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Clive of India: A political and psychological essay
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453 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1975
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About the author
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
31 books81 followersNirad C. Chaudhuri (Bangla: নীরদ চন্দ্র চৌধুরী Nirod Chôndro Choudhuri) was a Bengali−English writer and cultural commentator. He was born in 1897 in Kishoreganj, which today is part of Bangladesh but at that time was part of Bengal, a region of British India.
He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1975 for his biography on Max Müller called Scholar Extraordinary, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters. In 1992, he was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom with the title of Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE). His 1965 work The Continent of Circe earned him the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, becoming the first and only Indian to be selected for the prize.
In 1951 he published his most famous book, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, a penetrating and challenging analysis of Indian history, culture and British rule. The controversial dedication to the memory of the British Empire caused a furore at the time but the book is now considered a classic work of Indian literature. He was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for The Continent of Circe (1965), was made CBE in 1992 and received the Hon.D.Litt from the University of Oxford; the University of Viswa Bharati also awarded him Deshikottama, its highest honorary degree.
A passionate admirer of western culture, he first visited England in 1955, a visit which inspired his book Passage to England. He decided to make his home in Oxford in 1970 when he was over seventy. He was a familiar and arresting sight out and about in Oxford, a diminutive figure, always impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit, although he wore Indian attire at home. He wrote his last book Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse only a year before his death at the age of nearly 102.
He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1975 for his biography on Max Müller called Scholar Extraordinary, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters. In 1992, he was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom with the title of Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE). His 1965 work The Continent of Circe earned him the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, becoming the first and only Indian to be selected for the prize.
In 1951 he published his most famous book, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, a penetrating and challenging analysis of Indian history, culture and British rule. The controversial dedication to the memory of the British Empire caused a furore at the time but the book is now considered a classic work of Indian literature. He was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for The Continent of Circe (1965), was made CBE in 1992 and received the Hon.D.Litt from the University of Oxford; the University of Viswa Bharati also awarded him Deshikottama, its highest honorary degree.
A passionate admirer of western culture, he first visited England in 1955, a visit which inspired his book Passage to England. He decided to make his home in Oxford in 1970 when he was over seventy. He was a familiar and arresting sight out and about in Oxford, a diminutive figure, always impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit, although he wore Indian attire at home. He wrote his last book Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse only a year before his death at the age of nearly 102.
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August 11, 2025
If Clive of India: A Political and Psychological Essay proves anything, it’s that Nirad C. Chaudhuri could look at the blueprint of colonial plunder and see a tasteful interior design plan. Only a writer with his particular blend of contrarianism and colonial cringe could take Robert Clive—the man who basically turned the East India Company into a state-sized pickpocket—and treat him like a case study in admirable ambition.
To Chaudhuri, Clive isn’t a looter, a manipulator, or a man who stumbled into power via equal parts audacity and moral vacancy—no, he’s a sort of Anglo-Indian Napoleon with better table manners and a sharper waistcoat. The fact that most of his “great achievements” came with receipts written in famine and coerced treaties? Inconvenient footnotes, barely worth the ink.
Chaudhuri approaches Clive the way a proud, eccentric uncle might talk about a relative who once robbed a bank — not denying the theft, but insisting we must admire the courage, flair, and vision involved in the act. He’s that dinner guest who, when someone brings up the Bengal famine or the Battle of Plassey, leans back in his chair and says, “Yes, but think of the administrative efficiency!” This isn’t a biography so much as an elaborate polishing job on a tarnished statue, a kind of literary Brasso applied to one of the more notorious opportunists of imperial history.
The “political” analysis, such as it is, ends up feeling like an apologia for conquest dressed up in grand strategic theory. You can almost see the index cards: “Geopolitical Necessity”, “Military Genius”, “Stabilising Force”. Every one of them is a euphemism for “He was very good at taking things that weren’t his.” Chaudhuri treats the East India Company’s expansion less as corporate imperialism and more as the inevitable march of history — a phrase that always translates to “things worked out nicely for the side I’m rooting for”.
