Black Hole of Calcutta

The Black Hole of Calcutta was a dungeon in Fort William, Calcutta, measuring 14 by 18 feet (4.3 m × 5.5 m), in which troops of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, held British prisoners of war on the night of 20 June 1756. John Zephaniah Holwell, one of the British prisoners and an employee of the East India Company said that, after the fall of Fort William, the surviving British soldiers, Indian sepoys, and Indian civilians were imprisoned overnight in conditions so cramped that many people died from suffocation and heat exhaustion, and that 123 of 146 prisoners of war imprisoned there died.

Fort William was built to safeguard the East India Company’s trade in Calcutta, the chief city of the Bengal Presidency. In 1756, amid rising tensions with the French East India Company due to the global Seven Years’ War, the British began strengthening the fort’s defenses. Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, ordered both the British and French to cease fortification work, wary of European encroachment. The French complied, but the British continued, prompting the Nawab’s ire and contributing to the subsequent conflict. In consequence to that British indifference to his authority, Siraj ud-Daulah organised his army and laid siege to Fort William. In an effort to survive the battle, the British commander ordered the surviving soldiers of the garrison to escape, yet left behind 146 soldiers under the civilian command of John Zephaniah Holwell, a senior bureaucrat of the East India Company who had been once a military surgeon. The desertions of Indian sepoys made the British defence of Fort William ineffective and it fell to the siege of Bengali forces on 20 June 1756. The British officers and merchants based in Calcutta were rounded up by the forces loyal to Siraj ud-Daulah and forced into a dungeon known as the "Black Hole".

Holwell wrote about the events that occurred after the fall of Fort William. He met with Siraj-ud-Daulah, who assured him: "On the word of a soldier; that no harm should come to us". After seeking a place in the fort to confine the prisoners (including Holwell), at 8.00 p.m., the jailers stripped the prisoners of their clothes and locked the prisoners in the fort's prison—"the black hole" in soldiers' slang—a small room that measured 14 by 18 feet (4.3 m × 5.5 m). The next morning, when the black hole was opened, at 6.00 a.m., only about 23 of the prisoners remained alive. Historians offer different numbers of prisoners and casualties of war; Stanley Wolpert estimated that 64 people were imprisoned and 21 survived. D. L. Prior estimated that 43 men of the Fort-William garrison were either missing or dead, for reasons other than suffocation and shock. Busteed suggests that the many non-combatants present in the fort when it was captured make infeasible a precise number of people killed. Regarding responsibility for the maltreatment and the deaths in the Black Hole of Calcutta, Holwell said, "it was the result of revenge and resentment, in the breasts of the lower Jemadars (sergeants), to whose custody we were delivered, for the number of their order killed during the siege." Concurring with Holwell, Wolpert said that Siraj-ud-Daulah did not order the imprisonment and was not informed of it. The physical description of the Black Hole of Calcutta corresponds with Holwell's point of view:

Prison data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).