्या जवळ असतो. दोन्ही आकृती बनवलेल्या पेंट केलेल्या लाकडी कवचामुळे कदाचित हिंदू धार्मिक शिल्पेच्या दक्षिण भारतीय परंपरा ओढल्या जातील. हे साधारणत: अर्धा इंच जाड आहे आणि दुसऱ्या महायुद्धात बॉम्बच्या नुकसानीमुळे झालेल्या नुकसानीवर आता बरेचसे मजबुतीकरण झाले आहे. डोकेच्या शेवटी पुष्कळ उघड्या आहेत, पेंट केलेल्या वाघाच्या पट्ट्यांच्या आतील भागाच्या पॅटर्नशी जुळण्यासाठी तयार केल्या आहेत, ज्यामुळे पाईपमधून आवाज अधिक ऐकू येऊ शकतात आणि वाघ "स्पष्टपणे नर" आहे. वाघांच्या शरीराच्या वरच्या भागाला चार स्क्रू काढून यांत्रिकी तपासणी करण्यासाठी उचलले जाऊ शकते. मानवी आकृतीचे बांधकाम समान आहे परंतु लाकूड जास्त दाट आहे. व्हीएंडएच्या संरक्षण विभागाच्या तपासणी आणि विश्लेषणाने हे निश्चित केले आहे की सध्याच्या पेंटचा बराचसा भाग पुनर्संचयित झाला आहे किंवा ओव्हरपेन्ट झाला आहे.
Tipu's Tiger was part of the extensive plunder from Tipu's palace captured in the fall of Seringapatam, in which Tipu died, on the 4 May 1799, at the culmination of the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War. An aide-de-camp to the Governor General of the East India Company, Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, wrote a memorandum describing the discovery of the object:
The earliest published drawing of Tippoo's Tyger was the frontispiece for the book "A Review of the Origin, Progress and Result, of the Late Decisive War in Mysore with Notes" by James Salmond, published in London in 1800. It preceded the move of the exhibit from India to England and had a separate preface शीर्षकd "Description of the Frontispiece" which said:
Unlike Tipu's throne, which also featured a large tiger, and many other treasures in the palace, the materials of Tipu's Tiger had no intrinsic value, which together with its striking iconography is what preserved it and brought it back to England essentially intact. The Governors of the East India Company had at first intended to present the Tiger to the Crown, with a view to it being displayed in the Tower of London, but then decided but to keep it for the Company. After some time in store, during which period the first of many "misguided and wholly unjustified endeavours at "improving" the piece" from a musical point of view may have taken place, it was displayed in the reading-room of the East India Company Museum and Library at East India House in Leadenhall Street, London from July 1808.
It rapidly became a very popular exhibit, and the crank-handle controlling the wailing and grunting could apparently be freely turned by the public. The French author Gustave Flaubert visited London in 1851 to see the Great Exhibition, writes Julian Barnes, but finding nothing of interest in the Crystal Palace, visited the East India Company Museum where he was greatly enamoured by Tipu's Tiger. By 1843 it was reported that "The machine or organ ... is getting much out of repair, and does not altogether realize the expectation of the visitor". Eventually the crank-handle disappeared, to the great relief of students using the reading-room in which the tiger was displayed, and The Athenaeum later reported that
When the East India Company was taken over by the Crown in 1858, the tiger was stored in Fife House, Whitehall until 1868, when it moved down the road to the new India Office, which occupied part of the building still used by today's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In 1874 it was moved to the India Museum in South Kensington, which was in 1879 dissolved, with the collection distributed between other museums; the V&A records the tiger as acquired in 1880. During World War II the tiger was badly damaged by a German bomb which brought down the roof above it, breaking the wooden casing into several hundred pieces, which were carefully pieced together after the war, so that by 1947 it was back on display. In 1955 it was exhibited in New York at the Museum of Modern Art through the summer and spring.
Tipu's Tiger is a notable example of early musical automata from India, and also for the fact that it was especially constructed for him.
