CBSE Class 12 English - The Tiger King
THEME OF THE ST OR Y :
- It suggests that death is certain and no one can escape death. The author conveys that destiny is all-powerful and inevitable.
- No one can change his destiny. The author also suggests that men in power are quite ruthless towards wildlife.
- They kill innocent animals on one pretext or the other. In this story ‘The Tiger King ‘, the maharaja kills the tigers because he has been told by the astrologer that his death will come from a tiger. So he kills them to evade death.
SUMMARY
When the king and queen of Pratibandapuram had their first baby who was just 10 days old at the beginning of the story the court astrologers made a prediction that child would grow up and will be champion of the champion but one day he will meet his death.
Now, this revelation or prediction is quite hilarious and obvious at the same time because we know that death is inevitable. It is a universal truth. The child was entitled The Tiger King when he grew up because he went on a tiger hunt to kill the hundredth tiger to get rid of his fear of death.
As a result of his hunting, the population of tigers started to decline in his kingdom. To continue his hunting’s he decided to ask his dewan to arrange a list of all the statistics of tiger population in the different native states and then investigate if there is a girl that he can marry in the royal family of a state with a large tiger population. He decided to form a matrimonial alliance to keep continuing his hunts.
The dewan followed his orders and found the right girl from a state that possessed a large tiger population. This way he continued killing five or six tigers each time he visited his father in law. He managed killing ninety-nine tigers, and he grew anxious about killing the hundredth tiger. To add to his anxiety the tiger population in his father in law’s kingdom went dry too. It was becoming difficult to spot even a single tiger. Maharaja remembered what the astrologer said “even after killing ninety-nine tigers the maharaja should beware of the hundredth.
Just when he was completely helpless regarding that one tiger that was remaining to be killed he received a piece of happy news that the sheep started to disappear, he was so happy to know this that he announced a three-year exemption from all the taxes for that village. But again tiger was nowhere to be found and in his fury, he asked the dewan to double the land tax fore with. Dewan told the maharaja that this step would result in their state falling in prey to Indian National Congress.
Dewan somehow managed to arrange for a tiger which had been brought from People’s Park in Madras. It was arranged for the Maharaja to be killed. Even though he missed the target it was still killed by the hunters under fear of losing their job.
At the end, the tiger king was finally killed by the infection caused by the rough surface silver of the wooden tiger.