Black Hole of Calcutta

From New World Encyclopedia
Fifty foot obelisk on grounds of St John’s Church in Calcutta commemorating the calamity

The Black Hole of Calcutta refers to a small dungeon where troops of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, held British prisoners of war after the capture of Fort William on June 20, 1756.

John Zephaniah Holwell reported that following the fall of the Fort, the nawab held British and Anglo-Indian soldiers and civilians overnight in conditions so cramped that a large proportion of those held died from suffocation, heat exhaustion and crushing. He wrote that 123 prisoners died out of 146 prisoners held.

Background

The British built Fort William to protect British East India Company trade in the city of Calcutta, Bengal. The British, preparing for battle with the French during the Seven Years War (1756-1763), fortified Calcutta, especially by strengthening Fort William. The Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, rightly felt concern that the fortification marked the British East India Company's encroachment upon Indian sovereignty. [1] He ordered both French and British to immediately stop building the fortifications. The French at Chandernagore complied. The British ignored the command, fearing the war with France would catch them unprepared. Siraj gathered his large army, including artillery and Europeans hired to train the Indians, and marched on Calcutta.

Siraj advanced unopposed, finding the approach to Calcutta unfortified. As the Indian force advanced, the British fell into confusion. The garrison's commander organized an escape, and left a token force in the fort under the command of John Zephaniah Holwell, a one-time military surgeon and top East India Company civil servant. Desertions by allied troops, mainly Dutch, made even that temporary defense untenable. Their evacuation of the fort by ship fell into disorganization. Siraj laid siege to the fort. The British, including many civilians, fought bravely for three days before the fort fell to the Nawab of Bengal.

The Holwell account

File:Oldest Gun at Fort William.jpg
The oldest artillery piece at Fort William, Calcutta

Other accounts relate that Indian soldiers took the surviving defenders prisoner. That included British soldiers, Anglo-Indian soldiers, and civilians who had been sheltered in the Fort. Some prisoners escaped, while others attacked their guards. In the end, the Indian soldiers placed sixty four prisoners into tiny room eighteen feet (5.5 m) long and 14 feet 10 inches (4.3 m) wide. The room had two small windows. [2]

According to Holwell, the troops, apparently acting without orders, had packed the prisoners in the small guard room, locking them in overnight. Prisoners begged for water or release, growing delirious from heat exhaustion. As time passed, prisoners collapsed from heat stroke, suffocation, or trampling. Siraj Ud Daulah released the prisoners in the morning, becoming aware of their plight after he woke.

In one account of the incident, the Siraj's soldiers imprisoned 146 prisoners, 123 of them suffocating during the night. That version of events, supported by other survivors, received wide accepted at the time in Britain. Even as late as 1957, Winston Churchill cited those numbers. [3] The reason for confusion may lay in the confusion of the falling of the fort. Because so many non-combatants took refuge in the Fort, the number that died cannot be stated with any precision.[4]

The Siraj's soldiers threw the corpses into a ditch. They sent Holwell and three others as prisoners to Murshidabad; the rest of the survivors obtained their liberty after the victory of a relief expedition under Robert Clive. The British later used the Black Hole as a warehouse. They erected an obelisk, 50 feet (15 m) high, in memory of the dead.

Holwell portrayed the night as follows [5]: The dungeon, a strongly barred room had been intended for the confinement of two or three men at a time. The room had only two windows. A veranda projecting outside and thick iron bars within impeded the ventilation. Fires raging in different parts of the fort suggested further oppressive atmosphere. The prisoners packed so tightly that closing the door became difficult.

The prisoners offered one of the soldiers stationed in the veranda 1,000 rupees to have them removed to a larger room. He went away, but returned without accepting the money. Doubling the bribe, the soldier tried again without success; the nawab slept, and no one dared wake him.

By 9 pm several had died, and many more became delirious. A frantic cry for water became general. One of the guards brought some to the bars. In their impatience to receive it, the water nearly all spilled. The little they drank seemed only to increase their thirst. Loosing self-control, those in remote parts of the room struggled to reach the window. A fearful tumult ensued with many trampled to death. They raved, fought, prayed, blasphemed, and many then fell exhausted on the floor, dying of suffocation.

By 11 pm, prisoners began to die rapidly. At 6 am, Siraj-ud-Dowla awoke, ordering the door opened. Howell counted only 23 of the original 146 still living. Fresh air soon revived them. Soldiers took the commander before the nawab. Howell reported that he expressed no regret for the calamity. Holwell and some others acquitted him of any intention of causing the catastrophe. They attributed the crime to officers who acted without orders.

Alleged victims

Holwell's account included a summary of the alleged victims: Dutch and English sergeants, corporals, soldiers, topazes,[6] militia, whites, and Portuguese,[7], making on the whole one hundred and twenty-three persons.

  • Of Council — E. Eyre, Wm. Baillie,. Esqrs., the Rev. Jervas Bellamy.
  • Gentlemen in the Service — Messrs. Jenks, Revely, Law, Coales, Valicourt, Jeb, Torriano, E. Page, S. Page, Grub, Street, Harod, P. Johnstone, Ballard, N. Drake, Carse, Knapton, Gosling, Bing, Dod, Dalrymple.
  • Military Captains — Clayton, Buchanan, Witherington.
  • Lieutenants — Bishop, Ifays, Blagg, Simson, Bellamy.
  • Ensigns — Paccard, Scot, Hastings, C. Wedderburn, Dumbleton.
  • Sergeants, &c. — Sergeant-Major Abraham, Quartermaster Cartwright, Sergeant Bleau (these were sergeants of militia).
  • Sea Captains — Hunt, Osburne, Purnell (survived the night, but died next day), Messrs. Carey, Stephenson, Guy, Porter, W. Parker, Caulker, Bendall, Atkinson, Leech, &c., &c."

