Robert Clive: Imperial hero or greedy bully?
The Clive Museum at Powis Castle in Wales contains one of the most important collections of South Asian art in Europe. The collection was assembled by Robert Clive, the first British Governor of Bengal, known as ‘Clive of India’ and his son Edward, later Governor of Madras. The present display was arranged in 1987 by Alec Cobbe in display cases which he designed and decorated with Oriental motifs, and with his own quirky handwritten labels.
Visitors approach the Clive Museum through a ballroom dominated by information boards, which make it difficult to appreciate the room with its fine bookcases and portraits. The boards paint a picture of Clive as a violent and rapacious plunderer and his opponents as innocent victims through a skewed and highly selective presentation of history. There are references to ‘pillaging’ and ‘spoils’ with no explanation that war booty was legal till well into the 19th century.
The text on the display boards includes the following: ‘Recent research shows that most of the collection was either purchased or received as gifts from Indian connections, but a significant portion was pillaged. The tiger’s head finial from the throne of Tipu Sultan is the most famous example.’
About Robert Clive we are told: ‘The young Robert Clive was expelled from three schools, and later caught running a protection racket. Sent to India by his father, he soon became a successful Major-General for the East India Company, famously winning the Battle of Plassey.
With a vast fortune taken from the treasury of the defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah, Clive returned to Britain as one of its richest men.
Later, Clive would extort for the Company the Diwani (right to raise taxes) over Bengal from the captured Mughal Emperor, effectively turning a trading company into a ruler. To some in Britain this made Clive an imperial hero, to others a greedy bully.’
A quotation from an article by William Dalrymple published in the Guardian in 2015 is displayed in large letters: ‘It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company … managed in India by an unstable sociopath – Clive.’ There is more on the National Trust website, where we are told that the National Trust is ‘accelerating plans to reinterpret the stories of the painful and challenging histories attached to Powis Castle.’
Inside the Museum some of the labels in sepia ink glued to the back of the display cases remind us of items which are no longer in the collection. The Clive family owns many of the items and loans them to the National Trust. When the family decided to sell the very rare Durbar set, consisting of pieces finely worked in sliver and silver-gilt, the National Trust made no effort to raise the £730,000 necessary to keep it in this country, even though its export was delayed in December 2020 for this purpose.
Clive is indeed a controversial figure, already an object of both admiration and odium in his own lifetime. But this exhibition is so keen to deplore imperialism that it offers no insights as to why some might have regarded him as a hero. Moreover, it looks suspiciously as if moral disapproval may have deterred the Trust from trying to preserve the integrity of an important part of its collections.