Black Hole of Calcutta
The Black Hole of Calcutta incident refers to forty three British soldiers and their Indian comrades in arms who perished in the Fort William brig, June 20, 1756. The events leading up to the Black Hole of Calcutta involved a campaign by the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah against the British East India Company security forces in Calcutta.
In June 1756, he marched on the Company's settlement with a sizable force of 30,000 foot soldiers, 20,000 horsemen, 400 trained elephants and eighty pieces of cannon. Faced with overwhelming superiority, most of the British soldiers fled along with their Indian troops. Siraj-ud-Daula took captive the few who remained, putting them into the brig at Fort William for the night.
The brig had been called the Black Hole by the British, and the name stuck after the events of the night had passed. June 20, 1756, proved a sweltering night, forty three of the sixty four prisoners perishing from heat exhaustion and suffocation. Robert Clive, the man who proved most important in establishing of the British East India Company as a colonial power in India, led a putative expedition, defeating Siraj-ud-Daula and the Marathas. Clive continued over the next eleven years, until 1766, when he left India, to set up the British East India company in firm control of much of India. The Black Hole of Calcutta had given him the entrée to set Great Britain on the path to ruling India until 1947.
BLACK HOLE INCIDENT
ReplyDeleteBlack Hole of Calcutta, scene of an incident on June 20, 1756, in which a number of Europeans were imprisoned in Calcutta and many died.
The Europeans were the remaining defenders of Calcutta following the capture of the city by the nawab Sirāj al-Dawlah, of Bengal, and the surrender of the East India Company’s garrison under the self-proclaimed governor of Bengal, John Z. Holwell.
The incident became a cause célèbre in the idealization of British imperialism in India and a subject of controversy.
The nawab attacked Calcutta because of the company’s failure to stop fortifying the city as a defense against its rivals in anticipation of war (the Seven Years’ War, 1756–63).
Following the surrender, Holwell and the other Europeans were placed for the night in the company’s local lockup for petty offenders, popularly known as the Black Hole. It was a room 18 feet (5.5 metres) long and 14 feet (4 metres) wide, and it had two small windows.
According to Holwell, 146 people were locked up, and 23 survived. The incident was held up as evidence of British heroism and the nawab’s callousness. However, in 1915 British schoolmaster J.H. Little pointed out Holwell’s unreliability as a witness and other discrepancies, and it became clear that the nawab’s part was one of negligence only.
The details of the incident were thus opened to doubt. A study in 1959 by author Brijen Gupta suggests that the incident did occur but that the number of those who entered the Black Hole was about 64 and the number of survivors was 21.