Robert Clive, who emerged victorious in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, was mesmerised by the opulence and grandeur of Murshidabad, the capital of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, whom he had defeated. He wrote, “The city of Murshidabad is as extensive, populous and rich as the city of London, with this difference: That there are individuals in the first possessing infinitely greater wealth than the whole of the Lombard Street joined together.”
The ensuing plunder of its wealth, called the “financial bleeding of Bengal”, made Clive one of the “richest self-made man in Europe”, according to British historian William Darlymple. He is a personification of the colonial state and the insidious designs of the metropole, culminating in the systematic loot and organised plunder of the colonised. And moral compunction of such injustice is effectively dissociated through the dehumanisation of the native people as sub-humans. Winston Churchill’s phobia of Indians, as “They are beastly people with beastly religion,” ratifies such psychology.
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