SPEAKER_03: AppleCard is the perfect credit card for every purchase. It has cash-back rewards unlike others. You earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at a 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a high-yield savings account. Apply for AppleCard in the Wallet app on iPhone and start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. AppleCard subject to credit approval, savings is available to AppleCard owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Charms apply. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today those objects are housed in genteel institutions across the UK and the world. They usually come with polite plaques. The Australian podcast Stuff the British Stole is a six episode series about the not so polite history behind a few of those objects. I completely fell in love with the show, so we're going to play the first episode and talk to the presenter and creator, Mark Fennell, about the series. Here's Stuff the British Stole.
SPEAKER_06: His eyes seem kind of dead. Like he should be screaming. I mean, the guy's being mauled by a tiger. Blood should be everywhere, but the floor is completely dry and his eyes seem serene. His mouth curved to almost a smile. Like even in death, he knows he's won.
SPEAKER_02: It's intrinsically a kind of, you know, dramatic and very bloody event.
SPEAKER_04: The tiger's roaring, the man's screaming.
SPEAKER_11: It's shameless. It's so blatant. I mean, if somebody, you know, literally dug your father's grave up and put it on display
SPEAKER_07: in his backyard, I mean, it's that kind of story you're talking about.
SPEAKER_06: On the 3rd of December, 2019, London was sunny. I mean, bloody freezing, but the sky was this absolute crisp blue. You could see high above the city, three, four planes crisscrossing the sky, one of which I acted beyond in a matter of hours. The city was already decked out with tinsel and baubles and there were puffer jacketed office workers cramming themselves into ritzy department stores. Then there was me, virtually alone in this cavernous museum hall, struggling to understand
SPEAKER_06: why no one was taking notice of the almost life-sized soldier with the dilated pupils of a career stoner, lying supine as a wild orange tiger plunged its fangs deep into the side of his neck.
SPEAKER_11: When we go to museums and we see these objects on display, we can sort of see the notes that they make as they're trying to tell those stories.
SPEAKER_06: Exactly which notes is history playing here?
SPEAKER_07: You can see the depth of hatred.
SPEAKER_02: When they were in the city, there was hand-to-hand fighting of the streets. The thing is Vanquish and his entire family has to suffer.
SPEAKER_11: People get defensive and they get uncomfortable and a lot of people walk away at that point. They see nothing wrong with their behaviour. Everything that you take for granted about your history. You were left here to die. It's not necessarily true.
SPEAKER_06: That's probably the moment it occurred to me. The crime I was witnessing, it wasn't murder. It was theft. I'm Mark Fennell and this is Stuff the British Stole.
SPEAKER_10: How long you are staying, sir?
SPEAKER_05: I'm flying back tonight. Tonight? Tonight, yeah.
SPEAKER_06: I'm just driving around trying to get presents for my kids. So in some ways this whole thing starts a few hours earlier with me being interrogated by a London cab driver who found my face, particularly the colour of it, extremely confusing.
SPEAKER_10: You are also looking at the Asian mayors from where?
SPEAKER_06: My mum is from Singapore but she's Indian and my dad is from Ireland.
SPEAKER_05: From Ireland? Yeah, so I'm a weird mixture of both.
SPEAKER_10: And you're born in Australia or you moved from here to...
SPEAKER_05: No, no, I'm an Australian citizen and I'm an Irish citizen and I grew up in Australia
SPEAKER_06: and I'm Indian ethnically but mum came from Singapore so it's all a bit... You understand a little bit Urdu.
SPEAKER_10: Japi, Hindi are few words only.
SPEAKER_06: I think my mum can swear in Hindi and that's about it. She definitely can and it is brutal. It's also true that I tend to think of myself as the worst kind of ethnic. I don't speak any other languages. No accents, no real understanding of my own history. That's it, I can cook and more importantly I still count towards your diversity quota.
SPEAKER_05: I work for the ABC which is like the BBC but for Australia.
SPEAKER_10: So you are like a reporter?
SPEAKER_06: I travel a lot, I interview lots of people around the world so that's what I do. You used to go to India as well?
SPEAKER_05: You know I've never been to India.
SPEAKER_09: Never been? No, I've never been.
SPEAKER_10: It's a surprise for me. Why not? All over the world you are travelling. For some how... It is your mum's homeland.
