IT STANDS, overgrown with weeds, in a corner of the neglected grounds of St John’s Church in Calcutta, a 50ft obelisk commemorating an infamous event that took place 250 years ago tomorrow — if it happened at all.

Generations of wide-eyed English schoolboys have been brought up on the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta, of how 123 British men, women and children perished in a cramped and stifling dungeon deep in the bowels of Fort William after the encampment was captured by the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj Ud Daulah.

The story – based on the lone testimony of John Holwell, the fort’s commanding officer and one of 23 survivors — was used to characterise India as a nation that needed civilising.

It was cited to justify the use of military force to recapture Calcutta at the Battle of Plassey the next year, and formed the ideological cornerstone of colonial rule for the next two centuries. But whether it really happened — at least in the manner described — is another question entirely.

There have been several challenges to Holwell’s account, not least by J. H. Little, an English schoolmaster, who, in 1916, labelled it a “giant hoax”.

More recent historians accept that the tragedy probably did happen, but that it was a result of negligence rather than malice and that the death toll was more likely 50 or 60.

In a book titled The Black Hole: Money, Myth and Indian Empire being published this month, the journalist Jan Dalley draws on company records, letters and the conflicting views of historians to argue that the incident was grossly exaggerated to disguise unseemly private profiteering by civil servants and the dishonourable desertions of the Establishment’s top brass.

Certainly the story has no place in the national consciousness of modern-day India. It is barely taught in schools, there is no reference to it at all in the latest edition of the New Cambridge History of India, and Indian historians dismiss it as a myth, even a lie. “The event is largely forgotten,” Partha Chatterjee, an anthropologist at the Centre for the Study of Social Sciences in Calcutta, said. “Whenever it is brought up now it is simply as an example of a falsehood of imperialist history.”

Basudeb Chatterjee, director of West Bengal’s government archives, was even more blunt: “Holwell was a congenital liar. His underlying motive was to impress on his superiors that he behaved nobly for surviving the experience. So he exaggerated. This story was constructed brick by brick until it became an example of how depraved Indians could be. The Nawab was painted black so the British could appear in bright relief. I call it the demonology of the Black Hole.”

There will be no ceremonies in Calcutta to mark tomorrow’s anniversary. “In England there might be some revival of the romantic, nostalgic stories of the Raj but few people here are really interested,” Dr Chatterjee said. “Stoking the old fires, imperialist or nationalist, is not going to help India today.”

Indeed it is hard to find any trace of what may or may not have happened 250 years ago, save for a small plaque on the General Post Office on the west side of the bustling Dalhousie Square where Fort William once stood.

Howell himself erected a monument on the square’s north-west corner, but it eventually disintegrated and the obelisk was rebuilt by Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, in 1902 as a symbol of British martyrdom for the Empire. Indian nationalists, insulted by its overbearing presence, moved it in 1940 to St John’s churchyard, where it now provides a perch for raucous crows. It does not feature on Calcutta’s tourist maps, and even locals are unaware of its existence.

One sweltering day last week an 18-year-old student named Mohammed Shamin was seeking shade in the church’s porch. The monument meant nothing to him, he said. “I’m not interested in history,” he told The Times. Busily writing in a bookkeeping ledger, he knows his future in a technology-driven India depends on recognising figures in financial accounts, not dates in a bygone era.

THE BLACK HOLE OF CALCUTTA

In 1896 a Bengali landlord who doubted Howell's story fenced round an area 15ft by 18ft and counted the number of tenants who could fit into it. The number was far fewer than 146

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