Decolonisation, cultural restitution and repatriation are increasingly hot topics, dividing the world of culture and politics. From the Benin bronzes to the Koh-i-Noor diamond, books such as Dan Hicks’s The Brutish Museums and Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland have studied extractive colonialism and questioned how cultural artefacts have travelled to, and been curated within, collections in western museums – often alongside distorted versions of their origin stories, or without credit where it’s due.
American author Tania James’s entertaining and erudite third novel Loot imagines the roots and routes of one such object: the automaton Tipu’s Tiger, one of the most contentious displays in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It foregrounds the stories and journeys of individuals and objects that are frequently mere footnotes in the history of empire.