SPEAKER_05: I know, it's terrible, I've never been. There's no real reason, I've never been for some reason.
SPEAKER_06: And with my cultural shaming now complete he drops me outside Euston Station for the last meeting I have before heading to the airport.
SPEAKER_11: Of course. Hi. Nice to meet you. I'm Alice, lovely to meet you.
SPEAKER_06: This is the person that would lead me to watch a man being murdered by a tiger. She'd also send me to a dog kennel and a tattoo parlour but she doesn't know that yet and neither do I. What I do know is that accent sounds familiar. Did you grow up in London? Mostly, yeah.
SPEAKER_11: You're right. Yeah, it's the fact that I sound a lot like my parents.
SPEAKER_06: And where are your parents from? Adelaide. Ah, that's what it is, that's what it is.
SPEAKER_11: We left Australia when I was very very young and I grew up in Hong Kong and then I've been in London most of my life so I went to school here, I've studied here and that's kind of part of the reason I've spent so much time in museums is moving here my parents were like we're going to be in the heart of culture and history so we're going to make sure you actually take advantage of that. Alice A Proctor, with an E, is a very different kind of historian.
SPEAKER_06: She specialises in the uncomfortable, which may explain why she wanted to meet in a library which best way I know how to describe it is that it's halfway between Hogwarts and an actual horror movie.
SPEAKER_11: So this is part of the Welcome Collection, so it's a history of science and medicine. They have a bunch of bizarre and terrifying paintings of like 17th century medical procedures and stuff.
SPEAKER_06: There is a picture over there of a guy that appears to be flying off a chunk of his own flesh and how would you describe that facial expression?
SPEAKER_11: Paint. Just a little bit.
SPEAKER_06: Alice gives guided tours, just not the ones that museums and galleries like.
SPEAKER_11: Basically when I started doing the tours they were like proper undercover secret tours, which means that most- Undercover historian, I love it.
SPEAKER_11: Most of the museums didn't find out about me until I started getting like press attention. So for a lot of them by the time they knew what I was doing it was sort of too late to stop me. Did they not wonder why is this this girl with the funny Australian accent wandering
SPEAKER_06: around with a group of people around her? Like did they just think you had a magnetic personality?
SPEAKER_11: They thought I was just a regular tour guide right? You know and so I knew that you could do this because I've been a regular tour guide and people would look at me and they would think oh yes she's a nice white girl with an art history background she's probably an official educator it'll be fine and no one would actually stop and listen to what I was talking about.
SPEAKER_06: But when people did stop to listen at places like say the British Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum or the VNA for short, some of the oldest collections on earth, what did they hear?
SPEAKER_11: Specifically about the stuff that people don't want to talk about which is colonial history the kind of darkest parts of empire and imperialism. You know there'd be these objects on display that have really violent histories and no one would mention that and also objects that have quote unquote contested histories or Now there's a euphemism.
SPEAKER_11: Right exactly and so a lot of museums use this term of contested histories as this way of kind of glossing over what's actually being contested which is that nine times out of ten they were stolen in very violent circumstances or taken as part of looting after conflict that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_06: How many objects would you say sit in British institutions that you would classify as stolen?
SPEAKER_11: So it's actually impossible to put a number on it because most estimates would say that a gallery like the British Museum or the VNA or one of those other institutions usually they've got about five to ten percent of their collection on display at any given time so there is so much stuff that's not on show and often it's really hard to even kind of access the catalogues of the stuff that's not on show so we honestly don't know how many hundreds of pieces there are that might be contested.
SPEAKER_06: And that is when Alice mentions the tiger.
SPEAKER_11: Basically it's a life-size wooden tiger mauling a life-size wooden man dressed in the uniform of the East India Company so it's very very unsubtle and when you crank the handle it sort of makes screaming and groaning noises. Super classy. It's incredible.
SPEAKER_06: The tiger has a name, Tipu's tiger, named after a very real Indian ruler by the name of Tipu Sultan. The tiger was his personal symbol. And a badass one at that. So the way Alice tells the story. The tiger was first found back in 1799 and this Tipu character was at war with the British. Seems he was killed and the British take his city and then the British soldiers...
SPEAKER_11: Go absolutely wild for three days, destroying stuff, looting stuff and only after three days is order restored and the official looting can begin.
SPEAKER_06: Official looting apparently being an accepted thing.
