He was just 49 when he died by his own hand. The peer of the realm, knight companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, member of parliament for Shrewsbury and former governor of Bengal was quietly buried in an unmarked grave in the dead of night. His contemporaries called him Clive of India. Yet, if there is something that our country has been quite sure of, it is that Robert Clive is not of India. Not at all of India.

The best example is the fact that almost no one remembers him in Madras, where I spent a good part of my schooldays. The city was Clive’s first port of call in India, as a writer in the East India Company. Reportedly, Clive’s first residence in the city is falling apart. My school sits barely five kilometres away from this house, which stands on the grounds of the CSI St Paul’s School, Vepery. Yet, we had never heard of this house. So much for Clive of India.

Clive’s more popular residence in the city is, of course, the Clive House in Fort St George. The fort also houses the church, St Mary’s, in which he was married to Margaret, whose descendant we have interviewed for this special issue. Both places are not open to the public, I gather.

Anyway, why this cover story? And, why now? The simple answer is that the Black Lives Matter movement has symbiotically strengthened voices against tyrants worldwide. The petition to unseat Clive from his pedestal outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall, London, has gathered strength and signatures. This Independence Day Special cover package is our attempt to prevent a forgetting and to highlight what Clive means to us as Indians.

Senior Special Correspondent Mandira Nayar has done a fine job of putting Clive in context by talking to as many stakeholders as possible. They include people like author and MP Shashi Tharoor, historian William Dalrymple and British politician Murad Qureshi who have strongly lobbied for moving Clive’s Whitehall statue to a museum. The interview with Robert Fowke, Margaret’s descendant, is another plus.

As a student of history, I know that it is dangerous to get into this game of binaries. Of seeing people in black and white. I felt that especially when we came to the part about the Jagat Seths, who bankrolled Clive to defeat Siraj-ud Daula at the Battle of Plassey. It is what it is and we have attempted to say it as it is.

While we are on the subject of Clive and Madras, I am reminded of another man who has passed under the radar, at a time when Cecil Rhodes is being ‘beheaded’. An employee of the East India Company, this man was the first president of Fort St George. He profited from the trade that took place there and was, reportedly, fired by the company for striking deals under the table. Like Clive, he, too, was married at St Mary’s. Today, we remember him for his generosity to a top university in the world.

In 1718, the Collegiate School in Connecticut was renamed to acknowledge the generous donation made by Elihu Yale. It became Yale College, and in 1887, Yale University.