Almost two hundred years after the British killed Tipu Sultan, I visited his kingdom in southern India. It was 1990, and I was staying with a family in a middle-class neighborhood in the city of Mysore. A sense of well-being prevailed among people who could afford small bungalows and English-medium schools for their children. Yet, in the eyes of the community, I had an elevated status. I had come from America, the land of dollars and endless opportunity. A professor at the prestigious Maharaja’s College invited me to speak to his journalism students. I was in my twenties and had held only junior positions at a couple of publications. But I was from America—America was my qualification.
Tania James’s mercurial and dazzling novel Loot (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), just out in paperback, caused me to reconsider my visit to Mysore in light of the brutal conquest of 18th-century India and the specter of future immigration she writes about. America had glittered between me and others like a prize I’d won—an obstacle to connection. I wasn’t aware then that the vanished hand of Empire bound us together, the fates of those who stayed in India and the minute fraction, like my family, who emigrated as a consequence of that history. Over two centuries, England deindustrialized a subcontinent that was the world’s richest economy in the early 1700s, emptying its treasuries, savaging its coveted textile industry, and taxing its people into penury, a ruination impacting Indian lives for centuries until independence in 1947 and for many decades afterward. James’s story about Abbas, a talented young Mysorean woodcarver, chronicles an episode of this devastation, training its lens on making art in a time of war. What happens to the artist when his society shatters? How does he keep alive the impetus to create after losing his family and place in the world? Is it possible for a dispossessed person to realize their dreams elsewhere?
Prior to the British attack, seventeen-year-old Abbas is yanked from his father’s workshop one day and taken to the Summer Palace. Tipu Sultan notes Abbas’s ingenuity in fashioning wooden animals with moving parts. Tipu, portrayed as a witty, intellectually adventurous sort of despot, fascinated with new technologies, commissions Abbas to fabricate a life-size tiger automaton mauling a British soldier. This feat of art and engineering is meant as a mockery of Tipu’s arch enemy. An existing drawing of this historic artifact, “darkly irreverent and anti-colonialist,” sparked James’s interest in telling this story, she noted in a podcast interview with G.P. Gottlieb on New Books Network.
James shades Tipu’s capital city of Srirangapatna with an air of mistrust, as spies from rival kingdoms lurk in every lane. Anyone suspected of betrayal is swiftly disappeared, including Tipu’s favorite consort. Not only is the ruler challenged by Indian enemies in the declining days of the Mughal Empire—the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Marathas, and the Nairs of Malabar— he has repeatedly fought the British East India Company. James’s Tipu takes heart in the superior firepower of the world’s first rocket artillery he has developed with his engineers and literally shits on his enemy by having the faces of British soldiers painted inside royal chamber pots.
A six-week deadline looms for the completion of Tipu’s tiger, as Abbas begins to fashion it from the safety of his palace workshop under the guidance of a French clockmaker, Lucien Du Leze, dispatched to Mysore by Louis XVI. Tipu’s real-life mechanical tiger is displayed today at the Victoria and Albert Museum, that hulking repository of imperial booty. Among the 60,000 objects in its South Asian collection—including art from the Mughal courts, the Rajput and Sikh kingdoms, and the Deccan sultanates—“Tipu’s Tiger” is a highlight.
Themes of art-making and cultural collisions inform both of James’s earlier novels, Atlas of Unknowns (2009) and The Tusk That Did the Damage (2015). In the latter, James occasionally enters the mind of a rogue elephant who terrorizes a rural area of southern India, where American filmmakers are shooting a documentary about an Indian veterinarian engaged in wildlife rescue. It’s not entirely surprising that the technology of filmmaking has a presence in James’s fiction, given that she studied film at Harvard. In Loot, she exposes the notion of Western technological superiority as a myth. Tipu Sultan did, in fact, innovate the first successful use of rockets in warfare and wrote a text on rocketry; Abbas (along with his mentor, Du Leze) constructs the Muslim polymath Al-Jazari’s animated elephant clock (as tall as two stacked pachyderms) for the entertainment of Tipu’s predominantly Hindu subjects at their autumn Dussehra festival. When the British invade Srirangapatna the following spring, they know to attack the weak side of Tippu’s fort, which has been betrayed by his confidantes. Abbas plays dead beneath a corpse to survive. James describes the East India Company’s siege as animated by ignorance and bigotry:
They shoot every Mysorean in sight, primed on stories of Tipu’s dungeons, tales of nails being driven into innocent eyes (no proof of this, but proof, at present, is beside the point.) It’s all so bloody easy. The give of stone walls, of sternum against steel. Thousands of dying Mysoreans. Any of them could be Tipu Sultan. They don’t know what he looks like, having only heard reports of a wild-eyed fat man with a black mouth and a bloodthirsty laugh.
