Forgotten in India, Robert Clive is alive and well in England

“Robert Clive has been largely forgotten in India,” the BBC reported last week, quoting the Indian comedian Anuvab Pal. The story, broadcast from Shropshire — Clive’s birthplace — suggested that one of the most notorious figures of British colonial rule barely registers in the modern Indian imagination.

Pal, who lives in Kolkata, told the BBC: “Obviously by modern morality he was a thief and a criminal and all of those things, but in India it’s quite fascinating, because a lot of people have just moved on from the empire.”

It was a striking choice of messenger. Instead of speaking to Indian historians, economists or cultural critics, the BBC handed the microphone to a comedian — as if the legacy of conquest and plunder is best reduced to a punchline.

The same broadcast also featured historian William Dalrymple, who praised the compromise reached in Shrewsbury, where the council decided to keep its Clive statue but add a plaque. “There’s a very good plaque… which explains both sides, the things he did that enriched us, however much we may regard them as war crimes today,” he told the BBC.

Dalrymple himself is no disinterested observer. His father, Major Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, was a British Army officer who served as an aide-de-camp to a general in the final days of the Raj, moving in viceregal circles. That inheritance of proximity to empire does not invalidate his scholarship, but it does mean that his calls for “balance” come with a particular pedigree — one rooted in the very structures that Clive helped establish.

Between Pal’s claim of forgetfulness and Dalrymple’s call for balance, the impression given was of a man softened by time — controversial, yes, but half-redeemed by explanatory boards and historical distance.

The reality is harsher, and far less forgotten.

Clive’s career in India began as a clerk for the East India Company and ended with him being among the wealthiest men in Britain. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Clive extracted enormous personal rewards from Bengal’s rulers. He secured an annuity of £27,000 a year (a staggering sum in the 18th century) alongside a lump payment of £234,000. In Parliament, his enemies accused him of walking away with £1.2 million — an amount greater than the entire annual revenue of the British Crown at the time.

In today’s money, those sums translate into billions of pounds.

The cost to Bengal was catastrophic. The East India Company’s extraction of land revenue under Clive’s system helped precipitate the famine of 1769–70, in which as many as 10 million people died. Grain was hoarded for profit, rents were raised, and while peasants starved, the flow of money to Britain accelerated.

This is not the story of a man “forgotten” by India, but of a figure whose decisions reshaped the subcontinent’s economy and left scars still visible today.

Back in Britain, Clive channelled his loot into estates that endure to this day.

• Claremont House, Surrey:Purchased and rebuilt in 1769 with his Bengal fortune, landscaped by Lancelot “Capability” Brown. Claremont later became a royal residence, but its foundation was Clive’s Bengal spoils.
• Oakley Park, Shropshire:Expanded and refurbished with East India Company money, anchoring Clive’s prestige in his home county.
• Powis Castle, Wales:Through his son Edward’s marriage into the Herbert family, Clive’s fortune entered aristocratic dynasties. Powis Castle today houses the Clive Collection, one of the largest hoards of Mughal arms, manuscripts, jewels and textiles taken from India. It remains a National Trust property, drawing ticket sales from the display of colonial loot.

Clive’s estates did not disappear into ruin. They were absorbed into the fabric of British life, their origins blurred but their functions continuing.

Claremont House has long since passed out of family hands. Today it serves as the main building of Claremont Fan Court School, a private co-educational day school. Generations of British children are educated in a house raised on the profits of Plassey. The landscaped gardens, designed by Capability Brown and also funded by Clive’s loot, are preserved by the National Trust and open to the public.

That trajectory — from plunder to stately home to school and heritage park — illustrates how seamlessly colonial fortunes were laundered into British respectability. Few of the parents who drop their children off at Claremont Fan Court each morning are told that their classrooms were built on the suffering of Bengal peasants.

Visitors to Powis Castle today pay around £15 per adult, or upwards of £40 for a family ticket. National Trust members, who pay nearly £100 a year, enter free. Either way, every ticket and subscription helps sustain the Clive Collection — a polite name for loot. In effect, tourists and schoolchildren are still funding the afterlife of a crook. It is not unlike visiting the palaces of Leopold II in Belgium, built on the corpses of millions in the Congo. Heritage is preserved, but its origins in blood and plunder are carefully muffled.

Clive’s son Edward, who inherited his fortune, married Lady Henrietta Herbert, daughter of the Earl of Powis. This union cemented the transfer of Indian loot into one of Britain’s great aristocratic families.

The Clive Collection at Powis Castle is a direct legacy of this marriage. It includes bejewelled arms, Persian manuscripts, Tipu Sultan’s palanquin, and textiles from Bengal’s looms. The National Trust openly acknowledges that the castle is filled with plundered wealth. Visitors pay to see it; the estate still generates income.

In short: Clive’s fortune continues to yield dividends. The claim that he is “forgotten in India” ignores the obvious truth that his legacy is embedded in Britain’s stately homes and cultural institutions — funded, maintained, and normalised under the banner of heritage.

Meanwhile, statues of Clive remain both in Britain and India. In Shrewsbury, petitions to remove him after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were rejected; instead, the council voted to add an “interpretation board.” In London, his statue still stands outside the Foreign Office.

In Kolkata, Pal told the BBC, a Clive statue near his home was recently repainted, with a new plaque describing him simply as a “Prominent Englishman.” Another Clive statue in the Victoria Memorial was shifted to a different corner rather than removed.

This half-erasure — repainting, repositioning, re-labelling — is presented as compromise. But it raises a question: why does Britain still resist confronting Clive’s crimes directly? Why are his victims’ descendants offered only plaques, while his heirs still enjoy the estates?

If anything is forgotten here, it is not Clive’s reputation in India. Indian historians, activists, and indeed ordinary visitors to Britain’s museums are acutely aware of what he represents. What is forgotten — or deliberately blurred — is Britain’s continuing debt to the loot he carried home.

By quoting a comedian and praising plaques, the BBC soft-pedalled the truth. Statues and interpretation boards do not neutralise the fact that Clive’s wealth still circulates in Britain’s economy, sustaining castles, landscapes, schools, and aristocratic fortunes.

For India, the famine he helped engineer, the collapse of its textile industries, and the siphoning of revenue into British hands are not easily forgotten. They are part of the long economic decline imposed by colonialism — a decline whose origins trace back, unmistakably, to Clive of India.

So is Robert Clive forgotten? Perhaps in the selective storytelling of British broadcasters. But his shadow stretches across Britain’s green estates, its castle collections, its classrooms and its balance sheets.

The truth is simpler and more uncomfortable: Clive is not forgotten at all. He is hidden in plain sight.