The Maidan, in the centre of Calcutta, used to be the drill-ground of Fort William: behind it the Victoria Memorial now rises. The Siege of Calcutta attracted plenty of attention from Indian observers at the time, but critical as he was of the Nawab’s “covetousness and pride of power”, Hari Chahan Das said no more about the Black Hole than that Siraj “suddenly attacked [the English] in Calcutta, and having plundered their property and cash, put several of their officers to death”. The English were of course more inclined to play it up. Survivor John Holwell (1711-1798) described it in harrowing detail, and in his biography of Robert Clive controversial Indian administrator Lord Macaulay (1800-1859) burnt it on the minds of a generation of outraged English readers.
Part 1 of 2
AT Balasore Admiral Watson got fresh news about what had been happening in Bengal.* He now heard, for the first time, details of the taking of Fort William and of the grim tragedy of the Black Hole.
Two English pilots who boarded the flagship told the story. The attack, said the men, opened on June 15th, Tuesday, and after a vain attempt to hold the gaol and Court House and a small redoubt* in front of the city, the garrison had been driven into the fort. There it was found they had only ammunition for three days’ fighting. The women and children were thereupon sent on board the ships in the river, lying off the Maidan,* and in the confusion that followed their departure, Governor Drake and most of the leading civilians — according to the pilots — deserted their posts,* and stole off on board ship to join the women, after which they induced the skippers to weigh anchor and drop down the river, leaving the garrison cut off and without means of escape.
* Vice-Admiral Charles Watson (1714-1757), Commander-in-Chief in the East Indies, was in India because the British anticipated that in the war with Louis XV’s France that was now imminent, India would be one of the primary theatres. In December 1756, his ship was at Balasore (Baleshwar) Roads, Odisha, a safe anchorage in the Bay of Bengal and some 94 miles southwest of Calcutta. See The Seven Years’ War.
* A defensive fortification, often only temporary, sometimes of masonry but frequently of earthworks.
* A maidan is a large open field, for public use or military parades — or in the case of Bombay, for cricket matches.
* Roger Drake was President of Fort William in Bengal from 1752. He was subsequently reprimanded, and relieved of his post on November 13th, 1757. His place was taken by Robert Clive.
Précis
In 1756, the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, laid siege to Fort William in Calcutta. Several months later, Admiral Watson heard how some in the British garrison there had resisted, and how the Governor and others had fled with the women and children to a waiting ship before abandoning the remainder to their fate. (53 / 60 words)
Part Two
The Black Hole Monument outside the Bengal Secretariat in Calcutta, photographed by Bengal-born Kathleen Blechynden (1856-1925) for Calcutta, Past and Present (1905). The monument still stands today, though sadly neglected. Writing to his daughter in 1930, activist Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), at the time serving six months in a British gaol, played the incident down as “greatly exaggerated” — as if he feared the Black Hole alone might legitimise the Raj. But the lesson of the Black Hole has nothing to do with the rights of government, and everything to do with the abuse of government: in their politics, the Company and the Nawab were remarkably alike, and the dead were as much the victims of the English who abandoned them as of the Nawab’s jeering guards. The tragedy should inspire everyone to leave ‘covetousness and pride of power’ behind.
These under Mr Holwell, a member of the Council, had fought on gallantly, keeping the enemy off until the afternoon of Sunday the 20th, when, being at their last cartridge, they beat a parley.* While they were talking from the walls, the enemy by treachery got possession of one of the fort gates (that in the rear), rushed the guard, and compelled the garrison to surrender at discretion.* That night the prisoners, a hundred and seventy-five in number, were crammed all together into the Black Hole, whence next morning only sixteen were left alive.* Of the sixteen, Mr Holwell and Mr Burdett, a writer, with two others, had been heavily ironed* and sent to the Nawab’s camp. Such was the tale told to Admiral Watson.*
* A parley (negotiation of peace) may be proposed by sounding a trumpet or beating a drum.
* That is, surrender unconditionally, accepting whatever fate the conqueror may decide upon.
* These numbers were subsequently revised down on the testimony of a survivor, John Zephaniah Holwell (1711-1798). “By narratives made public” he later wrote “you will only know, that of one hundred and forty-six prisoners, one hundred and twenty-three were smothered in the Black-Hole prison, in the night of the 20th of June, 1756.” Some later estimates have reduced the numbers still further, by as much as half, though it would be only natural if politics has come to bear on the discussion. Holwell’s account records that these 146 soldiers and civilians, including both men and women, were crushed into a poorly ventilated 14ft by 18ft prison cell designed for at most three, and subjected to ten hours of unimaginable suffering over a sweltering midsummer’s night in Bengal, while the guards outside laughed and jeered. Not all of the twenty-three survivors lived through the new day.
* That is, shackled. Holwell was inclined to excuse Siraj ud-Daulah himself, who had “repeated his assurances to me, on the word of a soldier, that no harm would come to us; and indeed I believe his orders were only general, that we would for that night be secured, and that what followed was the result of revenge and resentment in the breasts of the lower Jemadars [junior officers], to whose custody we were delivered, for the number of their order killed during the siege”.
* On December 18th, Watson wrote to Siraj ud-Daulah “courteously, but firmly, demanding the immediate restoration of Calcutta and compensation for property looted and destroyed.” He received no reply, so ten days later his ship eased up the River Hooghly to Budge-Budge. See One Man Army.
Précis
Admiral Watson then heard how John Holwell and over a hundred others that remained fought on bravely, until they were caught out by a surprise attack while negotiating terms. Forced to surrender unconditionally, they were penned overnight in the ‘black hole’, a tiny, suffocating cell, from which only a handful of them came out alive. (55 / 60 words)