The “psychological” bit is even more bizarre. It reads like armchair Freud for a man who didn’t need therapy so much as a restraining order from Bengal. We’re told about Clive’s depressive spells, his suicidal thoughts, and his turbulent ambition — all treated as the raw materials of greatness, rather than signs of a volatile and dangerous man armed with an army and a balance sheet.
Chaudhuri seems almost charmed by Clive’s ruthlessness, as if looting a country is merely a bold career move when viewed through the proper Anglo-Imperial lens. You half-expect him to recommend Clive as a case study in an MBA programme: “Week 5: Market Acquisition and Political Leverage — Lessons from Plassey.”
And yes, to be fair, Chaudhuri’s prose is crisp, his historical detail sharp. The man could describe a ledger entry and make it sound like a sonnet. That’s what makes this so infuriating — you’re watching an undeniable talent being poured into an exercise in moral sleight of hand. The sentences dazzle, but the logic is pure imperial fanboying. You keep waiting for him to break character, to admit that maybe, just maybe, installing a system of extractive colonialism wasn’t the most civilising of gestures.
But no — he’d rather toast Clive with metaphorical sherry for bringing “order” to India, conveniently ignoring that the “order” was enforced at bayonet point and bankrolled by famine.
At points, Chaudhuri writes about Clive as though he’s auditioning for the role of Clive’s posthumous publicist. He carefully reframes each act of opportunism as a stroke of genius, each act of violence as a regrettable but necessary measure. There’s a kind of moral airbrushing going on, smoothing out the sharp edges of history until you can almost forget the mass suffering that paid for the British Empire’s balance sheet to tilt so pleasingly in its own favour. It’s history as stagecraft — the corpse is hidden, the blood mopped up, the set reset for the next act of “civilisation”.
There’s also something personal here. Chaudhuri’s admiration for Clive isn’t just about Clive; it’s about what Clive represents in Chaudhuri’s own mental landscape. Chaudhuri has always been more comfortable seeing India through the eyes of its colonisers — and in Clive, he finds the perfect avatar for that worldview. Clive isn’t a villain to be studied for warning; he’s a hero to be understood, perhaps even emulated in intellectual form. The result is that Clive of India ends up feeling less like an academic text and more like an imperialist mood board.
And let’s talk about the moral gymnastics involved here. To write a “psychological essay” on Robert Clive without lingering on the catastrophic consequences of his career is like writing a “psychological essay” on a bank robber without mentioning the hostages. You can analyse all the “inner drives” you want, but if you’re skipping the part where those drives emptied treasuries and collapsed economies, you’re not doing history — you’re doing PR.
Every so often, the mask slips and Chaudhuri’s biases are laid bare. He’ll describe the “chaos” of pre-British India in ways that would make a Victorian colonial officer nod approvingly, then present Clive as the man who brought structure, as if “structure” means anything other than “a hierarchy that benefits me and mine”. When famine comes up — if it comes up — it’s treated almost like an unfortunate weather event, rather than the direct result of the economic systems Clive helped establish.
The book is also riddled with that special brand of colonial nostalgia in which the present is always a disappointment and the past is always a time of noble certainty. In Chaudhuri’s telling, Clive’s rise isn’t just a personal triumph; it’s part of a larger, almost mythic narrative of Britain’s rightful place in the world. The irony, of course, is that Britain at the time was being run by a corporation with shareholders — the East India Company was less Camelot and more Amazon with cannons. But you wouldn’t know that from Chaudhuri’s account.
What’s fascinating — and slightly depressing — is how this reverence for Clive mirrors the reverence Chaudhuri often reserved for Britain itself in his later works. There’s the same reluctance to name exploitation as exploitation, the same tendency to cast domination as a kind of benevolent stewardship. It’s as though he’s permanently auditioning for the role of “Most Loyal Intellectual in the Former Colonies”, competing only with his own bibliography.
By the time you finish Clive of India, you realise you’ve been reading less about Robert Clive and more about Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s ongoing project to rehabilitate empire as an admirable civilisational venture. Clive’s flaws are not erased, exactly, but they are reframed until they look like virtues in disguise. Ruthlessness becomes vision; opportunism becomes decisiveness; plunder becomes resource reallocation. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of laundering stolen money — by the end, you’re holding something polished, but you know exactly where it came from.