SPEAKER_11: And so when the official looting starts they find this tiger and it's made of wood so it's not got any material value whereas stuff like Tipu's throne is broken down because it's made of gold and it's more valuable in for its material than for its design. So the tiger survives in this very weird way because people don't think it's valuable enough. And they say they're going to send it to London to be put on display.
SPEAKER_06: Over the years Tipu's tiger ends up bouncing to a few different British museums and libraries. It goes down particularly badly at a library.
SPEAKER_11: So they have all these letters in the archives of students who are like I'm trying to use your library collection but people keep coming in and making the tiger roar and it's really disruptive to my studying. And for a while they think about taking it off open display because people are fainting in horror at the sight of it because apparently it's so frightening. So it's got this very weird history once it comes to the UK and now it's in the Victoria and Albert Museum which is a design museum.
SPEAKER_06: In case you're wondering fainting in horror was the exact moment I decided that even with the rapidly closing window to get to Heathrow Airport I had to see this thing. Which brings us to the beginning of this episode. Me alone in a cavernous room at the Victoria and Albert Museum watching a near life-sized British soldier made from Indian Jack wood being murdered by the badass personal symbol of Tipu Sultan. Honestly standing there all you want to do is smash open that glass and crank this faded brass handle just so you can hear this sound. So about 11 years ago the VNA invited a classically trained musician to attempt to play the tiger. They posted it on YouTube which is where this clip comes from. They even opened up the tiger's guts and inside it reveals this row of copper coloured pipes where his ribcage would be and leather bellows, lungs really. Blamping out these musical screams. The wildest part as he plays the mangled British soldier's arms automatically flail in agony. What the hell happened to this Tipu guy? Why would he want to make something like this?
SPEAKER_02: I have kept travel diaries for trips I've taken throughout my whole life and the first one that I have is from the age of five. I write down that I've gone to the VNA and I saw a funny object of a tiger killing an Englishman.
SPEAKER_09: No! Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: You're cute. That's amazing. It makes a huge impression even if you're like a five year old kid you know being put in front of this.
SPEAKER_06: You're hearing the voice of Maya Jasanov. Recording and here we go.
SPEAKER_02: I am a history professor at Harvard University and I teach and write on the history of the British Empire.
SPEAKER_06: Where does your interest in India begin?
SPEAKER_02: My interest in India begins with my birth because I am myself half Indian. My mother is from Calcutta and immigrated to the United States as a girl. And Maya has also become somewhat obsessed with this tiger and the man who owned it.
SPEAKER_02: Tipu Sultan was a prominent ruler in South India in the second half of the 18th century. He was one of the fiercest opponents of continued British expansion in the Indian subcontinent.
SPEAKER_06: I feel like you've done this before. I actually haven't but I can whip it out.
SPEAKER_02: So Tipu made a kind of fetish out of the tiger. The tiger of course is indigenous to India so his soldiers wore uniforms that had a kind of tiger stripe on them. Tigers on the pommels of his swords and you know just sort of tiger motifs everywhere around him. It was his badge. I can't find real photos of Tipu but the illustrations that we do have show a slightly chubby strong
SPEAKER_06: jawed man with a turban and a delicately coiffed moustache, always upturned. But what the pictures don't tell you is that this man spent every second of his 17 year reign caught in a series of strange balancing acts. The story of Tipu Sultan is one of a man who found himself between two superpowers, two huge revolutions and between two generations, his father and his sons. So for starters Tipu Sultan spent his life carrying out someone else's unfinished business, the business of his dad.
SPEAKER_02: A man called Hyder Ali. The two of them I think need to be understood together to some extent because Tipu was really building on what his father had started and what his father had started was a dynasty.
SPEAKER_06: An opulent one too. From the south west coast to deep inland they themselves were Muslim leaders but they ruled. Sometimes brutally. Over both Hindus and Christians. They overthrew existing leaders and they were on a hunt for more land, more people and more power.
SPEAKER_02: But in the course of doing this run into some of the other powers that were interested in grabbing a piece of the action and those powers included most notably the East India Company.
SPEAKER_06: The East India Company, in effect a commercial army in service of the British Empire.
SPEAKER_02: Hyder found himself in conflict with the East India Company repeatedly in a series of wars which resulted in, among other things, him taking a whole bunch of captives from the British army and holding them in the capital city of Sringapatam.
