Thug of Hindustan

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, heroes of the past are falling by the wayside. In a similar move, prominent Indians have been protesting the glorification of the man who led the loot of the country and paved the way for the British empire—Robert Clive

- MANDIRA NAYAR

It began, as change often does now, with a burst of idealism and an online petition. The statue of slave trader Edward Colston had just found a permanent place at the bottom of the sea in Bristol. History had been made. It had been corrected. There was a rush of revolution. And, swept up in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Ameya Tripathi, Meera Somji and Rhianna Ilube—British, but inheriting stories of the empire—launched a petition to topple India’s original bad guy: Robert Clive. “It sometimes takes pulling down a statue,” says Somji, studying gender at the London School of Economics, “or removing it to shake people.”

This is a new generation discovering the past through the prism of the present, probably spurred by this pause of a pandemic, to urgently right the wrongs of history. From America to Australia, the BLM movement is raging with this sense of urgency and is forcing countries to confront racism and imperialism. It is a revolt—the kind that has the possibility to ensure that the past is more inclusive, fairer and is not only the version of the victor. In a Game of Thrones sort of frenzy, statues are coming down and heroes are turning into villains. The message is clear: heroes of the past must subscribe to the 21st century sense of justice to be on pedestals.

In Belgium, statues of Leopold II, the coloniser king, have been pulled down; in the US, some memorials to the Confederacy, which supported slavery, have disappeared, and in the heart of London there is Clive, still standing.