New light on black hole for India
Generations of wide-eyed English schoolboys have been brought up on the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta, of how 123 British men, women and children perished in a cramped and stifling dungeon deep in the bowels of Fort William after the camp was captured by the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj Ud Daulah.
The story, based on the lone testimony of John Holwell, the fort's commanding officer and one of 23 survivors, was used to characterise India as a nation that needed civilising.
It was cited to justify the use of military force to recapture Calcutta at the Battle of Plassey the next year, and formed the ideological cornerstone of colonial rule for the next two centuries. But whether it really happened -- at least in the manner described -- is another question entirely.
There have been several challenges to Holwell's account, not least by JH Little, an English schoolmaster, who, in 1916, labelled it a ''giant hoax''.
In a book titled The Black Hole: Money, Myth and Indian Empire being published this month, journalist Jan Dalley draws on company records, letters and the conflicting views of historians to argue that the incident was grossly exaggerated to disguise unseemly private profiteering by civil servants and the dishonourable desertions of the establishment's top brass.
Certainly, the story has no place in the national consciousness of modern-day India. It is barely taught in schools, there is no reference to it at all in the latest edition of the New Cambridge History of India, and Indian historians dismiss it as a myth, even a lie.
''The event is largely forgotten,'' said Partha Chatterjee, an anthropologist at the Centre for the Study of Social Sciences in Calcutta. ''Whenever it is brought up now it is simply as an example of a falsehood of imperialist history.''