(EXTRACT)
Empired Out
At the end of 1999, just days before the start of the New Millennium, I was to return to India for a further stint of wanderings.
In the months before flying out, I consumed far too much literature on the history of British India. I made inroads into Lawrence James’s dense tome on the Making and Unmaking of the British Raj. I then switched over to Jan Morris’s jaunty Pax Britannica trilogy about the wider Empire, managing 1.5 books here, before picking up John Keay’s erudite piece The Honourable Company. But I think, by then, I was just Empired out.
Clive in a Box
My reading confirmed quite a bit of what I had previously absorbed in relation to Britain’s colonisation of foreign territories, particularly India and especially about Robert Clive. I was under no illusions just who Clive of India was and of his leading role in the subjugating and plundering of the subcontinent, under the auspices of the East India Company.
He just seemed so different to the man who had a whole glossy children’s book of mine, devoted to him. This was part of a box set about courageous people, and Brits in particular, who had made the world a much better place. Clive wasn’t the only suspect person included in this box set. However, the collection also included the likes of Florence Nightingale, Emmeline Pankhurst and Marie Curie. The beautiful and the damned, leant side by side within the box, all to be deeply revered.
Recalling the general tone of these children’s publications, before setting off for my latest foray into India, made me come over all colonial. I really couldn’t understand what those Guardian readers were complaining about. Yes, we stole the country’s freedom and plundered its resources, but we gave the natives their governmental and judicial institutions, and a rail network, not to mention doing our best with a Christian god. Boy had we civilised them!
But of course, it is no joking matter. All this ‘modernisation’ was implemented in a manner that enabled the new rulers to exploit and ship the wealth out of the country even faster; to use it as a bargaining counter in the dark side of triangular trade; and, to exacerbate a famine that killed millions of people. And that is just for starters. There really didn’t seem to be much to recommend it from any kind of moral perspective whatsoever.
Focusing on the Raj
And so, after all this reading, I arrived in the subcontinent, feeling a bit like a pariah-representative of a small nation state, five thousand miles away.
But my history lessons over the coming weeks, whilst in India, tended to focus on the 90-year era of direct rule by the UK Government – the British Raj, which superseded the East India Company, an epoch which was to last until independence. I was to revisit Robert Clive instead a matter of months later, when he reappeared in my life, in a way that I could not have envisaged…… (Continued)
Damian Rainford, 2023
Clive statue and house image -Damian Rainford
