Hole Black Truth
Krishna Dutta

The Black Hole: Money, Myth and Empire
by Jan Dalley
Fig Tree. Pages 240. £ 316.99.

The phrase "the Black Hole of Calcutta" has become a common English usage, yet every time I encounter it I feel an involuntary aversion — not just for its connotations of despondency but because of its malignant potency to taint a real place and its people. Its insensitive use over 250 years is hard to eradicate, though most people have little idea of how it was coined. It is in fact a brilliant political spin to cover up ignominious martial incompetence by the British.

Jan Dalley revisits this minor but haunting myth through the historical evidence, reflecting on the motives of the players and recording its impact on mass perception. She contrasts the grandiose militia of the nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, with feeble British defences and catalogues the cowardice of the British commanders, skilfully evoking a period of clashing cultures. The standard version of the event came from John Zephaniah Holwell, its chief survivor and an East India Company man. He proclaimed that 146 English and other Europeans were crammed into the Black Hole — an 18-by-14-foot cell with a single barred window — by the nawab on the sultry night of June 20, 1756. Next morning only 23 came out alive. Holwell scribbled his melodramatic account in a letter during the sea voyage to England, where it was published. But what had actually happened was more complex.

The obelisk in granite with the names of all who died in the siege of Calcutta was recreated by Lord Curzon

As the business of the East India Company prospered in Calcutta, it started to shore up the defence of their meagre office and store with a grand name — Fort William. The rumours of the Company’s substantial wealth peeved Siraj-ud-Daula enough to march down to Calcutta with his formidable army to investigate. The Company panicked, and instead of trying for a diplomatic solution rashly confronted him with an ill-prepared garrison. It lost the combat.

Unaware of the so-called fort’s incapacity to hold large numbers, Siraj hastily ordered the imprisonment of the captives for the night and retired. Unknown to him, his commanders, equally ignorant of the place, shoved the prisoners into the only cell available, which was tiny. Historians now agree that it was more of a bungle than an act of deliberate cruelty.

However, it was the first Indian blow to British national pride and commercial prospects. A retributive expedition was organised, when Robert Clive famously recaptured Calcutta in the battle of Plassey in 1757 and laid the foundations of the empire. Holwell paid for a brick-built memorial to the Black Hole in Calcutta, and generations of schoolchildren in Britain began to grow up reading about this atrocity by the barbaric Indians that fomented their spirits of heroism and superiority.

During the high noon of imperialism, the Viceroy Lord Curzon magnificently recreated Holwell’s decaying obelisk in granite, inscribing names of those who died during the siege of Calcutta, but not in the Black Hole. That propagandist icon stood in the city’s busiest square for 40 years until it was moved to an obscure corner of a churchyard.

The reality of the incident was far less brutal than the exaggeration. Scholars have also pointed out many inconsistencies in Holwell’s account. Karl Marx wrote that it was a sham scandal. Empire historians are familiar with all of this, but if Dalley’s latest postcolonial version succeeds in rectifying a chronic linguistic misuse, it will be providential.

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