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THE BARE BONES of this alleged atrocity are well known in both the UK and India but the incident itself was at best the subject of gross exaggeration and at worst one of cynical invention by the East India Company (EIC), anxious for public and governmental backing to expand its already colossal corporate influence across the subcontinent.
Founded by a royal charter issued by Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600, by the eighteenth century the EIC had grown into a giant to dwarf any conglomerate of the twenty-first century. Most worryingly for many, not only had it grown beyond the control of any government but the company had its own army and navy dwarfing those of the British regular forces. At its peak in the 1850s, the EIC had over 271,000 troops under its command and many more ships under sail than the British Navy. By 1756 it was throwing its weight around in Calcutta, now Kolkata, flouting its agreements with the local ruler or Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, and interfering in the internal affairs of his realm. When the company also embarked on major expansions of its fortified power base in the city, Fort William, Siraj ud-Daulah’s well-founded suspicions as to why this was being done prompted him to attack the installation on 20 June that year.
Most of the company troops and local recruits deserted and fled, so there were comparatively few left in the fort when the Nawab’s forces stormed the place; the exact number of Europeans who were locked up in the fort’s jail, known to locals as the Black Hole, remains unknown. When the Nawab entered the fort he immediately informed the senior EIC officer on site, John Zephaniah Holwell, that no harm would befall any of them and that, if they gave their word to behave, they could remain at large and unmolested within the confines of the fort. However, no sooner had the Nawab left the fort than the Europeans turned so petulant and demanding that the Nawab’s men slung the ringleaders – Holwell included, if he is to be believed – into the company’s own loathsome jail to teach them a lesson. The lowest estimate holds this contingent to have numbered nine, with three of them dead by morning – not from anything diabolical visited upon them by their captors but from wounds received during their short-lived and lacklustre defence of the fort the previous day. However, the incensed Holwell, determined to see the EIC reassert its stranglehold on the area and extend its tentacles into the neighbouring provinces, returned to London to publish A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen and Others Who Were Suffocated in The Black Hole.
According to this account – which Holwell cobbled together with other executives of the EIC who were not even in India at the time – 146 people went into the Hole and, in the morning, only 23 staggered out. Not only was there nothing like that number of Europeans left in the fort when it fell but the Hole itself measured a scant 18 feet by 14 feet and was thus incapable of holding such numbers. And there were other problems with Holwell’s lurid account of his night of horror. Droning on in ridiculous embellishment, he detailed the wretched faces of his companions twisted in pain and desperation for the water that the sniggering jailers kept pouring into the sand before their very eyes and so forth. The jail was not called the Black Hole for nothing; there were only two small ventilation slits, so how could he have seen such details in the total darkness that gave the jail its name? The great British public was in no mood for any such logical questioning of Holwell’s penny dreadful; the Nawab needed a damned good thrashing. It was time to unleash the beast that was Robert Clive, aka Clive of India.
THE FATE OF ROBERT CLIVE
For all his ill-gotten wealth, Robert Clive was destined to die in London in mysterious circumstances, discovered in his Berkeley Square mansion on 22 November 1774. Strangely, there was no inquest and rumours circulated of his having cut his own throat or died from a self-administered overdose of opium. Who knows, perhaps some of his old Market Drayton victims finally caught up with him; either way he was buried in an unmarked grave in the parish church at Moreton Say, close to his birthplace. A good indicator as to the scale of the loot he plundered was given by his descendants putting up for sale six items of Moghul art at Christie’s in 2004 which sold for £4.7 million; not bad for a small-town bully boy!
This was exactly the reaction for which the EIC had been hoping; the public howling for blood to such a degree that none in the government dared impose any restriction on the degree of EIC retaliation and, in Robert Clive, they had just the man for the job. Born into the family estates at Market Drayton in Shropshire, Clive had a reputation as a thug with a passion for street-fighting. He also ran a protection racket in the town and surrounding areas; owners of shops and businesses who did not relish waking up to a raging fire had no choice but to pay up. By the time he was eighteen, Market Drayton in general and his own family in particular had endured enough and so they packed him off to India with a post in the EIC. He later joined the company’s army. Rising meteorically through the ranks, Clive was mistaken by others to have been a bold and valiant commander, but he remained a thug, only now he had an army with which to play instead of a street gang. Already addicted to opium, he displayed an almost criminal disregard for his own and others’ safety.
Having recaptured Fort William and soundly trashed the forces of the Nawab, Clive moved on to bring other provinces under the EIC umbrella by employing much the same tactics he had used as a teenager in Market Drayton. Those who wanted to play ball with the EIC, as puppet rulers, had to pay him a huge bounty in return for the use of his army to crush those hostile to the prospect. These bribes, augmented by what he looted along the way, allowed Clive to return to the UK a very rich man indeed. With much of India back in the malevolent and avaricious grip of the EIC, few dared question the veracity of the Holwell account that had instigated the Clive-led backlash. Not until 1915 did the first cogent rebuttal emerge in the form of The Black Hole – The Question of Holwell’s Veracity, published by J. H. Little, Secretary of the Calcutta Historical Society. This was followed a few decades later by detailed papers from the likes of Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Vice-Chancellor of Dacca University, and Basudeb Chattopadhyay, Professor of Modern Indian History and Director of the West Bengal State Archives. When the British finally began their disastrous exit of India in 1947, their Black Hole Monument to Indian brutality and ingratitude was one of the first offensive reminders of their presence to be torn down by the mob.