Controversy

File:Black hole.jpg
Text on the Memorial in St. John's Churchyard

Holwell claims that one hundred and twenty-three died of one hundred and forty-six held. While his account met with ready belief in Britain at the time, other contemporary accounts claimed a larger number and differed on other details such as the room size and the presence of windows. In 1915, British scholar J.H. Little challenged Holwell's claims in his article, "The Black Hole — The Question of Holwell's Veracity," arguing Holwell an unreliable witness of questionable veracity. Little went so far as to label Holwell's version "a gigantic hoax." Other historians, including Indian scholar Brijen Gupta, disagreed with Little's allegation, but nevertheless consider Holwell's account exaggerated.

Only forty-three of the Fort William garrison had been listed missing after the calamity. The minimum number of deaths would be forty-three. this is also subject to the objection that according to the Holwell account itself, not all the prisoners would have been listed as members of the garrison. The actual number of deaths will probably never be definitively established. The Indians made no list of British and Dutch soldiers surrendering at the fort, not even a count of heads. Many escaped between the surrender and the confinement in the 'Black Hole'. Even a friend offered Holwell a chance to escape. The number of deaths in the 'Black Hole' has generally been accepted as 46.

The Monument

Holwell erected a tablet on the site of the Black Hole to commemorate the victims, but at some point before 1822 (the precise date remains unknown) it disappeared. Lord Curzon, the new Viceroy in 1899, noticing that nothing marked the spot, commissioned a new monument. He mentioned Holwell's tablet on the spot previously. In 1901, Curzon placed the obelisk at the corner of Dalhousie Square, the reputed site of the Black Hole.[8] At the apex of the Indian independence movement, the presence of that monument in Calcutta became a nationalist cause celebre. Nationalist leaders like Subhash Chandra Bose lobbied energetically for its removal. The Congress and the Muslim League joined forces in the anti-monument movement. As a result, the government removed the obelisk from Dalhousie Square in July, 1940, and placed it in the graveyard of St John's Church, where it remains to this day.

The Black Hole itself has long been taken down and no traces of it remain today.

Notes

  1. Winston S. Churchill. 1957. A history of the English-speaking peoples. Vol. 3, The age of revolution (London: Cassell), p. 220.
  2. Encycolpaedia Britannica. 1994-1999. Black Hole of Calcutta. DVD.
  3. Churchill, Winston S. 1957. A history of the English speaking peoples. Vol.3, The age of revolution, p. 221. Cassell. OCLC 59019707
  4. H.E. Busteed Echoes from Old Calcutta (Calcutta) 1908 pp. 30-56
  5. 1911 Encyclopedia
  6. Indian soldiers fighting for the British
  7. Anglo-Indians. Examples: "A Portuguese named William Robert, was charged before Mr. Andrews with having entered an untenanted house, belonging to Mrs. Shepherd..." & "...on a charge of having ordered a burkundauze employed by her to beat a native Portuguese of the name of John Morgan, which he did in such a manner as to break his leg." (From the Calcutta newspaper, The John Bull, October & March 1832.) As can be seen from these very British names, "Portuguese" was the general, albeit confusing, name used for Calcutta's Anglo-Indians: a term commonly used from the early 18th century to the mid 19th century - but no later than 1850. In 1829 Victor Jacquemont (traveling naturalist, to the Museum of Natural History, Paris) wrote: "There is a fairly large Portuguese population in Calcutta. Few of them, it is true, can boast a purely European origin; there are some, but they are all black, blacker than the natives... " In 1798 ‘Portuguese and other Christian inhabitants’ (IE, Eurasians and Indian converts) occupied 2,650 houses out of a total of 78,760 city abodes. They were often the distant offspring of Portuguese soldiers who had established the first European settlement in Bengal at Hooghly.
  8. Busteed Old Calcutta pp. 52-56

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Ahmad, Saiyid Amin. 1935. The black hole of Calcutta. Patna: United Press. OCLC 334063.
  • Barber, Noel. 1966. The Black Hole of Calcutta; a reconstruction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. OCLC 1361481
  • Hill, Samuel Charles. 1902. List of Europeans and others in the English factories of Bengal at the time of the siege of Calcutta in the year 1756: with an appendix containing lists of European sufferers. Calcutta: Office of the Supt. of Govt. Print. OCLC 20394343
  • Holwell, J. Z. 1758. A genuine narrative of the deplorable deaths of the English gentlemen, and others, who were suffocated in the Black-Hole in Fort-William, at Calcutta, in the Kingdom of Bengal, in the night succeeding the 20th day of June, 1756, in a letter to a friend. London: A. Millar. OCLC 2894470.
  • Macfarlane, Iris. 1975. The Black Hole: or, The makings of a legend. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 9780049540194.
  • The Military history of Great Britain, for 1756,1757: containing a letter from an English officer at Canada, taken prisoner at Oswego ; exhibiting the cruelty and infidelity of the French, and their savage Indians, in times of peace and war ; shewing their superior advantages, and the only means of redress ; impartially delineating the present state of our colonies in America, with some hints for their future regulation ; also, A journal of the siege of Oswego, the articles of capitulation. With a particular table of their inhabitants ; likewise of the loss and retaking of Bengall ; a journal of the siege of St. Philip's in Minorca ; with a plan of the fortification of St. Philip's, its environs, &c. 1757. London: Printed for J. Millan. OCLC 10030515.

External links

[[Category:]]

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.