Rajarshi Mitra
Indian Institute of Information Technology
During my trip to Exeter to attend the Britain and the World Conference earlier this year, I discovered that the Royal Bengal Tiger on display in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) was a gift from King George V (1865 – 1936). Exeter’s Bengal tiger was one of 39 tigers the King had killed during his hunting excursion in Nepalese Terai in 1911 – the year of his grand Coronation Durbar in India. The accompanying plaque states that the King presented tiger skins to British museums so that visitors who have never seen a tiger could meet one face-to-face. Like any responsible museum, RAMM’s curators have taken care to send a nuanced message through its natural history exhibits. They raise our environmental guilt, they remind us of nature’s destruction in the hands of man. Tiger hunts in India have a rich history of their own, and that Exeter has somehow been made part of that history had me intrigued. Continue reading “Shooting Tigers in Early 20th-Century India”
Imperial & Global Forum 
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