Tiger, tiger

I have just discovered the only reason to want an iPhone.  This impetus, strangely enough, comes from the V&A Museum’s Tipu’s iTiger App.

If you’re not up on the history of colonial inequity, let me explain.  The life-sized wooden and mechanical tiger mauling a European unsubtly summarized the Sultan of Mysore’s feelings for East India Company.  For the Tipu, the imagery of the great beast was an essential psychological trope in defeating the infidel British.  He utilized the tiger motif in many facets of his rule, from the uniforms and weaponry of his “tiger soldiers” to coinage and standards.

After Tipu was killed defending his capital in the fourth and final Anglo-Mysore War in 1799, the automaton was taken as a sort of trophy by the East India Company and displayed in their India Museum for the next fifty years.  Visitors were allowed to “play” the mechanism, which produced the sounds of a man being ravaged by a beast.  Now in the collection of the V&A Museum, visitors are no longer allowed to play organ grinder.  Obviously their staff had grown tired of requests to turn the tiger’s crank, hence the clever introduction of the iTiger.

The catalyst for this story, you wonder?  My most recent score at a thrift store.

It's not a tchotchke--it's history.