SPEAKER_06: By the time Tipu's father Hyder Ali had died and Tipu himself assumed power, the British, they were angry. Very angry.
SPEAKER_02: Hyder Ali died, Tipu Sultan inherited the throne and with it inherited this legacy of being in a up and coming kingdom that had successfully defeated the British and was holding British officers in captivity. And the British started to kind of build up this whole rhetorical picture of these people as these Muslim despots. And it was fueled by accounts that were coming from the captives from Sringapatam who came out with these tales of things like I was forcibly circumcised or I was forced to dress up in women's clothes and dance before the king. And out of all of this emerged this kind of demonization of these two figures Hyder and Tipu as, you know, people to be feared because they actually had beaten the British.
SPEAKER_06: Even to this day, there are so many competing narratives about Tipu Sultan. He remains one of the most controversial figures in Indian history and right now a deeply political one too. Can I just get you to introduce yourself and what you do for a living? I'm Shashi Tharoor.
SPEAKER_07: I'm a third term member of the Indian parliament, had a 29 year career at the United Nations ending as Under Secretary General under Gopi Anand. I have published 20 books with two more due out before the end of the year. And I am an amateur fan of modern Indian history.
SPEAKER_06: Pretty sure after 20 books you no longer qualify as amateur, but we'll let that one slide. Well, I happen to have a slightly unfashionable view in India today that he was a hero.
SPEAKER_07: And that's largely because he was a resolute anti-colonialist. I say it's a slightly unfashionable view because there are also a lot of accounts both in terms of British records, which may be biased, but also folklore and tales passed down the generations of his rather gruesome persecution of large numbers of Hindus and Christians, which have not endeared him to descendants of those communities.
SPEAKER_06: Literally as Shashi and I talk, there is a campaign afoot within India to remove Tipu from parts of the school syllabus because of his massacring of Hindu subjects. And yet, curiously for very Hindu politician Shashi Tharoor...
SPEAKER_07: I would on the whole regard him as someone whom Indians by and large are very good reason to be proud of. Mysore was a formidable state extending across the largest portions imaginable of Southern India. People of his kingdom of Mysore enjoyed the highest standards of living in the known world. The per capita income was higher than the highest European power of the time, the Dutch. Very well armed, high technological capacity rockets, which the British actually subsequently stole. He was an extremely effective general, a leader of troops in battle who won more wars that
SPEAKER_06: he lost. But eventually Tipu did lose the third Mysore war against the British. The price was far higher than he was bargaining for.
SPEAKER_02: One of the stipulations of the peace that was struck between the East India Company and Tipu was that two of Tipu Sultan's sons would be taken hostage by the British.
SPEAKER_06: Not just any British leader, mind you.
SPEAKER_02: And those two sons were received by the, at the time, the commander of the British forces, Lord Cornwallis, who a few years earlier had gained some notoriety here in the United States as the person who lost the Battle of Yorktown and with it concluded the American Revolution on American terms. Anyway, there he pops up in India a decade later and he takes these sons of Tipu Sultan.
SPEAKER_06: So the guy that failed to stop the American Revolution was not going to let this Indian warlord have his. And so he held on to Tipu's sons. Do we know how Tipu reacted to the abduction of his children?
SPEAKER_02: You know, there's probably something more specific, but suffice to say there was a fourth Mysore war.
SPEAKER_07: So you can imagine that Tipu had gone through a fair amount of humiliation at British hands. So I think it's fairly, it's fairly understandable. You could see the depth of hatred that Tipu felt.
SPEAKER_06: But Tipu wasn't the only one who hated the British. That's where our other superpower steps into the picture.
SPEAKER_02: And that is the French. So this connection with the French is really important to the story of Mysore's ascent and above all, I think its demise. So in the 1790s, Britain and France are engaged in a huge global war, the Revolutionary Wars. And as a piece of this war, they are skirmishing in India.
SPEAKER_06: And Tipu just wedged himself between them.
SPEAKER_07: Tipu helped the French and the French helped Tipu. They actually explored the idea of an alliance that would throw the British out of India.
SPEAKER_02: So they had French advisors and soldiers even who came and drilled their own troops and taught them new tactics and, you know, doubtless were conduits for certain kinds of technology and certain kinds of manoeuvres, which meant that, you know, to the extent that there was a technological gap between Western and Indian forces at that time, which wasn't huge even to begin with, that gap was flattened. And not just methods to wage war.
