Should Clive fall?

Of course not, silly billy. If Clive should fall, so should India.

I’ve enjoyed some of the responses to Thangam Elizabeth Rachel Debbonaire (nee Singh)’s rather silly suggestion this week that the statue of Sir Robert Clive standing outside the Foreign Office in London should fall. Thank you Sumantra. But Sumantra and others appear to be lone voices crying in the wilderness. I’ve seen the usual crowd of history-hating weirdos jump onto the bandwagon once more to decry the immorality of this man, and by so doing, advertise their own virtue. He was a racist! He was a genocidal murderer! He robbed from the (Indian) poor to make himself rich! He was a nasty freebooter who had no right to be in ‘India’ or to have any say in its future, etc, etc.

Except that… he was there, and he did help make modern India. And, while we’re on it, what ‘India’ are you talking about Lady Debbonaire (to give her her rightful title)? India didn’t exist until Clive - for good or bad - helped to create it, you silly billy. The debate yet again been another example of just how low our public conversation about history and culture - because that’s what its all about - has sunk.

Her observations of course revive much of the nonsense of the Colston drama in Bristol a year or two ago (where, incidentally, she was an MP), when an ignorant mob decided that they didn't like their history and so removed some statuary associated with it. It was an exercise in moral grandstanding: we are much better now; we are more morally upright (‘progressive’) than those terrible people who lived in the past and who did murderous, racist things. But in the debate I’ve seen on this subject during the week there's been one thing missing. It wouldn’t be were the late Nirad Chaudhuri still alive, because he'd be straight onto X to explain that what Lady D was doing was to deny her civic and political ancestry. He’d calmly explain that whenever he went to London he would salute the statute of Clive, because he knew that India owed its existence to the man. Chaudhuri helped teach me that modern India did not just appear in an extraordinary phantasm, but was the product of a long period of partnership between Britons, Britain, and Indians of every stripe to create a new national and political entity, which was handed to its new owners in 1947. (As an aside, a fractious family squabble ruined the handover, as the disciples of a chap called Mohammed Jinnah demanded their own distinct Muslim homeland, the very opposite of what had in fact been created in a united India.)

Lady’ D’s little outburst is a little bit like learning to deal with that embarrassing uncle you try to avoid at family functions: you might despise him because of his rotten teeth and disreputable air, but he’s still your uncle. We all have skeletons in our DNA. I think favourably of my own ancestors whom I am happy to have on my wall in their gilded frames, but I’m equally keen to ignore those who were less favoured or who were, frankly, drunks, reprobates or - forgive me please - imperialists. But I can’t ignore that they existed, and that in their small way, for good or bad, they made me. Clive, in his small way, made the recently ennobled Lady D, whether or not she wants to accept it. Perhaps it is because she has just discovered that Clive is that disreputable uncle that she wants him gone?

We may hate or despise our physical, physiological ancestry, but we cannot deny it.

We may hate or despise the political and civil culture in which we exist, and its origins, but we can’t deny it.

We may hate those who established our nation over a thousand years, and we may hate the political views that framed their consciousness, and directed their actions as they saw fit in the context of their times, but we cannot deny it.

Likewise, Lady D cannot cannot deny her civic or political ancestry just because she doesn’t like its progenitor. To deny Clive is to deny herself, not merely to ignore the reality of history, but to refuse the very real existence in herself of the political and cultural DNA that made her who she is, and which makes her - and us - still.

Grow up Lady D. Live with your past, and with your political ancestors. It’ll make you a more rounded person, and a better one.