“Who Shot the Tiger?: Performing Imperialism in India” explores how tiger hunts recur in nineteenth-century British visual culture. Appropriated from Indian courtly tradition, colonial depiction of tiger hunts enforced British imperial power even as the transformation of these objects across time became the Empire’s undoing.

Tracing the emergence of this motif into the English cultural consciousness, questions of the archive’s complicity in imperialism arise. The violence embedded in representations of the hunt is perpetuated by materials held in Yale’s collections.

Still, the objects in this exhibit and Yale’s archive remain 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. Such radical reimagination is urgent for these endangered animals. Who will look and change these tigers before it is too late?

Curated by Catherine Kausikan ’25