In recent times, Tipu's Tiger has formed an essential part of museum exhibitions exploring the historical interface between Eastern and Western civilisation, colonialism, ethnic histories and other subjects, one such being held at the Victoria and Albert Museum itself in Autumn 2004 शीर्षकd "Encounters:the meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500–1800". In 1995, 'The Tiger and the Thistle' bi-centennial exhibition was held in Scotland on the topic of "Tipu Sultan and the Scots". The organ was considered too fragile to travel to Scotland for the exhibition. Instead, a full-sized replica made of fibre glass and painted by Derek Freeborn, was exhibited in its place. The replica itself was also associated with a historic Scottish event having been made in 1986 for 'The Enterprising Scot' exhibition, which was held to commemorate the October 1985 merger of the Royal Scottish Museum and the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland to form a new entity - the National Museums of Scotland.
Today Tipu's Tiger is arguably the best-known single work in the Victoria and Albert Museum as far as the general public is concerned. It is a "must-see" highlight for school-children's visits to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and functions as an iconic representation of the Museum, replicated in various forms of memorabilia in the Museum shops including postcards, model kits and stuffed toys. Visitors can no longer operate the mechanism since the device is now kept in a glass case. A small model of this toy is exhibited in Tipu Sultan's wooden palace in Bangalore. Tipu's Tiger has not been the subject of an official repatriation request, presumably due to the ambiguity underlying Tipu's image in the eyes of Indians; , although Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya recently purchased Tipu's sword and other items associated with him which have been brought back to India.
Tipu Sultan identified himself with tigers; his personal epithet was 'The Tiger of Mysore,' his soldiers were dressed in 'tyger' jackets, his personal symbol invoked a tiger's face through clever use of calligraphy and the tiger motif is visible on his throne, and other objects in his personal possession, including Tipu's Tiger. Accordingly, as per Joseph Sramek, for Tipu the tiger striking down the European in the organ represented his symbolic triumph over the British.
The British hunted tigers, not just to emulate the Mughals and other local elites in this "royal" sport, but also as a symbolic defeat of Tipu Sultan and any other ruler who stood in the path of British domination. The tiger motif was used in the "Seringapatam medal" which was awarded to those who participated in the 1799 campaign, where the British lion was depicted as overcoming a prostrate tiger, the tiger being the dynastic symbol of Tipu's line. The Seringapatam medal was issued in gold for the highest dignitaries who were associated with the campaign as well as select officers on general duty, silver for other dignitaries, field officers and other staff officers, in copper-bronze for the NCOs and in tin for the privates. On the reverse it had a frieze of the storming of the fort while the obverse showed, in the words of a nineteenth century tome on medals, "the BRITISH LION subduing the TIGER, the emblem of the late Tippoo Sultan's government, with the period when it was effected and the following words 'ASSUD OTTA-UL GHAULIB', signifying the Lion of God is the conqueror, or the conquering Lion of God."
In this manner, the iconography of this automaton was adopted and overturned by the British. When Tipu's Tiger was displayed in London in the nineteenth century, British viewers of the time "characterised the tiger as a trophy and symbolic justification of British colonial rule". Tipu's Tiger along with other trophies such as Tipu's sword, the throne of Ranjit Singh, Tantya Tope's kurta and Nana Saheb's betel-box which was made of brass, were all displayed as "memorabilia of the Mutiny".
In one interpretation, the display of Tipu's Tiger in South Kensington, served to remind the visitor of the noblesse oblige of the British Empire to bring civilisation to the barbaric lands of which Tipu was king.
Tipu's Tiger is also notable as a literal image of a tiger killing a British Officer, an important symbol in England at the time, and from about 1820 the "Death of Munro" became one of the scenes in the repertoire of Staffordshire pottery figurines. Tiger-hunting in the British raj, is also considered to represented not just the political subjugation of India, but in addition, the triumph over India's environment. The iconography persisted and during the rebellion of 1857, Punch ran a political cartoon showing the Indian rebels as a tiger, attacking a victim in an identical pose to Tipu's Tiger, being defeated by the British forces shown by the larger figure of a lion.
Motives for collection of articles, such as Tipu's Tiger, are seen by Kalter as having a social and cultural context. The collection of Western and Indian art by Tipu Sultan is seen as motivated by the need to display his wealth and legitimise his authority over his subjects who were predominantly Hindu and did not share his religion, viz. Islam. In the case of the East India Company, collection of documents, artefacts and objet's d'art from India helped develop the idea of a subjugated Indian populace in the minds of the British people, the thought being that the possession of such objects of a culture represented understanding of, dominance over and mastery of that culture.