SPEAKER_06: The French also supplied other technologies, including technology to make music.
SPEAKER_02: Tipu's Tiger is pretty fascinating for a whole bunch of reasons. But one of them is that the manufacture of it is clearly Indo-European. That is, the wood that it's made out of is Indian wood. That part was manufactured in India. But the mechanism inside that creates these noises is of European manufacture. This is how Tipu's Tiger came to be.
SPEAKER_06: The embodiment of Tipu's rage against the British and the alliance between France and Mysore, the same alliance that was about to be Tipu's undoing. And now a surprise appearance from a little known historical figure, somebody who in less than a year would become an icon of the French Revolution. Enter Napoleon Bonaparte.
SPEAKER_02: Napoleon, at the time, an up and coming general in the French Revolutionary Army, invades Egypt. For him, Egypt is a staging post on the way to India. Napoleon writes to Tipu Sultan and says, here I am in Egypt, you know, ready and waiting. I'm going to send over my 10,000 men to come and join you and chase the British away. Well, that letter that Napoleon wrote was intercepted by the British off of Jeddah. The British jumped on the excuse or pretext, if you will, to go after Tipu. In May of 1799, the East India Company surrounds Sringapatam and they decide to go for it. They bombarded the thick fortifications and broke holes in it and set up their ladders and went running over and into the city. And then when they were in the city, there was hand to hand fighting in the streets. And among the dead that was discovered in a heap of bodies by one of the gates of the city at the end of this action was that of Tipu Sultan himself.
SPEAKER_06: Caught between the superpowers of France and Britain, between Cornwallis, a veteran of the American Revolution, and Napoleon, soon to be leader of the French Revolution, there lies the Tiger of Mysore.
SPEAKER_07: Well, Tipu Sultan's fall was, I think, the end pretty much of any meaningful Indian resistance to steady British expansion. He was the last substantial monarch to be willing to fight the British.
SPEAKER_05: How do you think Tipu would feel about his tiger sitting in the British institution? A statue that had been prepared essentially for him to actually demonstrate his contempt
SPEAKER_07: for the British to actually be in British hands would have been the ultimate act of humiliation. So he would have been pretty, pretty upset about that.
SPEAKER_04: I think Tipu would be quite pleased because he was a very vain man. Someone who sees the tiger immediately wants to get drawn into the story about Tipu. So you have millions of people from around the world getting drawn into that story. That would never happen if it was, say, in Bangalore, which would now be the capital of the Mysore state that he once ruled.
SPEAKER_06: Dr. Zaria Masani is a historian who was raised in India only to end up at Oxford University in the UK. And as more people like Shashitha Roor argue for the return of Tipu's tiger to India, Zaria thinks there's parts of this story that were missing. I mean, I'm all for certain objects that are of great iconic values, say religious value
SPEAKER_04: being returned with something like Tipu's tiger. The reason it survived is that it was shipped off to England and conserved and preserved. Had it been in India, it would have just fallen to pieces eventually because no one would have been particularly interested for a couple of hundred years. But Indian politician Shashitha Roor disagrees.
SPEAKER_06: There's something wrong about stealing items that belong to another people and then, you
SPEAKER_07: know, self-righteously claiming you look after them better than those who are entitled on them would. I mean, if somebody, you know, literally dug your father's grave up and put it on display in his backyard, would you feel that morality was on his side? I mean, it's that kind of story you're talking about.
SPEAKER_04: There is no tradition of museums in Indian culture. You know, pre-colonial India had no museums. So I think this is very much a Western fascination with antiquity that was transplanted to a country like India. I don't think it has that unique value. And I think if it were returned to India now, it would just be another nationalistic sort of icon to be displayed somewhere of, you know, an Indian tiger eating a British soldier. I don't think that anyone would particularly be interested in the history beyond that.
SPEAKER_06: Except there is at least one person for whom it would mean much more than that. It took us a little while to track him down, but eventually we managed to connect the call. This might seem like a weird question, but after all these years, do you think of yourself as royal? No, I don't think of myself as a royal.
SPEAKER_08: I feel I have not done anything much. I am an ordinary person. I just happen to be in the family. My name is Bakhtiar Alisha, sixth generation descendant of Tipu Sultan from his tenth son.
