Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [38]
Quite apart from the immense plunder to be had in India, there was an established system of taxes to be milked by the Company: it was the good fortune of the British traders to be at their boldest in India when the Mughal Empire, which had dominated much of the subcontinent since the early sixteenth century, was losing its grip.* In Bengal, the wealthiest part of India, the Company had, for example, achieved more or less complete control of the export of silk and sugar, cotton and jute, salt and saltpetre by the middle of the eighteenth century. But then in 1756 the old nawab died and was succeeded by his nephew and adopted son, Siraj ud-Daula, who decided that the foreign presence was impertinent, demanded gifts from the European trading companies and, when the British refused, attacked Calcutta. There now occurred an event which would overshadow British attitudes to India for a century or more.
As Siraj ud-Daula’s massive forces advanced through the city, many of the British simply took to their heels, abandoning comrades, wives and children and fleeing to ships in the port. The Company’s fort was left in the hands of those who could not or would not flee, under the command of John Zephaniah Holwell, a Dublin-born doctor, now employed as the East India Company’s tax collector. On the afternoon of Sunday, 20 June, Holwell surrendered. The victorious nawab ordered that the English prisoners be confined in the garrison’s dungeon. This turned out to be a cell about 20 feet square, into which, Holwell subsequently claimed, 146 people were marched at the point of swords. There were two small barred windows. In addition to the heat of so many bodies crammed together, it was early in the rainy season and the night especially hot and muggy. Those at the windows offered increasingly vast sums of money to the guards outside to release them, who said they could do nothing without the nawab’s authority, and he was busy with his post-battle debauch. The temperature inside the dungeon continued to rise. One of the prisoners tried to slake his thirst by sucking the perspiration from Holwell’s shirtsleeves. The doctor attempted to drink his own urine. No one could breathe properly and the temperature climbed higher still. Some prisoners sank to the floor, others became delirious or fell into comas. As the imperial historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote:
Nothing in history or fiction … approaches the horrors which were recounted by the few survivors of that night … the prisoners went mad with despair. They trampled each other down, fought for the places at the windows, fought for the pittance of water with which the cruel mercy of the murderers mocked their agonies, raved, prayed, blasphemed, implored the guards to fire among them. At length the tumult died away in low gaspings and moanings.
When dawn broke and the nawab had recovered from the night before, the door was opened. Macaulay described how ‘twenty-three ghastly figures, such as their own mothers would not have known, staggered one by one out of the charnel-house. A pit was instantly dug. The dead bodies, a hundred and twenty-three in number, were flung into it promiscuously and covered up.’ The Black Hole of Calcutta was a horror story to rival anything among the Gothic tales which swept Britain in the late eighteenth