
BENGALURU: Sunil Baboo is perhaps not a name that would ring in many nods in a room. His work being in a field – collecting antiques – that is in today’s world, is overlooked and understated, being relegated from common consciousness to somewhat of a niche. Nonetheless, his most recent acquisitions, which are two colour prints concerning Tipu Sultan, are bound to turn heads; those not only of artists or art appreciators, but also historians.
Historicisation is an act where the medium in question betrays context. Naturally, most of India’s history of colonisation, when extracted from the land itself, has its origin in oral narratives and written text. While the same could be said of British historicisation of colonised India, the pictorial form acts as an equally potent – and utilitarian – mode of narrative.
The West’s particular interest in Tipu Sultan is one of the major factors behind the aforementioned prints. In essence, amongst other elements, a history (or narrative) follows the principle of causation. The root cause of the paintings could be traced to, according to Baboo, a reputation of momentary incompetence incurred by the empire:
“Tipu Sultan’s defeat during the Third Anglo-Mysore War was a kind of face-saving for the British government, because the First and Second Anglo-Mysore War defeats by Hyder Ali were oftentimes viewed as a slight of the British Army and administration in India.”
Painted by experts who ‘specialised in depicting great scenes from history’, a projection of power is evident in these prints. The colonial master reigns supreme even in an act of moral barbarity (kidnapping Tipu Sultan’s sons), and pats himself on the back for what is laughably poised as magnanimity: the return of the children to their mother. Interestingly, the perceptive viewer even notices the nomenclature ‘Tippoo Saib’, revealing a refusal to accord the title of ‘Sultan’ to the racialised other.
This otherisation in terms of physical features is a paradoxical area. As Baboo notes, these particular prints in terms of creation foresaw the inevitable: “These two prints were made by publisher Haines in 1796, even prior to the final defeat and death of Tipu Sultan at the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War of 1799.”
Moreover, the majority of portrayals of Tipu Sultan by the West, as Baboo shares, as opposed to these two prints in question, were made after his death. In the prints commissioned or created post the monarch’s death, Tipu Sultan is portrayed in a sort of ahistoric or retroactive light: in these, not only does he have caucasian features, but also lacks the rotundity so often associated with him from documentation, especially from India.
What perhaps one witnesses the most in these paintings is art as a medium that conveys the tensions of a regime in stress. It would be imprudent to call these tensions early faultlines; indeed, the crown’s fangs into the Indian mainland would sink only further. However, these paintings, as historic footnotes, exist to portray an empire in nascent anxiety; an empire not used to defeat, which was (and is) committed to acts far worse than using art as an ideological shield.