The Black Hole of Calcutta was a small dungeon where troops of the Nawab of Bengal held British prisoners of war after the capture of Fort William on 20 June 1756. According to a disputed account by a survivor, 123 of 146 prisoners died of heat exhaustion in the confined conditions. Certain historians now believe the number to have been at most 43.
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Fort William had been established to protect British East India Company trade in the city of Calcutta, in the region of Bengal. In 1756, in preparation for expected skirmishes with French forces, the British began building up Fort William's military strength and defences. The Nawab of Bengal, Siraj Ud Daulah, having achieved his station despite opposition by the East India Company, was unhappy with British interference and perceived a direct threat to his own rule.
Siraj organised an army and laid siege to the fort, whose defenders suffered many casualties. The garrison's commander organised an escape, and left a token force in the military fort under the command of John Zephaniah Holwell, a former military surgeon who was a top East India Company civil servant. Desertions by allied troops, mainly Dutch, made even this temporary defence untenable, and the fort was taken. Indian soldiers took the surviving 64 to 69 men of the British contingent prisoner, together with an unknown number of Anglo-Indian soldiers and other persons of mixed ancestry, many of them civilians, who had been sheltering in the Fort. During this period some prisoners were able to escape, and others attacked their guards. The troops, apparently acting on their own, then packed the prisoners into a guard room measuring 14 by 18 feet (4.3 by 5.5 mertres) and locked them in overnight. Prisoners begged for water or escape, growing delirious from heat exhaustion. As time passed, men collapsed from heat stroke or suffocation, or were trampled on. It seems highly unlikely that the Nawab was aware of the actions of his troops. The prisoners were not released until morning, when Siraj ud-Daula awoke. By then, some modern historians believe, some 43 members of the garrison were dead or missing for other reasons, but the presence of so many non-combatants in the Fort at the time it fell mean that the overall numbers who died cannot be stated with any precision.
The corpses were thrown into a ditch. Holwell and three others were sent as prisoners to Murshidabad; the rest of the survivors obtained their liberty after the victory of a relief expedition under Robert Clive. The Black Hole was later used as a warehouse, and an obelisk, 50 feet (15 metres) high, was erected in memory of the dead.
Holwell had placed a tablet on the site of the Black Hole to commemorate the victims, but at some point before 1822 (the precise date is uncertain) it disappeared. Lord Curzon, on becoming Viceroy in 1899, noticed that there was nothing to mark the spot and commissioned a new monument, mentioning the prior existence of Holwell's. It was erected in 1901 at the corner of Dalhousie Square, which is said to have been the site of the Black Hole. At the height of the Indian independence movement, the presence of this monument in Calcutta was turned into a nationalist cause célèbre. For reasons that are somewhat obscure, Subhash Chandra Bose, an influential Indian National Congress leader, lobbied energetically for its removal. The Congress and the Muslim League joined forces in the anti-monument movement. As a result, the obelisk was removed from Dalhousie Square in July 1940 and re-erected in the graveyard of St John's Church, where it remains to this day.
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