SPEAKER_06: By day, Bakhtiar Alisha is a criminal lawyer in Kolkata. It amazes me that even five generations or six generations down the line, people still
SPEAKER_08: want to connect and people want to know about him. So I just feel that what kind of charisma that man must have had, that is still, you know, kind of has a ripple effect on us till date. People still want to connect. They still have that kind of an aura about him, which kind of rubs off on us.
SPEAKER_06: But the way Bakhtiar tells a story, being a descendant of Tipu wasn't always a good thing.
SPEAKER_08: He was martyred in 1799. His family was kept as prisoners. They were kept as prisoners till about 1806. So that is how our family came here.
SPEAKER_06: Bakhtiar describes how the family were restricted from interacting with the locals or going back to Mysore. They were exiled. Somehow we survived.
SPEAKER_08: We were left here to die. It's been a decline for the family from those times. How do you feel about that?
SPEAKER_06: How do you feel about that decline?
SPEAKER_08: Very unfortunate. All those people who went against the British, they're in bad shape today in India. People who work with the British, they still have their royalty and everything even today, as usually happens. You know, I mean, once a king is vanquished and his entire family has to suffer. So those were unfortunate times for the family.
SPEAKER_06: History is personal, it's messy, and sometimes in ways that we don't necessarily expect. So remember earlier when I said that Tipu Sultan ruled sometimes brutally over Hindus. What I didn't realise is that apparently includes my own family.
SPEAKER_05: You know, I've never been to India.
SPEAKER_09: Never been? No, I've never been. It's a surprise for me.
SPEAKER_10: Why not? All over the world you are travelling. So somehow... It is your mum's homeland.
SPEAKER_06: My mum's family does go back to India. Generations of Niyas were raised in the coastal regions of a place called Kerala.
SPEAKER_04: Kerala, which was colonised by Tipu, not by the British, but by Tipu, who massacred hundreds, about 100,000 local people, transported many to slavery. He practised slavery quite widely. My own Indian ancestors were almost definitely subjects of Tipu Sultan.
SPEAKER_04: I mean Tipu's tiger belongs as much to me or you, I think, as it does to someone back in Mysore. Whether he was a war criminal or whether he was a great leader, the heritage that's there belongs to all of us.
SPEAKER_06: I did actually make it to the airport that day. Let me tell you, there's something about handing over your passport to make you really consider who it is you belong to. To tell you the truth, I don't actually have a definitive opinion on British colonialism, but as an Australian who's a bit Indian, a bit Singaporean, a bit Irish, I do know that I wouldn't exist without it. And depending on where you're listening to this, there's a pretty good chance that you wouldn't either. In that library, Alice told me about four other objects.
SPEAKER_11: There's this whole kind of history of undescribed violence. Tragic.
SPEAKER_06: Thousands of people are murdered. Surprising. You are weak. This is your fate. Some very strange objects from different corners of the earth. And they tell a story. The story about how you and I ended up with the world that we have today. It's the story of us, told through some stuff. The British Stole. Stuff the British Stole was produced by Zoe Ferguson and myself. The executive producer is Amrutha Sleigh and Julie Browning is the head of society and culture. She's written a book called The Whole Picture which is available now. This is a production of ABC RN and it was created and written by me. I'm Mark Fennell and here's a hint for next episode. It wants to hug you. See ya.
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SPEAKER_06: My name is Mark Fennell and amongst other things, I'm the creator of a podcast series called Stuff the British Stole. Originally the title had another word in it that was not stuff. It was another S word, but multiple broadcasters around the world told me that I should change that. But the word I'm glad didn't change was the stolen part.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely. So you did this for the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. You're based in Australia. When you start with the name Stuff the British Stole and you're in Australia, do you just begin with like gesturing broadly to the land around you or?
