Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [39]
But Macaulay – one of that line of Highlanders who became pillars of empire (he had served on the Governor General’s Council in India) – was writing over eighty years after the event. There are various inherent improbabilities in the story (how was it physically possible to force 146 Europeans into a space so small, and if it was so gargantuan a crime, why did the East India Company not include it in its list of demands for compensation later?). Macaulay had reason enough to exaggerate the drama and Holwell, his source, sufficient incentive to obscure the embarrassment of his surrender with a story of grotesque human rights abuse. Holwell paid for a memorial to be erected at the site, but it was demolished in 1821, on the orders of the then Governor General after becoming ‘the lounging place for lower class loafers of all sorts who gossip squatting around and against it’. Exactly what happened and how many lives were lost will never be known, but the significance of the Black Hole of Calcutta lies much more in what it was held to represent as a terrible example of the fate which could await Europeans in this strange land – in 1901 the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, commissioned a replacement monument, believing that the event had laid the foundations for British India. It was now nearly a century and a half after the night in question, yet for the purposes of imperial propaganda the memorial recorded that ‘146 British inhabitants of Calcutta were confined on the night of 20th June 1756, and … only 23 came out alive.’ As the Calcutta poet Rabindranath Tagore observed many years later, it ‘proclaimed to the heavens that exaggeration is not a monopoly of any particular race or nation’.* But precise numbers were not the point. Clearly, far too many people were crammed into a horribly confined space. The symbolic warning tale of the Black Hole of Calcutta was still being taught in British schools in the 1960s.
Retribution (generally inevitable in British India) came in the form of an expedition sent up from Madras under the command of Robert Clive. It landed in Bengal in December 1756 as news arrived that hostilities had officially resumed between Britain and France, in what later became known as the Seven Years War. Clive retook Calcutta with little trouble and then decided he would finish off Siraj ud-Daula and his French backers for good. By February the intimidated nawab had agreed to pay reparations. But it was not enough. A coterie of Bengal bankers and merchants was willing to offer Clive big financial rewards for unseating the nawab and replacing him with someone more congenial. Clive’s choice was Mir Jafar, the intensely ambitious child of Arab immigrants who had risen to become one of Siraj ud-Daula’s commanders. Treachery now outdid treachery: if the financial backers thought they were dealing with an English gentleman, they did not know their man, for unknown to them Clive drew up two different versions of the agreement and forged the signature of the British admiral who was supposed to guarantee its trustworthiness.
It was 23 June 1757, a year since the Black Hole of Calcutta, and the weather was sweltering when Clive’s East India Company army closed on the nawab at Plassey. A mile away stood Siraj ud-Daula’s vast forces, perhaps 50,000 strong, along with wives, concubines, servants, traders, children and associated hangers-on. Astrologers and other crackpots were on hand to advise on tactics. Many of the infantry had been press-ganged into service and would be readied for battle with doses of opium. Characteristically, commanders would then ride into combat on elephants, presenting lovely targets for sharpshooters, while the doped-up infantry rushed forward – as one not unsympathetic observer put it, ‘both in their garb and impotent fury, resembling a mob of frantic women’. In support of this swirling mob, though, Siraj ud-Daula had forty pieces of heavy artillery, supervised by a team of French gunners.
Early in the morning, the nawab’s guns began to shell the Company troops. Clive’s