The Clives: Looters or art collectors?
The Clive collection at Powis Castle is displayed in cases designed by Alec Cobbe. There was another case in the centre of the room, which has been removed.
The Clive Museum at Powis Castle has lost some its finest treasures, notably the silver Durbar set, and the elaborately decorated central display case has been removed, together with its contents. Now the National Trust has announced that it is ‘accelerating plans to reinterpret the stories of the painful and challenging histories attached to Powis Castle’, further threatening the integrity of the museum while portraying the Clive family in a negative light. Dr Zareer Masani sets out a different perspective on Robert Clive, his descendants and their collection.
Perched atop a hill in South Wales is Powis Castle, a fairy-tale, medieval fortress surrounded by lush, terraced lawns and topiary and housing one of the world’s finest collections of Anglo-Indian artefacts, dating to the eighteenth century. The future of this remarkable display is now uncertain. The National Trust website advises us: ‘The present Clive Museum … remains a symbol of Britain’s colonial past and represents the ongoing impacts of colonial and imperial legacies in the twenty-first century.’ Before you can begin to enjoy the museum, you must first run the gauntlet of National Trust information boards, advising you that what you are about to see are treasures ‘looted’ from unfortunate Indians by the evil colonialist Clive, father and son. We are told: ‘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.’
Loot is actually an Indian word referring to plunder or burglary, so it’s hard to see how the term applies to a collection made up of some perfectly legal war booty, but mostly of gifts and collectables, acquired by the Clive family out of a serious interest in Indian art and crafts. Lest we wonder whether these objects might be better off left in situ in India, you might consider that the collection would have been highly unlikely to survive there, because we Indians preferred to throw away antiques or melt them down, until the British taught us to value and conserve them in the museums they set up for us.
So, what exactly is this Clive ‘loot’? Reached from an initially uninspiring castle ballroom, the collection is housed in a gallery beautifully designed in the 1980s by the artist Alec Cobbe. Following the intimate aesthetic of a gentleman’s display of curios, the collection is housed in cabinets designed by Cobbe with Oriental motifs, carefully incorporated from the paintings and aquatints of the remarkable Thomas and William Daniell, painters of Oriental scenes at the turn of the 19th century. The artefacts themselves range from Indian miniature paintings and Hindu bronzes to armour and weaponry. The most remarkable objects are a jewelled gold tiger finial from the legendary throne of Tipu Sultan, the Mysore warlord whom the East India Company defeated, and Tipu’s beautifully decorated campaign tent. Also present is a luxurious palanquin reputed to have carried the Bengal Nawab, Siraj-ud-Daulah, fleeing from the battlefield of Plassey in 1757, where Robert Clive laid the foundations of the British Raj.
It’s fair to say that none of these objects would have survived, let alone collectively, had the Clive family not salvaged them from Indian bazaars and battlefields, conserved them for three centuries and then opened them to the public at the castle they had presented to the National Trust. Whatever one thinks of its origins, the collection is an almost unique historical portrait of the Anglo-Indian encounter in all its splendour and complexity.
Powis was inherited by the Clives via Lady Henrietta Clive, sister and heiress to the last Earl of Powis, who died without issue. Henrietta had married the second Lord Clive, son of the victor of Plassey. Much of the collection was first assembled by her father-in-law Robert, and Henrietta added to it considerably during her travels in India as wife of Edward Clive, Governor of Madras. Henrietta and Edward inherited both the castle and the earldom of Powis from her brother.
Reading the National Trust’s labels, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Clives were pirates, or worse still, ruthless colonialists, who enslaved us poor Indians by brute military force and stole our wealth and treasures. The actual historical reality was rather different. Indeed, the founder of the dynasty might seem very much a man for our times, battling penury and mental health problems to rise by his own brilliance to wealth, military success and fine cultural tastes.
Robert came from a very modest gentry family, went out to India in his teens as a clerk with the East India Company and unexpectedly emerged as the saviour of the Company’s Madras settlement from being wiped out by its French rival and their Indian ally. Clive showed remarkable, self-taught military skills in commanding the Madras armies in the South Indian wars of the mid-18th century, so much so that when a tyrannical Nawab in Bengal, up north, attacked the Company’s Calcutta settlement in 1756, young Clive was despatched to teach him a lesson.
Far from waging unprovoked war on the Nawab of Bengal, as the National Trust tells us, Clive was drawn into a plot by the Nawab’s own courtiers and bankers to rid themselves of an extravagant, brutal and sadistic tyrant. No mention by the National Trust that Nawab Siraj, whom they portray as victim, is almost unanimously held responsible for the Black Hole of Calcutta, the infamous atrocity in which about 100 British men, women and children were suffocated to death.
The Battle of Plassey was won by Clive with hardly a shot fired, when half the Nawab’s own army refused to fight, and the Nawab was later murdered by his own uncle. Clive, who now took over as Governor of Bengal, was no tyrant, and he tortured or murdered no one. His weakness was for money, though the war booty he acquired from the new Nawab of Bengal was modest by Indian standards, and he gave generously to charities for disabled or indigent Company soldiers. It’s doubtful that Clive’s administration felt any more foreign to the Bengali masses, when compared with the mostly imported Central Asian, Turkish and Arab nobles who made up the courts of Mughal nawabs. Company officials were far more likely to speak Indian mass vernaculars like Bengali than the Persian-speaking Mughal aristocracy.