SPEAKER_06: Yes. Well, it actually started with a conversation with a friend of mine and she's Lebanese and we used to host a TV show together and we were just saying, we both love going to museums, but when we were there, you would always just like close your eyes and point, open your eyes and went, oh yeah, that was stolen from insert country here. And then we looked at each other and then we looked at the landscape around us and went, oh, everything. And I think that was a good starting point. And I think when I look for stories and projects and things to create and work on, I'm usually looking for a small doorway into a big world. And this struck me as the perfect way to do history, to do colonialism without, and I'm doing air quotes here, doing history and colonialism. It's something that's digestible and it has intrigue. And I think that was kind of the heart of it. And the way it really kicked off for me is I happened to be on my way to London and I was going over for an award that I knew I was going to lose. So I was like, I need to think of something else worthwhile to do on this trip. So I arranged to meet up with a historian who I had kind of heard of before and she sort of just blew my mind. She's actually at the, she's the voice you hear at the beginning, Alice Proctor. And it was a real like on a whim, like let's just catch up and I might record it. And suddenly she kind of like crystallized the whole thing for me. And I was like, oh, there's a world of stories here that you can tell that tell us not just about ephemera, but they tell us about ourselves and it tells us about how we ended up with the world, as I say in the series we have today. And I think that was, it was a bit of a light bulb moment.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Yeah. So how did you pick the different objects to focus on? Because as you said, you know, like there's a lot of examples of stuff the British stole. So we heard about one of them, but of the other ones in the series and you, as you told me that you're going to make another set of these, these episodes. You know, what is the thing that sort of, that sort of piques your interest when it comes to a certain type of object?
SPEAKER_06: You're totally correct. There are a gazillion things and that's a very technical mathematical term that the British stole. I think it's, there's a few bars that it needs to clear. So it has to have a few internal turning points as an object itself in terms of the history that tells. But ultimately what it comes down to is it has to, you have to be able to draw a line in some point in all that fishing and reading old papers and whatnot. You have to be able to draw a line between the object being taken and today. And usually I find that's a person or a family, something that somebody for whom it matters a great deal and they kind of crystallize it. It can never be ephemeral. It always has to connect to something emotional. And you know, it's funny when, when I first sort of started making the series, a lot of people were like, well, when are you going to do the Portuguese? And when are you going to do the Nazis? And I'm like, look, heaps of stuff was stolen there too. But I think the thing with the British Empire is the British Empire shaped so much of our lives. Like the fact that you and I, we're separated by thousands of miles and kilometers right now. But the fact that you and I can communicate is because we both speak English. And if you speak English, you've been touched by the British Empire. And so I think it's, it's this idea that it does, it has this huge shaping force that sits underneath our lives in a way that is so ubiquitous that it's almost invisible, right? Unless you take the time to look at it through a digestible lens. And as it turns out, weird objects sitting in museums, quite digestible.
SPEAKER_03: So the, even the title indicates a point of view about it. And so I'm curious to know the different responses you might've gotten from the podcast, maybe from people who might vehemently disagree with you with even the verb stole. Yeah, the title is strident, right?
SPEAKER_06: But also once you get into the stories, you realize the stories are really complicated. And there are, and I, and I say to people, um, you know, when we're approaching them to be in the series, we are open to having the conversation about it being contested and we are open to you saying, no, it was not stolen. It was a gift or whatever you want to say. What it really comes down to for me is it's about nuance, right? So you have to be able to be honest with the audience and go, well, this person says this, but if you look into it, it isn't backed up. Or if you go down another pathway, it sounds like it isn't. And I think a big part of why I like this medium, the thing that we make is that it allows you to take an audience down the pathway. And I think that kind of respects your intelligence that, that you can hold more than one idea at once. And when we look at the past, there's a tendency to either focus only on the good things or
SPEAKER_06: only on the bad things. And my attitude to particularly colonialism is you will encounter these arguments and people will say, well, you know, if it weren't for colonialism, you wouldn't have laws and you wouldn't have railroads. But then at the other end of the spectrum is like, because of colonialism, there was genocides and there was, you know, children taken away from families, horrendous stuff. And my attitude to history and the thing that this series taught me is that those two things don't ever balance each other out. And they definitely don't cancel each other out. All they do is they coexist. And I think we as a species are smart enough to hold both of those ideas at the same time and not try and force them to balance each other out in some sort of historical weighing match. It doesn't work that way. And I think what's good about stories like this is you can actually guide the audience through those things. And we emerge at the other end with a more sort of complex understanding. Like I say to people, like, I want you to stand in the mess. Like I want you to feel the mess.
