The Black Hole of Calcutta


                               The Black Hole of Calcutta

By the end of the seventeenth century power in the Mogul Empire had fallen into the hands of Nawabs, or provincial governors, whilst the British and the French were building their competing commercial empires in India.

The British developed a trading post in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the 1690s and built Fort William to defend it,  By the middle of the eighteenth century the fort was falling into disrepair and with the imminence of the seven years war bringing tension between the British and the French repairs were started.

The Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, sent orders to the British and the French to stop work on their fortifications.  When the British took no notice he marched on Calcutta with an army said to number 50,000 men, 500 war elephants and 50 cannon.    The governor, his staff ran for the safety of the ships in the harbour, leaving behind women and children and a garrison of 170 soldiers under the command of John Zephania Holwell, a tax collector and bureaucrat with no military experience.

Siraj’s attack came in the morning of 20th June and by the afternoon Howell was forced to surrender in return for what he believed was a guarantee of quarter, meaning they would receive safe conduct to the nearest friendly territory.  At about 8 o’clock that evening 146 British prisoners including Holwell were herded into a small retaining cell designed to hold two or three miscreants, which measured 18ft x14ft1in and had two small windows.  The temperature was a humid and suffocating 40 degrees.  At 6o’clock in the morning when the door was unlocked there were only 23 survivors, including Holwell still alive.  A pit was hastily dug and the bodies dumped into it.

Holwell referred to “a night of horrors I will not attempt to describe as it bars all description”  After his return to England the following year he referred to the deplorable deaths of English gentlemen and others who were suffocated in the Black Hole.

Vengeance was swift.  Robert Clive marched on Calcutta in January 1757 and set siege to Fort William.  The fort fell and Siraj ud-Daulah fled to the ancient Mogul palace at Murshidabad on the banks of the River Hooghly.  In July, at the battle of Plassey, he was betrayed by his uncle and successor Mir Jaffar, assassinated with the agreement with the East India Company.

John Zephania Holwell’s story was the only contemporary narrative of the “Black Hole of Calcutta”.  It soon became the basis for representing Indians as a cowardly, base and despotic people.  The account in Macauley’s essay “Clive of India” inspired a patriotic fervour and rage at Indian perfidy in generations of Britons.

It has long been clear that Howell’s figures were exaggerated.  A 1959 study by Brijen Gupta suggests that 64 people entered the Black Hole and that 21 survived.  Certainly 146 people could not have been in a room of the stated dimensions (18ft x 14ft10ins).  Indian scholars have also shown that the Nawab had no hand in the affair, he did not order the imprisonment, nor did he know of it.  However for the British at the time and for many years after it became an  article of faith to accept the veracity of the account in it’s most extreme form.

Mirza Mohammad Siraj ud-Daulah was the last independent Nawab of Bengal.  The battle of Plassey left the Company in control of Bengal and Bihar with a right to collect taxes.  By 1803 the Company had a private army of 260,000 and ruled over huge areas of India.  This lasted until 1858, following the Indian rebellion of 1857, and the Government of India Act which brought into effect the British Raj.

        Siraj ud-Daurah                         Robert Clive                


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Comments

  1. BridgetOctober 26, 2020 at 2:02 PM

    Always known the term and never knew the story. Thank you

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanieOctober 27, 2020 at 8:10 AM

    So the English were telling fibs? Surely not 😂

    ReplyDelete

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