Clive’s first governorship from 1757 to 1759 was a period of transition, during which Company officials, unaccustomed to such power and on meagre salaries, resorted to corrupt profiteering through gifts and private monopolies. When Clive returned for his second governorship in 1764, he was sent to sort out the mess, stamp out corrupt profiteering and put the Company’s rule on a stable basis.
We read on an information board: ‘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.’ In fact, Clive warmly received the then fugitive, not captive, Mughal Emperor, who willingly signed over the Diwani to him, in return for a prosperous fiefdom and a generous tribute to help him maintain it.
Clive’s second governorship found him a poacher turned game keeper, who refused all gifts himself and banned private trade by Company servants. When he returned to England in 1766 the foundations had been laid for two centuries of stable, largely peaceful and remarkably uncorrupt British rule in India. That doesn’t stop him being blamed for hugely exaggerated casualties in one of Bengal’s cyclical famines, which occurred three years after Clive’s departure.
At Powis, a quotation from an article by William Dalrymple is prominently 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.’ What the National Trust fails to tell us is that the East India Company was already subject to ever closer investigation and regulation by the British Parliament, that Robert Clive himself was much loved by his Indian sepoys, whose hardships and dangers he shared, and that he mixed freely with Indians and exhibited no evidence of racial prejudice. His main sights were set on British politics, and his Indian wealth and income were vital assets for his career in England’s own very corrupt parliamentary system. Clive used his wealth to finance a small platoon of six or seven MPs loyal to him, on the basis of which he hoped for ministerial office. He had reckoned without the unpopularity of the East India Company, much resented and exaggerated by some political factions, of which he had become a symbol. Clive also had to suffer the snobbery of the old Whig oligarchy, who looked down their noses at him as a self-made man, who had most conspicuously not inherited his wealth.
Clive had hoped for an English peerage, enabling him to sit in the House of Lords, but he received only an Irish barony, and was subjected to a prolonged parliamentary enquiry, which eventually exonerated him of any abuse of power. Dogged by false accusations, envy and prejudice, Clive’s mental health deteriorated. The likely cause seems to have been a bipolar disorder, leaving him prey to extremes of depression and euphoria, easily treated today, but not in the 1770s. The result was a tragic ending in 1774, when Clive got up suddenly from the lunch table and was discovered half an hour later by his wife with his jugular cut by his pen-knife. He was only 49.
Though anachronistically labelled a sociopath by some of his detractors today, Clive was a devoted husband and father, a loyal friend and an inspired leader of men. Ironically, it was his son who inherited the English earldom Robert had aspired to, awarded by a government belatedly keen to honour the man who had won it an empire in the East, making up for its loss of the American colonies.
Edward Clive served a fairly uneventful term as Governor of Madras at the turn of the 18th century, which happened to be the moment when the East India Company’s rivalry with Tipu Sultan of Mysore reached its violent climax. Tipu and his father, regarded as Muslim usurpers by most of their Hindu subjects, were notoriously cruel to hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Christians whom they butchered and enslaved in the course of their conquests, including hundreds of British prisoners, some mere children. They intrigued with the French to oust the British from Madras and almost succeeded in doing so. The Fourth Anglo-Mysore War finally brought this rivalry to an end when the future Duke of Wellington defeated Tipu, who died in battle at his fortress-palace of Seringapatam.
Adopting its usual accusatory tone, the National Trust’s website informs us: ‘As Governor of Madras, Edward Clive bears responsibility for the defeat and death of Tipu Sultan (1750–99), the ruler of the Indian state of Mysore.’ It also advises us: Tipu Sultan’s magnificent state tent, made of painted chintz, was one of the treasures seized by Edward Clive. The tent was a symbol of Tipu Sultan’s power and leadership, which he used when travelling around his territories. At Powis it was used as a marquee for garden parties, highlighting the uncomfortable ways objects were used to signal colonial dominance and subjugation through appropriation.’
Despite such accusations of cultural appropriation, the historical truth is that Governor Clive at Madras had no direct role in Tipu’s fall, though he received the tent and a jewelled tiger finial from Tipu’s throne as war-booty, along with other objects of Tipu’s weaponry. Once again in accusatory mode, the National Trust tells us: ‘This gold, bejewelled tiger head finial was taken from the throne and given to Henrietta Clive by Arthur Wellesley, later the 1st Duke of Wellington. Like the tent, its importance in conveying Tipu Sultan’s personal status compounded the cultural, as well as physical, colonisation undertaken by the Clives.’
Contrary to these gratuitous health warnings, historians agree that the rights and wrongs of the Anglo-Mysore Wars had little to do with the Clive family and that the final chapter was directed by the Marquis of Wellesley, in his recently created overlordship as Governor-General at Calcutta. What the Clive Collection as a whole demonstrates is the complexity of Indian politics in the aftermath of the collapse of the Mughal Empire, long before the East India Company’s ascendancy. The Company and its officers on the ground, like the Clives, found themselves drawn into an ever-expanding political dominance of the subcontinent in order to maintain their trade in an increasingly uncertain world.
Here lies a historical dilemma well worth exploring, but the National Trust instead continues to treat us to well-intentioned but misleading platitudes. Meanwhile, the future of the collection and its fine display is uncertain. The website announces: ‘Our research is ongoing and we are accelerating plans to reinterpret the stories of the painful and challenging histories attached to Powis Castle. This will take time as we want to ensure that changes we make are sustained and underpinned by high quality research.’ High quality research is what we would all like to see, but the omens are not good. Festina lente.