Introduction

Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

In the Victorian era, many middle-class readers in England would have found this poem by William Blake familiar. But with a slight change of wording, Blake’s verse might have posed a more pertinent question: What (im)mortal hand or eye, / Dare shoot thy fearful symmetry? The British Raj was ascendant. Tiger hunting, appropriated from Indian courtly tradition, was a popular pastime amongst colonists. At the metropole, the valor of an Englishman who shot “fearful” man-eaters was advertised everywhere: objects as diverse as memoirs, board games, and photographs testify to the tiger fervor of the Victorian public.

Such depictions of the tiger hunt perpetuated the Empire’s power. The global circulation of these images materialized the glory of a successful kill without need to set foot on Indian soil. Tracing the emergence of tiger hunting through the archive raises questions about imperial complicity. The violence embedded in representations of the hunt is perpetuated by materials held in Yale’s collections.

But the objects in this exhibit and Yale’s archive can be contested; the potential for decolonial critique lies latent. Activated through looking, reading, and imagining, they expose British colonial power as an illusion, constructed and preserved in motifs. It is we, as part of the Yale community, who can transform these images of empire in the university’s collections today. We must see in them not an unmediated view of reality but the opportunity to envision a more equitable future. Such radical reimagination is urgent for an endangered species so threatened by imperialism. Who will look and change these tigers before it is too late?