Travel Tips

The infamous Black Hole of Calcutta incident refers to forty three British soldiers and their Indian comrades who died in the Fort William brig, June 20, 1756. The number of deaths has been hotly disputed by many noted historians, however, the premise being that the said brig could never have held that amount of prisoners. They were said to have died from suffocation & heat exhaustion.
The events leading up to the incident involved a foray by the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah against the British East India Company security forces in Calcutta. In June 1756, he marched on the Company's settlement with an army of 30,000 foot soldiers, 20,000 horsemen, 400 trained elephants and eighty cannon.Faced with the onslaught, most of the British soldiers fled along with their Indian troops. Siraj-ud-Daula captured the few who remained, putting them into the brig at Fort William overnight.The heat was at its most intense.

This place of imprisonment was referred to as the Black Hole by the British, and the name has conjured up images of hell ever since.
Robert Clive, the man who proved most important in establishing the British East India Company as a colonial power in India, led retaliatory expedition, defeating Siraj-ud-Daula and his army.. Clive continued his military dominance for the next eleven years until 1766, when he left India. Owing to his determined endevours, the British East India company remained in firm control of much of India. The Black Hole incident and retaliation had given him the means to enable Great Britain to remain in power until 1947, when India finally became independant.
A tablet was erected on the site of the Black Hole to commemorate the victims. It had been stolen at some point before 1822. Lord Curzon, the new Viceroy in 1899, noticing that nothing marked the spot, commissioned a new monument. In 1901, Curzon placed the obelisk at the corner of Dalhousie Square, the reputed site of the Black Hole. At the height of the Indian independence movement, the presence of that monument in Calcutta became a nationalist issue. Nationalist leaders like Subhash Chandra Bose lobbied energetically for its removal. The Congress and the Muslim League joined forces in the anti-monument movement. As a result, the government removed the obelisk from Dalhousie Square in July, 1940, and placed it in the graveyard of St John's Church, where it remains to this day. The Black Hole itself has long been taken down and no traces of it remain today.