A Silenced Roar

After Tippoo's Tiger in the Victoria & Albert Museum

There is a Bengal Tyger locked up

in a glass box and stuffed

in the corner of the South Asian wing –

Whose claws have turned to dust,

Whose fangs have been buried in mud,

But whose discordant voice is the true source of its pain.

For this Tyger though silenced,

perennially barbaric and violent,

knows there is more to life than this –

That the love and pride that bleeds into his black stripes

are the real gruesome truths that a museum curator could never admit.

As English fails to capture the true name of a King:

Tipu

is the only echo that a quiet can ring.

It's 2022 –

and if you wanted to

you too can buy this cultural representation of colonial resistance on a

keychain.

And you feel conflicted, despite justifiable reservations,

because you think that a symbol of generational pain would look just so cool

on your Kipling backpack.

But it's not an imperial soldier who has been on the brink of extinction,

and it's not the Jungle Book that we are banning.

But your appropriation and misplaced defiance has been temporarily forgiven,

when a British Museum is the final judge of your moral decisions.

And we can sit and speak of reparations and what it costs to pay off guilt –

But when you can own the one thing that had the power to destroy you,

tell me:

What is the true price for a Tyger killed?

With the worth of a nation imbued into what was once feared and hated,

there is no apology that could amount to these lifetimes of payments.

As you keep locks on the memories of generations born without keys,

Unable to understand the devastation of what they never had,

tell me:

What becomes of our story?

Tales turned to Tygers that get looted and burned in fires,

that are mutilated and formed into the pillars of empires.

Inaccessible and apart from the land that bore it –

Separated and detached from a country once adorned in it –

The Tyger – our राजा, our புலி, our honor

Stays trapped and locked and forgotten in a corner,

Hidden somewhere half-way across the world,

Where the silence is too loud to hear a defiant roar.