The Betrayal at Plassey

Bengal, in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent, was in the eighteenth century the richest and most populous province of the Mughal world, a land of immense wealth in textiles, grain and trade, ruled by its own Nawab as a virtually independent Muslim prince in the twilight of Mughal power. Into this land the European trading companies, above all the English East India Company, had thrust themselves, building fortified factories, amassing wealth and increasingly meddling in its politics. In 1756 the young Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah, seeking to curb the growing power and the abuses of the Company, moved against it and took its fort at Calcutta; the Company struck back, and at dawn on 23 June 1757 its forces under Robert Clive, only some three thousand men, met the Nawab's army, perhaps fifty thousand strong, at the mango grove of Palashi on the Bhagirathi north of Calcutta. The Persian chronicle of the age, the Siyar al-Muta'akhkhirin of Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, records how the day was decided not by fighting, of which there was remarkably little, but by treachery: Clive had conspired in secret with the Nawab's chief general, Mir Jafar, and with disaffected bankers and nobles, and Mir Jafar, bought with the promise of the throne, held the great bulk of the Nawab's army motionless and out of the action. The loyal commander Mir Madan, who pressed the fight, was struck down by a cannon-ball early in the day; with his fall and a burst of monsoon rain that the Company kept its powder dry against, the Nawab's heart failed him and he was persuaded to quit the field. Siraj ud-Daulah, betrayed, was defeated and within days captured and killed, and Mir Jafar was set up by the Company as a puppet Nawab in his place. Plassey was a small battle of enormous consequence: it made the Company, a corporation of foreign merchants, the real master of Bengal, free to plunder its treasury and its trade, and it is reckoned the beginning of the long British conquest and colonial rule of India, a rule under which the wealth of the land was drained away and which brought, within a generation, the catastrophic Bengal famine of 1770 and lasting exploitation and subjection upon its peoples. This scene depicts the field of Palashi with the two armies drawn up, the Company's small ordered line against the Nawab's vast and strangely passive host as the cannonade falters; in keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, and the violence is not depicted.