Lord Clive’s descendant battles for invalids

Like her ancestor, Ingrams too has had her share of battles. But while his were waged for plunder and annexation, hers have been against pain and for the cause of the disabled.

The wheel-chair she uses testifies to her own brand of courage, quite removed from the military daring of a Clive.

She was just 25 and the mother of three small children – the youngest an infant of three months – when a van driven by her husband crashed into a tree. "I still just remember that jolt," she says. The accident transformed her life. Her husband died in the tragedy and she herself had to spend 10 tortuous months in the hospital, painstakingly going through physiotherapy.

Today, she has the use of her right hand. "I was never bitter about the accident. I concentrated my energies in trying to regain the use of my hands but my left hand is still paralysed. And my physiotherapist helped immensely," she says.

Her own experiences have made her a formidable campaigner for the cause of the handicapped. As a member of the House of Lords, she is constantly arguing for better facilities and access for people rendered unequal by physical constraints.

Against these urgent issues, Robert Clive is something of an old forgotten ghost for Ingrams. She is also not quite sure whether he is an ancestor worth owning up to. Historians, like Percival Spear, while writing of Robert Clive’s military "genius for irregular warfare" also saw him as an "opportunist not overburdened with scruple". Ingrams confesses with a laugh, "I would much rather have been a descendant of Warren Hastings. He seems a more worthy person!"

Clearly then, Clive was never an obsession in the family. "One heard about him of course, and as a child I remember seeing some swords and things that belonged to him at my grandfather’s home in Powis Castle, but that’s about it," says Ingrams.

Before coming to India, Ingrams did however brush up on the family history by reading the Dictionary of National Biography.

"I learnt that Robert Clive, after he came home in 1760, was given an Irish peerage which meant that he could sit in the House of Commons as Baron Clive. He came to India three times before he died at the age of 49," says Ingrams. He actually died by his own hand, revealed Spear.

Robert Clive’s son, Edward, fared better in terms of social recognition or so it seems. Says Ingrams, "He became an MP at the age of 20 – was made a baron of Great Britain and went on to become the governor of Madras. Family legend has it that he lived well into old age and was often spotted gardening in his shirt-sleeves at the age of 80!"

But even as she relates these old tales, it is evident that history, though it may have its uses, is not her cup of tea. "Frankly, all these titles and so on can bore the pants off people. The present is so much more interesting," she says.

And for the present, it is India with all its sights, sounds and people. "It is so vast," she says, "there’s so much to learn from it."

If Robert Clive, guerrilla leader, kingmaker and plunderer, had shown some circumspection that his descendant displays today, history as we know it may have been quite different!