In a detailed study published in 1987 of the tiger's musical and noise-making functions, Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume concluded that since coming to Britain, "the instrument has been ruthlessly reworked, and in doing so much of its original operating principles have been destroyed". There are two ranks of pipes in the organ (as opposed to the wailing and grunting functions), each "comprising eighteen notes, [which] are nominally of 4ft pitch and are unisons - i.e. corresponding pipes in each register make sounds of the same musical pitch. This is an unusual layout for a pipe organ although while selecting the two stops together results in more sound ... there is also detectable a slight beat between the the pipes so creating a celeste effect. ... it is considered likely that as so much work has been done ... this characteristic may be more an accident of tuning than an intentional feature". The tiger's grunt is made by a single pipe in the tiger's head and the man's wail by a single pipe emerging at his mouth and connected to separate bellows located in the man's chest, where they can be accessed by unbolting and lifting off the tiger. The grunt operates by cogs gradually raising the weighted "grunt-pipe" until it reaches a point where it slips down "to fall against its fixed lower-board or reservoir, discharging the air to form the grunting sound" Today all the sound-making functions rely on the crank-handle to power them, though Ord-Hume believes this was not originally the case.
Works on the noise-making functions included those made over several decades by the famous organ-building firm Henry Willis & Sons, and Henry Willis III, who worked on the tiger in the 1950s, contributed an account to a monograph by Mildred Archer of the V&A. Ord-Hume is generally ready to exempt Willis work from his scathing comments on other drastic restorations, which "vandalism" is assumed to be by unknown earlier organ-builders. There was a detailed account of the sound-making functions in The Penny Magazine in 1835, whose anonymous author evidently understood "things mechanical and organs in particular". From this and Ord-Hume's own investigations, he concluded that the original operation of the man's "wail" had been intermitent, with a wail only being produced after every dozen or so grunts from the tiger above, but that at some date after 1835 the mechanism had been altered to make the wail continuous, and that the bellows for the wail had been replaced with smaller and weaker ones, and the operation of the moving arm altered.
Puzzling features of the present instrument include the placing of the handle, which when turned is likely to obstruct a player of the keyboard. Ord-Hume, using the 1835 account, concludes that originally the handle (which is a 19th century British replacement, probably of a French original) only operated the grunt and wail, while the organ was operated by pulling a string or cord to work the original bellows, now replaced. The keyboard, which is largely original, is "unique in construction", with "square ivory buttons" with round lathe-turned tops instead of conventional keys. Though the mechanical functioning of each button is "practical and convenient" they are spaced such that "it is almost impossible to stretch the hand to play an octave". The buttons are marked with small black spots, differently placed but forming no apparent pattern in relation to the notes produced and corresponding to no known system of marking keys. The two stop control knobs for the organ are located, "rather confusingly", a little below the tiger's testicles. The instrument is now rarely played, but there is a V&A video of a recent performance.
Tipu's Tiger has provided inspiration to poets, sculptors, artists and others from the nineteenth century to the present day. The poet John Keats saw Tipu's Tiger at the museum in Leadenhall Street and worked it into his satirical verse of 1819, The Cap and Bells. In the poem, a soothsayer visits the court of the Emperor Elfinan. He hears a strange noise and thinks the Emperor is snoring.
The French poet, Auguste Barbier, described the tiger and its workings and meditated on its meaning in his poem, Le Joujou du Sultan (The Plaything of the Sultan) published in 1837. More recently, the American Modernist poet, Marianne Moore wrote in her 1986 poem "Tippoo's Tiger" about the workings of the automaton, though in fact the tail was never movable:
Die Seele (The Souls), a work by painter Jan Balet (1913–2009) shows an angel trumpeting over a flower garden while a tiger devours a uniformed French soldier. The Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain painted Tipu's Tiger in his characteristic style in 1986 titling the work as "Tipu Sultan's Tiger". The sculptor Dhruva Mistry, when a student at the Royal College of Art, adjacent to the Victoria and Albert Museum, frequently passed Tipu's Tiger in its glass case and was inspired to make a fibre-glass and plastic sculpture Tipu in 1986. The sculpture Rabbit eating Astronaut (2004) by the artist Bill Reid is a humorous homage to the tiger, the rabbit "chomping" when its tail is cranked round.