Mir Jafar

Mir Jafar was the commander-in-chief who did not fight at Plassey, and his name is a synonym for traitor in Bengali, Urdu and Hindi to this day. He was an Arab by descent who had risen in the service of the Nawabs of Bengal and married into the ruling family. When the young Siraj ud-Daulah succeeded in 1756 and antagonised both the British and his own court, the East India Company under Robert Clive negotiated with Mir Jafar, William Watts acting as intermediary and the banking house of the Jagat Seths providing the money: he would hold his division back, and would be made Nawab. At Plassey on 23 June 1757 he did exactly that. Two thirds of the Bengal army stood still, a rainstorm wet the Nawab's powder and not the Company's, and a battle that should have been decided by numbers took a few hours. Siraj was captured and murdered. Mir Jafar became Nawab and discovered what the position now meant: the Company set the terms, took the revenues of twenty-four parganas, and deposed him in 1760 in favour of his son-in-law when he could not pay, then restored him in 1763 when the son-in-law proved less pliable. He died in 1765, the year the Company took the diwani and began collecting Bengal's land revenue directly. What Plassey established was not a conquest but a protectorate that behaved like one. His descendants held the title of Nawab of Bengal under British protection until 1880, with no power attached to it. The word mirjafar entered ordinary speech across northern India and Pakistan and is still used. Whether he was uniquely treacherous or simply the courtier who took an offer that several others had also been made is a question Indian historians have argued about for two centuries.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history