After the slaughter, the treasures of Tipu’s royal capital are amassed on the parade grounds and jewels, armaments, and art works are distributed among white officers and soldiers by a “prize committee.” The vast number of poor Indian troops recruited by the British to fight their battles do not share in the loot. I assumed this prize-giving ceremony was James’s invention, but it was actual imperial practice. What James does invent is the tiger’s passage to England with Colonel Horace Selwyn, who forgoes silver ornaments and chooses Tipu’s automaton as his award. Lady Selwyn will be pleased by the eccentric object, he imagines, since she delights in filling their estate with his quirky prizes.
Beneath the surface charm of James’s fable is a trapdoor to terror. Loot, a Hindi word, (perhaps appropriated by the British in recognition of their actions in India), connotes a thieving that devastates its victim. A raped woman is looted of her dignity and sense of security. A looted people are thrown into the same abyss. In 1849, fifty years after Tipu Sultan lost his kingdom, my maternal grandfather’s ancestral city, Multan, was seized by the East India Company in one of the bloodiest battles in world history. In Loot, Tipu is gunned down by Red Coats and Abbas magically flees a field of corpses to a new life.
Years later, Abbas resurfaces in France, a ghost of himself. Gone is the curious, ambitious boy; in his place is a taciturn man, hard to know and grimly fixated on creating a work that will outlast him. James has a deft touch, shying away from strong sentiment, and yet the pathos of her characters haunts. Abbas comes to Rouen in search of his mentor, Du Leze, who left Mysore before the siege. He finds only Jehanne, a half-French girl he knew in Srirangapatna. A lovely young woman now, she passes for European. Together they devise a mission to steal back Tipu’s Tiger, a much-exhibited war trophy, from Colonel Selwyn’s English estate. It’s an interesting allegory of a contemporary issue: the restitution of cultural property. European countries, especially Britain, stubbornly continue resisting calls from formerly colonized nations to return plundered treasures.
Abbas creeps into Lady Selwyn’s Peacock Room to retrieve his tiger; India, endowed with new power and wealth from its tech revolution, has announced the repatriation of cultural artifacts a policy priority. London’s Telegraph raised the alarm last May, howling that India would force Britain into a “colonial reckoning” by demanding thousands of antiquities back—making the largest claim of any nation to date for the return of its heritage. Keep the stolen $400 million Koh-i-noor diamond, the Indian Express quipped in an editorial, “but give back the rest.” What Britain would never be able to properly compensate India for, they pointed out, was its immeasurable losses in industrial development, commerce, and trade under colonial rule.
In an early story by James in the collection Aerogrammes, “Lion and Panther in London,” also based on historical fact, two Indian wrestler brothers are brought to England in 1910 by a British impresario. The “Lion of the Punjab” is elated to win all his matches against his European opponents, well-aware he’s regarded an inferior. His victories bolster his pride in his traditional methods of training, and it’s not until his last days in England that he realizes his shady promoter had fixed the matches. “I am just a pawn,” he tells his brother in disillusionment and defeat.
Much differently, in Loot, Abbas and Jehanne summon ingenuity to succeed, not as thieves but contributors to their new society. It’s difficult to read the second half of the book, set in Europe, as something other than a fable of modern-day immigration. The Mysorean characters’ rise in 19th-century France seems informed by the achievements of the contemporary Indian diaspora. James’s story is a mirror held up to those who left India because too much had been destroyed by Europeans.
