#BlackHoleofCalcutta

[whencyclopedia]

Black Hole of Calcutta

The Black Hole of Calcutta refers to a prison cell which was used to hold 146 mostly British prisoners captured after the Nawab of Bengal had taken over the city from the East India Company. Interred on 20 June 1756 in a tiny cell in Fort William, 123 of the prisoners died of dehydration and suffocation.

The number of the Black Hole deaths may have been exaggerated, but testimonies to the event actually happening are numerous. The East India Company used the story as a justification for taking over Calcutta completely. It was really in the next century, though, that knowledge of the incident was spread through textbooks and literature as one of a host of equally dubious means to justify Britain's colonial presence in India. The incident's grip on the popular imagination can be seen in the long-lasting use of the expression "like the Black Hole of Calcutta" to refer to any dark and forbidding place.

Background

In the mid-18th century, the British East India Company (EIC) was seeking to expand its control of trade and territory in India. The rich region of Bengal was an obvious target, and Calcutta (Kolkata) became a major trading port for the company. The French East India Company was also present in the region at Chandernagore (Chandannagar) further up the coast. Balancing between these two foreign companies, both essentially representatives of their respective government's imperial ambitions in India, was the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah (b. 1733), nominally under the suzerainty of the Moghul emperors in Delhi. Siraj ud-Daulah wanted to remove the EIC from Calcutta since it would not pay to improve the city's fortifications, and so he marched on the city in June 1756. A short siege followed, and the city fell. The fate of those captured was the source of the infamous Black Hole legend.

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