SPEAKER_03: I like the idea of standing in the mess. I mean, what we discovered a little bit in the repatriation sort of discussion is that who you're repatriating to is actually pretty complicated because it isn't the monarch or the controller of a state that once was. I mean, there's a brand new government there and there's descendants of those people. And it becomes like, well, I don't even know where this object belongs, even if you were inclined to give it back anyway.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And you know, in the next episode of the series, that is a very core problem where basically we've got two guys who basically come into possession of something that belongs to a ruler that no longer exists. And then the government in Nigeria were like, well, we can have it back if it's a gigantic political act and we can put on a song and dance about it. But that's not what the people that own the objects currently wanted. And so there's a huge amount of challenge. There's huge swathe of challenges that happen there. And I actually it's something that comes up all the time with this series, which is like you get to the point of what you've told the story of how it ended up where it is. And then in an effort to find a conclusion, you're like, ah, there is none because we're still living with the consequences. And so you have to kind of dig a little deeper and go, well, what if there's the macro story of the object and what you do with it. But then it's like, what does that object tell you? And what does the story of that object tell you? And usually it tells you about a culture that's been interrupted and families that have been interrupted. And if you can find something and this is what I this is what keeps me up at night. If I can find something that the answers that usually there's an ending and it's not necessarily the ending to the object because the object is static, but the people, they keep going. And if you can find something that returns justice and conclusion to them, then I kind of feel like I've done my job somewhat maybe.
SPEAKER_03: So you know, when it comes to the whole concept of using mundane objects or maybe even fantastic objects to sort of use as a lens to view ourselves in the world, I mean, this is something that's very near and dear to the heart of us at 99PI. And as such, you know, we get pitches about the repatriation of colonial objects like quite often. And we've done a few of these stories. You can't do them all. I mean, maybe you can do them all. But we can't do them all. Why do you think this topic feels so relevant right now? Like it really seems to be people are thinking about it in a way that I've never encountered before.
SPEAKER_06: We are re-examining history really intensely across the world right now. And I think there's a sense that history has been unbalanced in how it was taught. Like I in my country in Australia, you know, Indigenous Australians have been around for 60,000 years, the oldest continuous culture on Earth. But when I was when I was growing up through school, the way it works is that you get one page of there are Indigenous people in Australia and then Captain Cook arrived and that's when history starts. Right. And I think that's true of a lot of, you know, Western histories. And there's a sense now of we need to go back and re-examine the past. And certainly in academic and historical societies, that's been happening for a long time. But I think it's pushed out into the wider world where people are suddenly looking back, looking around them at the land on which they walk and going, huh, how did we get here?
SPEAKER_06: And I do think movements like Black Lives Matter has been really instructive in sparking that, not just in the US, but around the world. It's funny with statues, I digress, bear with me. Statues are such a fascinating thing because when you when you build a statue to somebody, you're not leaving a lot of room for nuance around that statue. You build statues to heroes. Right. And if that person is anything less than or more than a hero, you're putting a lot of pressure on that plaque to tell that story. And most of the time, those plaques don't tell that story. That's my whole thing. And I made a podcast to address the inadequacy of plaques in museums. It's a weird life choice, but I back it. I fully support it.
SPEAKER_03: So our audience has listened to episode one about T-Poo's tiger, which is like a really fantastic object that makes sound and is colorful and odd in many ways. Could you tease some of the other ones from this series and maybe even tease some of the objects you're working on for series number two?
SPEAKER_06: So we have objects that were taken from an African nation in the middle of a massacre, a really specific massacre. We have a dog that was taken from China. There is a tattoo or a body part that was tattooed that was taken from New Zealand. And then there was something that was taken from my home country. And at the moment, we're currently working on another five episodes. And all I'll say is that I'm spending a lot of time with Greek people. And I can't possibly imagine why I would be talking to Greek people. It's not like they have anything major stolen from them by the British that I can think of. Well, Mark, thank you so much for talking with us and for sharing your stories and allowing
SPEAKER_03: us to share them with our audience, because I know they're going to just dig the hell out of it. So thank you. Thanks, Roman. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmet Fitzgerald, Mix, Music and Tech Production by our director of sound, Sean Riehl. Our executive producer is Telaini Hall. Robert Kolstad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivien Leigh, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Loshma Dawn, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Andrew Davies at ABC. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. Or you should check out this new Stitcher series called Toxic, all about Britney Spears and her disturbing conservatorship and the group of fans trying to end it as told by some of those fans spearheading the movement. It's a fascinating podcast. You can find a link to it and other Stitcher shows I love and every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org. I'm going to steal something from the British.
SPEAKER_03: You're listening to a Stitcher podcast from Sirius XM.
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