Siraj-ud-Daulah Took Fort William on 20 June 1756, and the Black Hole Count Went From About 170 to 146 in the Survivor's Own Letters

The Black Hole of Calcutta was the lock-up of Fort William, where the Company’s prisoners spent the night of 20 June 1756 after the army of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, took the fort. John Zephaniah Holwell, the civilian who commanded the garrison at the end, printed that 146 men were shut in and 23 came out alive. His first letter after the siege gave other figures, about 165 or 170 shut in and about 16 alive, and the rest of that summer’s papers give still others.

Most of those papers were gathered by an English editor, S. C. Hill, in Bengal in 1756-57. Read with Robert Orme’s history, Brijen Gupta’s 1959 study and the Banglapedia entry, they show what the Nawab said he was owed, how a garrison of 514 met an army that the English put at 30,000 to 50,000, and why the casualty counts disagree.

What Siraj-ud-Daulah said he was owed

Alivardi Khan, Nawab of Bengal, died on 9 April 1756, Orme writes, and his grandson Siraj-ud-Daulah took power. Hill records that on 16 May, before marching out of Murshidabad against Shaukat Jang, the Nawab of Purnea, who had not recognised his accession, Siraj sent word to the French and the English to pull down every fortification built since his grandfather’s illness began. The French replied to his satisfaction. The English did not.

Hill, who edited the Company’s papers, sets out the Nawab’s case plainly. On fortifications the British had exceeded their rights: they had built a redoubt at Perrin’s Garden in the north of Calcutta, begun clearing the Maratha Ditch and repaired the defences near Fort William, all without asking anyone’s leave. Dastaks, passes that let goods travel free of customs duty and were meant for the Company’s own cargo, had been issued to cover the private trade of their servants and of Indian merchants they favoured. Krishna Das, son of an official the Nawab was pressing for accounts, had been admitted into Calcutta on 13 March 1756, which Hill says they had no right to do, though he allows they might have been justified in taking the risk. Hill’s conclusion is that Siraj-ud-Daulah “had a show of reason in all the pretexts he alleged.”

Siraj also wanted the Company to give up the privileges of the 1717 farman (an imperial order from Delhi) and fall back to the footing of Armenian and Portuguese traders, Hill adds, and he calls the quarrel one that could be “settled only by force.” Hill thought it folly to attack a useful trading community that Alivardi Khan had managed by milder means.

From Cossimbazar to Calcutta

The Company’s factory at Cossimbazar, beside Murshidabad, fell first. Orme gives its garrison as 22 Europeans, mostly Dutchmen, and 20 other men. William Watts, the chief, was called to the Nawab’s camp and signed a paper stating that Calcutta would level its new works within fifteen days, hand over government tenants sheltering in the settlement, and refund customs lost through misused dastaks. On 4 June the Nawab’s officers entered the fort.

On 9 June the army left for Calcutta. Orme writes that the sons of the banker Jagat Seth begged the Nawab to treat the English as “inoffensive and useful merchants,” and that Calcutta’s council wrote offers to demolish the new works which never reached Watts. Twenty days passed with no defence prepared, by Orme’s count. When the garrison was mustered it held 264 regular soldiers and 250 militia, 514 in all, of whom only 174 were Europeans, by Orme’s count, and the number of Indian matchlockmen was raised to 1,500.

The Nawab’s strength is a matter of estimates. English spies, in Hill’s pages, reported 30,000 to 50,000 men with 150 elephants and camels, the cannon taken at Cossimbazar, and 25 European and 200 Portuguese gunners. Banglapedia says 30,000, and Orme gives 50,000 for the army that set out against Purnea.

Five days at the fort

Siraj-ud-Daulah stood at the gate of Fort William on 16 June, Banglapedia says. After two days of fighting, Governor Roger Drake sailed for Fulta on 19 June with most of the English residents. Command passed to Holwell, Orme writes, with about 190 soldiers and militia left, where Banglapedia counts about 170 white men.

By noon on 20 June, Holwell wrote on 17 July, 25 of his men were dead, 70 or more wounded and only 14 were left to work the guns. A Dutch sergeant, Hedleburgh in Hill’s spelling, burst open the little river gate during a parley, and the Nawab’s men scaled the walls. At about five that evening the Nawab entered, Orme writes, with his general Mir Jafar, received Holwell three times and promised him on a soldier’s word that he would come to no harm. The treasury held only about 50,000 rupees, which displeased him.

Holwell put the Nawab’s dead at 5,000 “by their own confession” in July and at 7,000 at least in August. Hill notes accounts of 12,000 to 15,000, and a French and Dutch report of 2,000 wounded in the hospital at Hooghly. Those losses, Hill says, enraged the Nawab’s officers.

The night of 20 June

According to Hill and Banglapedia, some drunken European soldiers assaulted the Nawab’s guards that evening. Asked where the English locked up soldiers who misbehaved, the Nawab was told the Black Hole, and he ordered the prisoners confined for the night because there were too many to leave at large. Orme, whose account matches Holwell’s narrative, has the guard order the prisoners into the garrison’s common dungeon at about eight o’clock and puts 146 in a room “not 20 feet square” with two small windows. Hill cites Dr. C. R. Wilson for its true size, 18 feet by 14 feet 10 inches. Banglapedia gives the floor area as 267 square feet, which is under two square feet a person for 146.