The problem is not that Chaudhuri admires skill or ambition — those are admirable in the abstract. The problem is that he can’t, or won’t, divorce them from the moral context in which they were deployed. It’s one thing to acknowledge that Clive was effective; it’s another to write about that effectiveness as though it somehow outweighs the human cost. Chaudhuri doesn’t just acknowledge Clive’s moral compromises; he seems to think they’re part of the charm.
It leaves you with the impression that Chaudhuri would have been the ideal guest at an 18th-century East India Company banquet: erudite, loyal, able to quote Milton while politely ignoring the ledger lines detailing last month’s tax extractions. Clive may have conquered India, but here, in these pages, he conquers the author’s admiration — and that’s the real scandal.
If you want history, read it with scepticism. If you want a masterclass in highbrow colonial apologetics, this is your gold standard.
But if you want an honest reckoning with the legacy of Clive and the empire he served, you won’t find it here.
What you’ll find instead is an eloquent man telling you, in the most beautiful prose possible, that the theft of a nation was just another step on the road to civilisation.
It’s impressive, in its way. And profoundly depressing in every other.
To Chaudhuri, Clive isn’t a looter, a manipulator, or a man who stumbled into power via equal parts audacity and moral vacancy—no, he’s a sort of Anglo-Indian Napoleon with better table manners and a sharper waistcoat. The fact that most of his “great achievements” came with receipts written in famine and coerced treaties? Inconvenient footnotes, barely worth the ink.
Chaudhuri approaches Clive the way a proud, eccentric uncle might talk about a relative who once robbed a bank — not denying the theft, but insisting we must admire the courage, flair, and vision involved in the act. He’s that dinner guest who, when someone brings up the Bengal famine or the Battle of Plassey, leans back in his chair and says, “Yes, but think of the administrative efficiency!” This isn’t a biography so much as an elaborate polishing job on a tarnished statue, a kind of literary Brasso applied to one of the more notorious opportunists of imperial history.
The “political” analysis, such as it is, ends up feeling like an apologia for conquest dressed up in grand strategic theory. You can almost see the index cards: “Geopolitical Necessity”, “Military Genius”, “Stabilising Force”. Every one of them is a euphemism for “He was very good at taking things that weren’t his.” Chaudhuri treats the East India Company’s expansion less as corporate imperialism and more as the inevitable march of history — a phrase that always translates to “things worked out nicely for the side I’m rooting for”.
The “psychological” bit is even more bizarre. It reads like armchair Freud for a man who didn’t need therapy so much as a restraining order from Bengal. We’re told about Clive’s depressive spells, his suicidal thoughts, and his turbulent ambition — all treated as the raw materials of greatness, rather than signs of a volatile and dangerous man armed with an army and a balance sheet.
Chaudhuri seems almost charmed by Clive’s ruthlessness, as if looting a country is merely a bold career move when viewed through the proper Anglo-Imperial lens. You half-expect him to recommend Clive as a case study in an MBA programme: “Week 5: Market Acquisition and Political Leverage — Lessons from Plassey.”
And yes, to be fair, Chaudhuri’s prose is crisp, his historical detail sharp. The man could describe a ledger entry and make it sound like a sonnet. That’s what makes this so infuriating — you’re watching an undeniable talent being poured into an exercise in moral sleight of hand. The sentences dazzle, but the logic is pure imperial fanboying. You keep waiting for him to break character, to admit that maybe, just maybe, installing a system of extractive colonialism wasn’t the most civilising of gestures.
But no — he’d rather toast Clive with metaphorical sherry for bringing “order” to India, conveniently ignoring that the “order” was enforced at bayonet point and bankrolled by famine.
At points, Chaudhuri writes about Clive as though he’s auditioning for the role of Clive’s posthumous publicist. He carefully reframes each act of opportunism as a stroke of genius, each act of violence as a regrettable but necessary measure. There’s a kind of moral airbrushing going on, smoothing out the sharp edges of history until you can almost forget the mass suffering that paid for the British Empire’s balance sheet to tilt so pleasingly in its own favour. It’s history as stagecraft — the corpse is hidden, the blood mopped up, the set reset for the next act of “civilisation”.
