The Battle of Plassey
Thursday, June 11, 2020
The "Black Hole" of Calcutta has become something of a cliché, but its reality was all too horrible for those imprisoned there the night of June 20, 1756. It was a small (4.3 x 5.5 meter) dungeon in Fort William, which had been taken from the British that day by Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, in the Siege of Calcutta. That night, 146 prisoners were crammed into the Black Hole--123 of whom died of suffocation and heat exhaustion.
The Nawab supposedly had no knowledge of the gross mistreatment; it had been conducted by underlings, and he freed the survivors as soon as he learned of it. Nevertheless, the taking of the fort could not go unanswered, and surely the rumors about the treatment of British and Anglo-Indian soldiers, and Indian civilians, fueled the action soon to be taken against the Nawab.
British Lieut. Col. Robert Clive recaptured Calcutta by January of 1757, and in June of that year inflicted a decisive defeat on the Nawab and his numerically superior army at the Battle of Plassey
Looking at the bare numbers--some 3,000 on the British side, versus over 60,000 on the Bengali side--the victory seems impossible, until we learn that Clive had bribed the commander-in-chief of the Nawab's army, Mir Jafar, who defected to the British side with 50,000 troops! For this Mir Jafar was made the puppet Nawab after the battle.
In fact, the French East India Company--business and military rival to the British East India Company for whom Clive worked--took a hand in the battle as well, mirroring the Franco-British belligerence occurring at that time in Europe, known as the Seven Years' War.
Nevertheless, the battle, which took place at Palashi (Anglicized "Plassey"), 150 kilometers north of Calcutta, was over in 11 hours. Siraj ud-Daulah fled north, where he hid in a deserted garden, but was discovered and reported to the local military governor--the brother of Mir Jafar! Mir Jafar's son had the Nawab murdered the same night a council had failed to come to a decision about his fate.
The Black Hole of Calcutta was later put to use as a warehouse by the British.