INDIA-L Archives

From: Don McEwan <>
Subject: Off-Topic, perhaps?
Date: Wed, 04 Aug 1999 00:41:35 +0100

Smitten by the Tiger of Mysore

A new exhibition on the life of Tipu Sultan reminds us of a shameful
part of Scotland’s past, says Duncan Macmillan

Frame game: Visitors to the national gallery’s exhibition celebrating
the life of Tipu Sultan will have the opportunity to see works such as
General Sir David Baird Discovering the Body of Sultan Tipoo Sahib
WHAT would you think if the National Gallery in London marked the
eighth centenary of the death of William Wallace with an exhibition
whose centrepiece was a painting recording his grisly death? Not much,
perhaps.

But at one level that is what the National Gallery of Scotland’s new
exhibition, The Tiger and the Thistle, does in respect of India, as the
Indian consul-general pointed out delicately in his speech at the
opening.

The exhibition ostensibly celebrates Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore
and
the tiger of the title, the most effective military opponent of the
British, who eventually killed him in 1799.

He was a Muslim ruler in a Hindu country, but is nevertheless seen as
one of the heroes of India’s struggle to maintain its independence.
Hence
the consul-general’s Wallace analogy, and indeed, much to the apparent
consternation of our First Minister observed standing nearby, he also
extended it to suggest that the Indians and the Scots had a common
enemy and a common cause.

Unfortunately, in the 18th century the Scots were on the other side and
what has inspired this ambiguous celebration is the national gallery’s
enormous painting by David Wilkie of Sir David Baird Discovering the
Body of Tipoo Sultan. This unambiguously celebrates not Tipu’s life,
but
his defeat and death.

Sir David Baird, Scottish soldier and the thistle of the title, was his
last opponent. Though there is a bit more to the thistle too, for the
exhibition also records the wider part which Scots played in India, not
all as crude imperialists either. Maybe the shared experience that the
consul-general referred to, especially among the Highland Scots for whom
the oppressions of empire were still current, generated sympathy.

Certainly it seems many Scots took an enlightened interest in Indian
landscape, language, literature, flora and fauna and much else. To give
just one example, it was as a consequence of this episode in history
that
the first ever chair in Sanscrit was founded at Edinburgh University.

However, it is a tragic and violent history all the same. Tipu, and his
father before him, had fought a series of wars against the British
until
finally Tipu was defeated and killed at Seringapatam, one of the main
cities of Mysore, though there is no very clear image of it here – nor
indeed are there any maps, essential to understanding what this was all
about.

There are a few photographs of Seringapatam in the 19th century, but
mostly there are only laconic military drawings of its fortifications.
For
with French help, Tipu had turned it into a mighty fortress against the
British. He sent an embassy to Paris too in 1788. A painting here
records
vividly the sensation the Indian ambassadors caused among fashionable
Parisians when they took a walk in the park at St Cloud.

Revolutionary France maintained this interest and the last straw for
the
British and the excuse for the final hostilities was the appearance of
a
shipwrecked French adventurer, François Ripaud. Perhaps he was a
British agent provocateur, but they certainly took serious exception to
his organising his compatriots in Tipu’s court on revolutionary lines.
He
formed a Jacobin club and even planted a Tree of Liberty swearing
hatred to all kings "except Tipoo Sultan the Victorious and the ally of
the French Republic".

And so, as so often later, what was fought out in these imperial wars
was
a struggle between rival European empires. Tipu’s defeat was indirectly
a
French defeat too and opened the way to the British hegemony in India.

On 4 May 1799, Baird led the victorious charge into the breach of the
walls of Seringapatam. With cool brutality, he described how, victory
complete, he was brought to the body of his opponent, "under a
slaughtered heap of several hundreds ... [we] had the pleasure to
discover the body of the Sultaun", the scene, much edited, that Wilkie
painted. They did then give Tipu a full military funeral, but Baird
himself was considerably miffed when after the victory his junior,
Arthur
Wellesley, later Dukeof Wellington, was given the command.

Baird’s widow, however, was energetic on behalf of her husband’s
honour. First she erected a very manly monument to him on a hill near
Crieff. Then she commissioned Wilkie to paint the picture which is the
centrepiece of this exhibition. It took four years to paint and was
Wilkie’s biggest undertaking, but certainly not his best.

"Pillage and patronage," was the pithy summary by one 18th-century
commentator of the motives of empire. I suppose what Wilkie’s picture
does is to elevate the pillage to heroic status, though in fact it was
startlingly bureaucratic. After the fall of Seringaptam, a committee
was
set up, the Prize Committee it was called, to distribute the booty:
gold
plate, jewellery, filagree work, curious firearms, state palanquins,
rich
furniture, bales of fine muslins, silks and shawls, "everything that
power
could command and money could purchase", including a library of 2,000
books.

Several bits of this booty are on view here: a shamyana, an embroidered
canopy decorated with flowers, and the stylised tiger stripes that were
Tipu’s hallmark; a sword topped with a golden tiger head with ruby
eyes.
There are a few other bits and pieces, a wonderful Stubbs painting of a
cheetah belonging to George III, and an even better Indian painting of
one Tipu’s own cheetahs, but much of what is on view is documentary
rather than artistic, setting out the circumstances that led to Baird’s
victory and the myth that Tipu generated in life as in death and of
which
Wilkie’s picture was a central part.

But Baird in heroic pose at the centre of Wilkie’s composition seems
far
from indiscriminate slaughter, and Tipu’s dead body before him derives
from the Christian iconography of death. Maybe Wilkie was sympathetic
enough to see Tipu as a martyr. But Wilkie himself had family in India
and what he painted was meant to portray an icon of heroic empire.
That may be hard to accept now, but there is a picture here by Henry
Singleton of Tipu’s family recognising his body. For this imaginary
scene,
Singleton simply adapted Gavin Hamilton’s composition of Andromache
mourning the Death of Hector.

So Tipu becomes an ancient Trojan and the whole thing is cast in the
language of Homer. Equally romantically, Tipu’s young sons went as
hostages to guarantee the peace settlement which was reached in 1792.
This is recorded in several highly sentimental pictures. But in this
epic
language, your own status is enhanced by your enemy’s. So the Tipu
myth served a purpose. The bigger and badder he was, the better you
felt about getting rid of him.

But at least it was not all one-sided. Though it is only here in
replica, one of Tipu’s most famous toys was a life-sized model of a
tiger devouring a prostrate Scotsman. Fitted with a mechanical organ, to
Tipu’s
satisfaction it growled and groaned most convincingly. But even more
impressive is a ten-metre-wide panoramic painting of the battle of
Pollilur, during which Tipu’s father, Haidar Ali, comprehensively
defeated
a British force led by several Scottish generals, and the redcoats
formed
up in a square formation are plainly about to be overwhelmed. It quite
outshines the nearby panoramic painting of Seringapatam by Robert Ker
Porter.

David Baird was amongst those captured at Pollilur. In Wilkie’s
painting,
a barred window at ground level represents the prison where Tipu
subsequently kept him in chains. They had their own scores to settle,
so
perhaps we should not take sides now. Still, it does all leave you with
a
very strange feeling!

The Tiger and the Thistle: Tipu Sultan and the Scots in India is at the
National Gallery of Scotland until 3 October.

As reported in The Scotsman.

--
Don McEwan
Lothian
SCOTLAND

Jings, Crivvens & Help Ma Boab.!
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