At St Xavier’s in Patna, we inherited the English house system, so that those of who belonged to “Leopards” went around chanting, “Mighty Leopards”. For others, it was “Mighty Tigers” or “Mighty Panthers”. Once, while researching a piece on The Doon School, I was told (jokingly) by Karan Singh: “I belonged to Kashmir House — and I never got a decent meal there!”

But in England, Haberdashers’ Adams, a high-achieving grammar school in Newport, Shropshire, founded in 1656, has just dropped Robert Clive as the name of one of its houses because of the manner in which he won Bengal for the East India Company. Britain’s colonial history is under scrutiny with the Black Lives Matter movement spilling over from America.

I had a long chat with Gary Hickey, the school’s headmaster, who like Father Murphy of old, comes across as a very fair and decent man. He believes that the colonial history of the raj — and the Partition in particular — should be taught in schools which it isn’t because it is considered too controversial.

I liked the way the case for and against “Clive of India” — a local man, born near Market Drayton in Shropshire on 29 September 1725 — was set out.

The headmaster acted as Third Umpire: “We are persuaded that a name change for Clive House is the right step for the school. Making explicit our revulsion at the actions of historical figures is one way, amongst many, of reinforcing the message that racism has no place in our school or society. By renaming Clive House (after the war poet Wilfred Owen), we believe that we will be contributing, in a small but useful way, to recognizing and redressing some of the injustices inflicted on ethnic minority communities and their predecessors.”

Dark secrets

Unauthorized political biographies are hardly ever good news in England because authors tend to put the boot into their subjects. Tom Bower’s Boris Johnson: The Gambler is unsparing about the prime minister’s personal life. Lord Michael Ashcroft, former treasurer and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, co-authored Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron, which was not very flattering to the former PM.

The contents of Ashcroft’s new biography, Going for Broke: The Rise Of Rishi Sunak, the first on the chancellor of the exchequer, remain under embargo until November 12 but the advance publicity says: “Michael Ashcroft’s new book charts Sunak’s ascent from his parents’ Southampton pharmacy to the University of Oxford, the City of London, Silicon Valley — and the top of British politics.

“It is the tale of a super-bright and hard-grafting son of immigrant parents who marries an Indian heiress and makes a fortune of his own; a polished urban southerner who wins over the voters of rural North Yorkshire — and a cautious, fiscally conservative financier who becomes the biggest-spending Chancellor in history.” A friend who covers politics for a national newspaper tells me: “Ashcroft tends to bring out a biography a year of someone interesting. Rishi is talked of as a future prime minister but who is Rishi? He is seen as squeaky clean but we don’t know a lot about him.”

Prized possession

Opinion is divided on whether Joseph Mallord William Turner or John Constable was Britain’s greatest landscape artist. Anyway, a new exhibition, Turner’s Modern World, opened this week at Tate Britain. It comes as a surprise to learn that although Turner never actually visited India, he did four watercolours with Indian settings based on descriptions by eyewitnesses. Two of these have been included among the 160 paintings in the exhibition. They are The Fortress of Seringapatam, from the Cullaly Deedy Gate and The Siege of Seringapatam. The latter belongs to the Tate but the former is on loan from one-time Calcutta boy, Nirmalya Kumar, who has one of the finest private collections of the Bengal School. Kumar was with the London Business School and is now Professor of Marketing at Singapore Management University.

“I acquired it from Sotheby’s New York in 2014,” he said. “After I acquired [it] I took it for examination to the Tate and showed it to David Brown, the Turner expert there. Around 1800 when Turned painted these, paintings of India were rather popular as Thomas and William Daniell had very successfully published their set of 144 aquatints on India called ‘Oriental Scenery’. Besides, the empire was starting to consolidate.”

Kumar explained that over the decades Turner’s four Indian paintings “were mistakenly attributed to William Daniell (1769-1837). Only in the mid-1980s, when one was offered for sale at Christies, were they recognized as Turner originals.”

Reign on

Bhasha Mukherjee’s reign as Miss England has been extended because of the pandemic. Mukherjee, who thus becomes the longest-serving Miss England, has been working tirelessly on Covid-19 duties at Boston Pilgrim Hospital and Derby Royal Hospital. She says: “It’s hard to celebrate when you’re seeing Covid numbers rising in your hospital. We are right next to Nottingham which has the highest rate in the country so we have staff and patients coming between us and the hub of the virus.”

Footnote

Sir Geoffrey Boycott, 80, has not taken kindly to being dropped by the BBC as a cricket commentator after 14 years. He appeared to have Isa Guha in mind when he told a national newspaper: “They have sacrificed quality for equality. It is now all about political correctness, about gender and race. When you work for them you are wary and frightened of saying anything. It is a minefield out there and that is sad.” Incidentally, Boycott is auctioning off much of his cricket memorabilia.