The Back Hole: Money, Myth and Empire
By Jan Dalley,
Penguin, £ 11.99

The Black Hole of Calcutta was the British Raj’s first chamber of horrors. It served as a pretext and justification for conquest and violence. As Nirad Chaudhuri said, “it threw a moral halo over the British conquest of India”. Perhaps because of this reason, it continues to attract Britons to write books about it. It is significant that in the last three decades no Indian historian or writer has been tempted to write on the event. The book under review is by a journalist with the Financial Times.

The first problem with this book is that it has nothing new to say about the subject to anybody who is familiar with the event and its historiography. It goes over familiar ground and well-known controversies, if somewhat more lucidly than previous commentators. Secondly, this book is too obviously aimed at the British reader who is not too well-read on the early history of the British Empire in India. Jan Dalley thus spends many words and pages to describe the early trading activities of the English East India Company. These are boring and tedious since they have no immediate relevance for her subject. They only serve as padding for the book. In the process, she keeps so close to her sources that she even repeats errors of spelling that the British sources contain.

To Dalley’s credit it must be said that she does not buy into all the myths that have been perpetuated about the Black Hole. In this context, she does not even raise the question about the relative silence of Indian sources on the subject. The rule of Siraj-ud Daulah is not something completely unrecorded in Persian annals and most, if not all, of these are available in English translation. But very few of these actually mention the Black Hole. If indeed the Black Hole was a manifestation of the Nawab’s power and vengeance — as most British accounts made it out to be — why were Indian chroniclers silent about it?

It is true, of course, as Dalley rightly notes, that John Zephaniah Holwell, a survivor, was the first to report the event. But his vivid and purple account had a limited impact on his contemporaries. Newspapers in Britain in 1758 carried extracts from his recollections and then, the reports died down. The historian, Linda Colley, has pointed out that many of Holwell’s contemporaries did not accept Holwell’s vilification of Nawab Siraj-ud Daulah. Significantly, no new edition of his account appeared. Even the memorial he had built at his own expense had, by the 1820s, fallen into complete disuse and was taken down by the Marquis of Hastings, Lord Moira.

The revival of interest took place in the hands of two great paladins of the British Empire. One was Lord Macaulay, who in 1840 described it as “that great crime memorable for its singular atrocity”. The other was Lord Curzon, who restored the monument after he was moved by the “moral agony of the Black Hole”. Dalley follows the myth-making, but also gives details about the battle for Calcutta in 1756 when Siraj attacked the place.

Her attack never rises above the pedestrian and often has errors. She is unaware that between the destruction of St Anne’s Church in 1756 and the consecration of St John’s in 1787, the British had built the Mission Church in 1769, on the eastern fringes of Dalhousie Square. The church still stands and is worshipped in. Obviously Dalley’s native informants did not tell her this, just as nobody told her that the spire of St Anne’s had been destroyed in the cyclone of 1737, long before Siraj was a twinkle in Clio’s eyes.