There’s also something personal here. Chaudhuri’s admiration for Clive isn’t just about Clive; it’s about what Clive represents in Chaudhuri’s own mental landscape. Chaudhuri has always been more comfortable seeing India through the eyes of its colonisers — and in Clive, he finds the perfect avatar for that worldview. Clive isn’t a villain to be studied for warning; he’s a hero to be understood, perhaps even emulated in intellectual form. The result is that Clive of India ends up feeling less like an academic text and more like an imperialist mood board.
And let’s talk about the moral gymnastics involved here. To write a “psychological essay” on Robert Clive without lingering on the catastrophic consequences of his career is like writing a “psychological essay” on a bank robber without mentioning the hostages. You can analyse all the “inner drives” you want, but if you’re skipping the part where those drives emptied treasuries and collapsed economies, you’re not doing history — you’re doing PR.
Every so often, the mask slips and Chaudhuri’s biases are laid bare. He’ll describe the “chaos” of pre-British India in ways that would make a Victorian colonial officer nod approvingly, then present Clive as the man who brought structure, as if “structure” means anything other than “a hierarchy that benefits me and mine”. When famine comes up — if it comes up — it’s treated almost like an unfortunate weather event, rather than the direct result of the economic systems Clive helped establish.
The book is also riddled with that special brand of colonial nostalgia in which the present is always a disappointment and the past is always a time of noble certainty. In Chaudhuri’s telling, Clive’s rise isn’t just a personal triumph; it’s part of a larger, almost mythic narrative of Britain’s rightful place in the world. The irony, of course, is that Britain at the time was being run by a corporation with shareholders — the East India Company was less Camelot and more Amazon with cannons. But you wouldn’t know that from Chaudhuri’s account.
What’s fascinating — and slightly depressing — is how this reverence for Clive mirrors the reverence Chaudhuri often reserved for Britain itself in his later works. There’s the same reluctance to name exploitation as exploitation, the same tendency to cast domination as a kind of benevolent stewardship. It’s as though he’s permanently auditioning for the role of “Most Loyal Intellectual in the Former Colonies”, competing only with his own bibliography.
By the time you finish Clive of India, you realise you’ve been reading less about Robert Clive and more about Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s ongoing project to rehabilitate empire as an admirable civilisational venture. Clive’s flaws are not erased, exactly, but they are reframed until they look like virtues in disguise. Ruthlessness becomes vision; opportunism becomes decisiveness; plunder becomes resource reallocation. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of laundering stolen money — by the end, you’re holding something polished, but you know exactly where it came from.
The problem is not that Chaudhuri admires skill or ambition — those are admirable in the abstract. The problem is that he can’t, or won’t, divorce them from the moral context in which they were deployed. It’s one thing to acknowledge that Clive was effective; it’s another to write about that effectiveness as though it somehow outweighs the human cost. Chaudhuri doesn’t just acknowledge Clive’s moral compromises; he seems to think they’re part of the charm.
It leaves you with the impression that Chaudhuri would have been the ideal guest at an 18th-century East India Company banquet: erudite, loyal, able to quote Milton while politely ignoring the ledger lines detailing last month’s tax extractions. Clive may have conquered India, but here, in these pages, he conquers the author’s admiration — and that’s the real scandal.
If you want history, read it with scepticism. If you want a masterclass in highbrow colonial apologetics, this is your gold standard.
But if you want an honest reckoning with the legacy of Clive and the empire he served, you won’t find it here.
What you’ll find instead is an eloquent man telling you, in the most beautiful prose possible, that the theft of a nation was just another step on the road to civilisation.
It’s impressive, in its way. And profoundly depressing in every other.
December 12, 2007
If you are going to read any book on the history of Lord Robert Clive this is the must have book. This seminal work is fascinating and is written in a way that is not apologetic or filled with adulation for Clive's achievements and motives.
The style of writing is very easy going and the only real gripe for students of south asian history is the book does not refer to references and the bibliography used in compiling this account is fairly short.
The style of writing is very easy going and the only real gripe for students of south asian history is the book does not refer to references and the bibliography used in compiling this account is fairly short.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews