Certainly, most books that have dealt with the tiger, going back to the Hemingway and Roosevelt epoch that focused on “man eaters” and “jungle killers” usually consisted of one anecdote disguised in a multitude of forms: how to get a bullet into a tiger’s brain. Predatory fiction. Hard to imagine that only two hundred years ago there was a quarter of a million tigers roaming Asia sending alarm tremors running through jungle and forest, meadow and thicket at the approach of death; the disquieting presence of the tiger heavy in the air.
—Shiva, Solicitous of his Other Half. By Devidasa. Pahari region, Basohli, dated 1695 © San Diego Museum of Art—
The tiger remains an enigma inside the Indian paradox, in no way resembling the lion, his close relative. The pursuit of the tiger today is like searching for a lost wilderness, or perhaps the lost innocence of man when a tiger skin on the hearth indicated a life well spent, not a crime against nature.
Any study of the tiger is a journey through India and into the history of that country. The cat stands astride the history, first as a menace, then as a trophy, but always as an object of terror and reverence, a symbol of primeval power. Theatrically decorated in glowing reddish bronze, the dark markings as distinctive as fingerprints, he is perhaps the most beautiful creature ever evolved on earth. No other cat except the leopard combines so perfectly the paradox of beauty and savagery.
—A striking painting of Sultan Ali Adil Shah II hunting a tiger sold to a buyer over the telephone for the sum of £ 1,138,850 against a pre-sale estimate of £60,000-80,000. This circa 1660 watercolour on paper is a rare example of Deccani courtly painting to have survived from the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as being one of the most glorious, rich and mesmerising of Deccani portraits. Showing both Iranian and Mughal influence, it depicts a radiant, and yet almost dreamlike Sultan as he looses his arrow towards a tiger crouching on the rocks in front of him.
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SULTAN ALI ADIL II SHAH OF BIJAPUR HUNTING TIGER, INDIA, DECCAN, BIJAPUR, CIRCA 1660. Photo Sotheby’s—Read More:http://elogedelart.canalblog.com/archives/islamic_art_/p10-0.html
Between 1800 and the Bungalow Bill years of the fifties, the tiger killed roughly 250,000 Indians, not including the millions of cattle, donkeys, sheep, goats and domestic pigs he has eaten. Thousands of years ago, he was a scourge in the land. A seal found in the city of Mohenjo-Daro, a city that flourished about five thousand years ago on the Indus, shows a man up a tree, a tiger lurking hungrily beneath. ( to be continued)…
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