cemetery. For the poets amongst you, the scene was not so much Brooke’s corner of foreign field that is forever England, but rather Shelley’s decayed statue of Ozymandias.
The fact that a towering figure of the Victorian age lies ignored in a desolate plot beside a bustling roundabout, reminds us that in choosing historical heroes, society proclaims its current, ephemeral values. Nicholson’s fate has been shared by many of his generation that helped forge British India. As mayor of London, Ken Livingstone had called for the removal from Trafalgar Square of the statues of Havelock and Napier, two 19 th century generals who also made their reputations in India. Unlike Mr. Livingstone, they remain on their pedestals to this day, but when the former mayor admitted “I haven’t a clue who they are”, his was not a lone voice. 2 The truth is that Nicholson, Havelock and Napier make for unlikely heroes in the twenty-first century. Figures who once may have seemed impressive and worthy are now viewed with hostility or seen as faintly ridiculous and amusing. Nicholson is now largely forgotten. In so far as he is remembered, it is often more as the ‘butcher’ rather than the ‘hero’ of Delhi. A relative of Nicholson’s recalled how his famous forebear’s reputation had gone from imperial martyr to ‘a bully, racist, a religious bigot and, to cap it all, a homosexual sado-masochist’. 3 How the mighty are fallen. One reason for this is that empire has gone hopelessly out of fashion. The notion of the ‘imperial hero‘ became an oxymoron and is no longer needed in a post-imperial age. British India is a now only remembered by those who have reached retirement age. National decline and the particular tragedy that marked the end of the Indian Empire, with Mountbatten’s hurried partition amid scenes of hellish violence, have left their mark. To many in Britain, the best way to come to terms with the loss of empire was to openly despise or, very often, ridicule the attitudes and beliefs that had underpinned its foundations. Television comedies such as Monty Python, Ripping Yarns and Blackadder Goes Forth made notions of valour, service and sacrifice in the name of empire seem highly risible.
More seriously, in the last half century, academic history has switched its focus away from the study of great men (and they were all men) and political and constitutional history. It has pushed out into new directions. Gender history (or ‘herstory’?), black history and post-colonial history are but a few of the newer schools of historical analysis that have entered the mainstream. Post- colonialism has a particular bearing on Nicholson’s reputation, given its critical outlook on European imperialism, its central focus on indigenous populations and on the sufferings and depredations of colonial servitude. For many people today, their understanding of the age of Nicholson comes from reading the hugely popular Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser. For the uninitiated, Flashman was the fictional bully who was expelled from Rugby in Thomas Hughes’s 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days . In the 1960s Fraser took the character and, in a series of novels written up to his death five years ago, he described Flashman’s
Flashman: fictitious imperial hero and modern antihero.
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker