Wherever you are, in Calcutta, and for miles around, you can see it; and always when you see it you think of Ochterlony. And so there is not an hour in the day that you do not think of Ochterlony and wonder who he was. It is good that Clive cannot come back, for he would think it was for Plassey; and then that great spirit would be wounded when the revelation came that it was not. Clive would find out that it was for Ochterlony; and he would think Ochterlony was a battle. And he would think it was a great one, too, and he would say, "With three thousand I whipped sixty thousand and founded the Empire—and there is no monument; this other soldier must have whipped a billion with a dozen and saved the world."
But he would be mistaken. Ochterlony was a man, not a battle. And he did good and honorable service, too; as good and honorable service as has been done in India by seventy-five or a hundred other Englishmen of courage, rectitude, and distinguished capacity. For India has been a fertile breeding-ground of such men, and remains so; great men, both in war and in the civil service, and as modest as great. But they have no monuments, and were not expecting any. Ochterlony could not have been expecting one, and it is not at all likely that he desired one—certainly not until Clive and Hastings should be supplied. Every day Clive and Hastings lean on the battlements of heaven and look down and wonder which of the two the monument is for; and they fret and worry because they cannot find out, and so the peace of heaven is spoiled for them and lost. But not for Ochterlony. Ochterlony is not troubled. He doesn't suspect that it is his monument. Heaven is sweet and peaceful to him. There is a sort of unfairness about it all.
(FE)
Sita has been swatting up and as we stand beside the cloud-kisser she tells us all about it. Sir David Ochterlony was an East India Company general who fought against the Kingdom of Nepal in 1828—and won.
In gratitude for this new trade route the Company offered to build him a monument. Fine, he said, I’ll have a tower made with a Turkish dome supported by a Syrian column on an Egyptian plinth. When it was finished he opened it with his thirteen wives in attendance, many of them seated on his herd of elephants. As Gillian is snapping away she notices some confusion in the execution: the plinth is Syrian, the dome Egyptian and the column Turkish. Inside there is a staircase for viewing from a Moorish balcony under the dome but it had to be closed after several (post-Independence) suicides.
Also, after Independence it was renamed Shahid Minar after what the British called terrorists and the Indians call freedom fighters.55 (The Kashmiri separatists fighting the Indians now are of course “terrorists” and no doubt after their independence will become posthumous freedom fighters.) Naturally everyone ignored the Marxists and still calls it the OM. On the Maidan ground next to the monument is a venue for political meetings, modeled philosophically on Speakers Corner in London. It’s a busy place—Bengalis are political people—and the park there is now just scrubland and covered, inevitably, in trash.
Richard Zacks (Page 251) notes "... a fine exit line before the family's departure to the Himalayas: 'The last thing we saw was Ochterlony's lingam, standing erect & fine, & then Calcutta was gone.'"