In Orme’s telling Holwell offered an old jemadar (a native officer of the guard) a thousand rupees, then more, to split the prisoners between two rooms. The man came back to say the Nawab was asleep and no one dared wake him. The door was opened in the morning, and 23 came out.

Holwell’s first count, and his second

Holwell’s letter of 17 July, from Murshidabad, says he and all the prisoners, “about 165 or 170,” were crammed into the Black Hole and “only about 16 of us came out alive.” His next letter, written in August from Hooghly and printed by Hill, corrects it: “I over reckoned the number of prisoners put into the Black Hole and the number of the dead,” it says, giving 146 and 123, “many recovering after air was let in.”

The same letter revises his charge against the Nawab. In July Holwell had accused him of ordering the cruelty. By August he wrote, “I have now reason to think I did him injustice,” and that Siraj’s order was only general, “That we should be imprisoned that night, our number being too great to be at large.” The resentment of the jemadars and guards for their dead, Holwell wrote, took the form of the night’s treatment. Banglapedia says the story as later told in Britain rests on Holwell’s narrative alone.

What other hands counted

Hill prints other counts from that summer:

• Captain Mills, who was inside, kept a pocket book that gives 144 men, women and children shut in and “upwards of 120” smothered.
• Watts and Collet, writing from Chandernagore on 16 July, have 146 and 123 dead.
• William Lindsay, writing to Orme, says about 200 prisoners.
• The Dutch council at Hooghly, writing to Batavia on 24 November, says about 160 in a room with space for 40, and that all but 15 or 16 died.

Two Armenian merchants wrote of it, Gupta adds. Emin gives “400 (? 40)” Englishmen smothered, with the question mark in Gupta’s footnote, and Khojamall gives fifteen Europeans dead. Indian chronicles of the period make no mention of the incident, Gupta notes.

What historians made of it

Banglapedia credits J. H. Little, headmaster of the English high school in Murshidabad, with the argument that after deaths in the fighting, the evacuation and desertions, 146 prisoners could not have been left in Siraj’s hands three hours after the surrender. It adds that Bholanath Chunder fenced off an area of the room’s size with bamboo and found that far fewer than 146 of his Bengali tenants fitted inside. Gupta says Little went further and called the tragedy a “gigantic hoax.”

English scholars, Gupta writes, mostly followed what he calls the Curzon-Wilson-Hill school, which holds that Holwell’s account is substantially true. Hill himself accepts 123 deaths but says that only 56 of the dead can be traced by name. Jadunath Sarkar judged “probably not more than sixty” were confined, Gupta reports, calling that “rather a guess.” Gupta’s own reconstruction is “quite close” to it, and he counts 235 Europeans in the siege, of whom 159 survived and 76 died, and he argues that Holwell’s list of 52 Black Hole dead includes men killed in the fighting.

Percival Spear’s Oxford History of India (1958), as Banglapedia summarises it, held that something like the incident did happen through the “ignorance, apathy and confusion” of the Nawab’s agents, though the numbers are uncertain. Spear’s reason was that 123 defenders of Calcutta still had to be accounted for, and the evidence that they fell in battle is thinner than the evidence for the Black Hole.

Alinagar, Plassey and the monument

On 21 June Siraj-ud-Daulah renamed Calcutta Alinagar and ordered a mosque built in the fort, Hill writes. Company troops landed to retake it on 2 January 1757, and the National Army Museum says Calcutta was back in Company hands by February.

At Plassey on 23 June 1757 the museum gives the Nawab around 50,000 men, including 16,000 cavalry, against a Company force of about 3,000, of whom 2,100 were Indian sepoys and about 800 Europeans. Mir Jafar, who commanded the Nawab’s cavalry, refused to take part, as the earlier tuput article on the battle that was bought sets out. Orme writes that Siraj was captured on 2 July 1757 and killed that night in Murshidabad on the order of Mir Jafar’s son, whom he calls Meerum. How the Company turned that foothold into the revenue of three provinces is told in the article on the Battle of Buxar, and what the revenue did next in how Britain drained India.

Holwell’s memorial to the Black Hole dead was set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821, restored under Lord Curzon in 1902 and removed in 1940 to a neglected churchyard, Princeton University Press says in describing Partha Chatterjee’s The Black Hole of Empire. The 1940 campaign for its removal led to the arrest of Subhas Chandra Bose. On 11 July 1940 the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, told the Commons that Bose was arrested on 2 July to forestall a breach of the peace, because he had declared his intention “to initiate forcible action” to have the monument demolished or removed. Bose’s own account, written in Presidency Jail on 26 November 1940, says the Bengal Government then decided to remove the monument and released everyone detained over the agitation except two men, himself and Narendra Narayan Chakravarti.