John Zephaniah Holwell

John Zephaniah Holwell was a surgeon and East India Company official whose account of the Black Hole of Calcutta became one of the most influential pieces of writing in the history of British India. He trained in surgery, joined the Company in 1732, and worked his way into its Bengal administration. In June 1756 the young nawab Siraj ud-Daulah took Calcutta, and Holwell, left in command after his superiors fled by river, surrendered Fort William. He was among the prisoners confined overnight in the fort's small punishment cell in June heat. His narrative published in 1757 gave the figures that fixed the episode in the British imagination: one hundred and forty-six shut in, twenty-three alive in the morning. Modern historians generally accept that the confinement and deaths happened and that his numbers are too high, the cell being too small to hold that many; some argue for around sixty-four prisoners. There is no evidence the nawab ordered it. The account served the Company's purposes and was used to justify the conquest that followed Plassey. Holwell served briefly as governor of Bengal in 1760 and was removed by the Company. He was also a genuine scholar of Indian religion, an early European defender of Hindu belief, and an outspoken vegetarian and opponent of cruelty to animals. He erected a monument to the dead in Calcutta at his own expense, which was later demolished and then rebuilt by Curzon in 1902 as an imperial symbol. It was removed again in 1940 after Indian objection. The episode has been fought over ever since, and the dispute is now less about how many died than about what the story was used to justify.

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