imagine yourself to be a secret admire of siraj ud daulah write a essay
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Growing up in post-colonial Bombay – now Mumbai – as a Midnight’s Child in the 1950s, for me Robert Clive, the man who conquered India for the British, was still a historical hero to be revered at my Anglican Cathedral School, alongside more recent national figures like Akbar, Shivaji and Gandhi. Today, Clive has been knocked off his pedestal by the anti-colonial Left, variously labelled a greedy plunderer, a ruthless trickster and even a “social psychopath”
The most famous example was the long essay about him by the great historian and imperial statesman Thomas Macaulay. “Clive, like most men who are born with strong passions and tried by strong temptations, committed great faults”, wrote Macaulay a century later in 1851. “But every person who takes a fair and enlightened view of his whole career must admit that our island, so fertile in heroes and statesmen, has scarcely ever produced a man more truly great either in arms or in council.”
Robert Clive’s reputation has waxed and waned through the ages, depending on who was writing his history, colonialists or nationalists, Britons or Indians. Why should we care now? Possibly because Clive, more than any other British imperialist, epitomises both the enormous achievements and the frailties of Western empire-builders.
We know that he began life as an orphan, born into a minor gentry family, brought up by a devoted aunt and uncle. Perhaps because they indulged him too much, he was known for his temper and fights as a child and, according to Macaulay, even held shopkeepers in his village to ransom by threatening to break their windows. He grew up into what the great diarist Horace Walpole described as a “remarkably ill-looking man”.