On my visits to Bristol in the past, there was always a certain statue peering over the city centre that would trigger heightened emotions in me. I’m not talking about the recently toppled monument of slave-trader Edward Colston, but the memorial to another representative of empire: the radical scholar and reformer Raja Rammohan Roy, who came to London in 1830 as the ambassador of the Mughal Emperor (who was by then a titular sovereign under the rule of the East India Company), and died in Bristol three years later.