The Black Hole of Calcutta 1756 (36)

 

1. Calcutta

2. The Black Hole of Calcutta

The Black Hole of Calcutta was a dungeon in Fort William, Calcutta, measuring 14 by 18 feet (4.3 m × 5.5 m), in which troops of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, held British prisoners of war on the night of 20 June 1756.  John Zephaniah Holwell, one of the British prisoners and an employee of the East India Company, said that, after the fall of Fort William, the surviving British soldiers, Indian sepoys and Indian civilians were imprisoned overnight in conditions so cramped that many people died from suffocation and heat exhaustion and that 123 of 146 prisoners of war imprisoned there died. Some modern historians believe that only 64 prisoners were sent into the Hole, and that 43 died there. Some historians put the figure even lower, to about 18 dead, while questioning the veracity of Holwell's account. Fort William was established to protect the East India Company's trade in the city of Calcutta, the principal city of the Bengal Presidency. In 1756 India, there existed the possibility of a battle with the military forces of the French East India Company, so the British reinforced the fort. Siraj ud-Daulah ordered the fortification construction to be stopped by the French and British and the French complied while the British demurred. In consequence to British indifference, Siraj ud-Daulah organised his army and laid siege to Fort William. In an effort to survive the battle, the British commander ordered the surviving soldiers of the garrison to escape, yet left behind 146 soldiers under the civilian command of John Zephaniah Holwell, a senior bureaucrat of the East India Company. once a military surgeon. Desertions of Indian sepoys made the British defence of Fort William ineffective and it fell to the siege of Bengali forces on 20 June 1756. The surviving defenders who were captured and made prisoners of war numbered between 64 and 69, along with an unknown number of Anglo-Indian soldiers and civilians who earlier had been sheltered in Fort William. The British officers and merchants based in Kolkata were rounded up by the forces loyal to Siraj ud-Daulah and forced into a dungeon known as the "Black Hole". In memory of the dead, the British erected a 15-metre (50') high obelisk, now in the graveyard of St John's Church, Calcutta.