The Return of Tipoo’s Tiger channels a message from the distant future. A performance and video installation commissioned for the V&A Museum’s “Collecting Europe” programme (2017), envisions a world in the year 4016 CE, where Tipoo Sultan’s 18th century automaton of a devouring mechanical tiger who has become a relic worshipped by submarine dwellers within the channel tunnel.

In this strange yet striking scenario, Tipoo’s Tiger becomes a meme for Europe’s global presence—a lively, uncanny echo of the power dynamics between Europe and the rest of the world, as well as between humans, machines, and nature. The performance, delivered through dialogue and ritual, frames the Tiger as both triumph and warning.

This ceremonial invocation, part homage and part satire, invites visitors to consider the tangled legacies of conquest, technology, and memory, all conveyed through a future-facing lens of myth and possibility.


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“S : All hail the stripes, the strength, the striving. The lost and found Tiger Lord has risen, his claw and order (or, golden standard) shining. 
 
M: All hail the roar, the rampant stance, the man-beast victorious. The machine has now spoken, and has been spoken for. 
 
S: From the frozen seashore to the blossoming desert we wait for the relics to speak. We listen but we cannot yet hear what they say. 
 
M: So we begin, as we must, with homagery and gratuitude. All hail all that needs hailing, taxicabs for time travel, autonomiles with expandable leg-room for constricting consciousnesses, epiphenomenal epiphanies, sunbursts and sultan-lotion for the radioactive illusions of thermodynamic sovereignty. 
 
S: All hail, all hail, all hail. ”

-excerpt from The Return of Tipu’s Tiger (performed by Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Monica Narula)