Black Hole of Calcutta in Kolkata

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comments 5

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  Dr.Rachna Dixit

  :: 07 November 2017 23:52:35

  It's a memorial in memory of hundreds who died in prison due to lack of air and space in closed wall of Prison.This place is GPO now next to collectorate

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  Prafulla Rajak

  :: 07 October 2017 13:45:08

  Very old landmark of kolkata 👌👌 Historical value ...

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  Prince Dewangan

  :: 15 September 2017 16:25:18

  Historically important place, especially for plassey war

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  Anmol D

  :: 04 August 2017 09:44:30

  It's actually Kolkata Collectorate.

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  Niloy Kumar Das

  :: 22 April 2017 12:28:40

  The Black Hole of Calcutta was a small dungeon in Fort William in Calcutta, India where troops of Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, held British prisoners of war after the Bengali army captured the fort on 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, Anglo-Indian soldiers, 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 died. Fort William was established to protect the East India Company's trade in the city of Calcutta, the principal city of the Bengal Presidency. In 1756 India, there existed the possibility of imperial confrontation with military forces of the Kingdom of France, so the British reinforced the fort. Meanwhile, the local ruler, the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, was unhappy with the East India Company's political interference in the internal affairs of his province; the British merchants were undermining his political power. As the Nawab, Siraj perceived a threat to Bengali independence and himself. He ordered the immediate cessation of the reinforcement of Fort William, but the East India Company paid no heed to the native ruler. In consequence to that British indifference to local Bengali authority, Siraj ud-Daulah organised his army and laid siege to Fort William. In an effort to survive the losing 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 a military surgeon, in earlier life. Moreover, the desertions of allied Indian troops made ineffective the British defence of Fort William, which fell to the siege of Bengali forces on 20 June 1757. The surviving defenders who were captured and made prisoners-of-war numbered between 64 and 69, along with an unknown number of Anglo-Indian soldiers and civilians who earlier had been sheltered in Fort William.