But instead of proceeding with his plan, the retinue was redirected to Bhagawangola, about fifteen miles away from Mansurganj. The flight of Siraj was meant to take him to Rajmahal. At the stroke of three, on June 25, those loyal unto the last followed the Nawab, leaving Mansurganj for good-or for Robert Clive or Mir Jaffar. The coaches and the palanqueens and the elephants and the furniture and the jewels and his consorts, including his favourite Lutfunnisa Begum, were readied in haste. Finding himself abandoned, Siraj, then, prepared for an unholy exodus. Siraj wanted no man to be turned away, doubtless, inspired by his repentance. He ordered his men to disburse liberal sums from his treasury to whosoever had any demand on it. That was eight days after the Nawab succeeded in escaping from his palace in Mansurganj, following the news of desertion by his troops at Plassey. Two weeks after the Eid-ul-Fitr in the Islamic lunar year 1170-or 1757-Nawab Sirajuddaulah was captured by the troops of Mir Qasim. It has become almost customary for accounts of the Battle of Plassey to chart the historiography of events between the incident infamous as the alleged 'Black Hole of Calcutta' (June 20, 1956) and the battle of June 1757-that Manu Pillai has termed as the 'war that defined modern India.' The events following the battle make the betrayal of Sirajuddaulah even more palpable. It was "Plassey which necessitated," he remarked, "the conquest and colonization of the Cape of Good Hope, of the Mauritius, the protectorship over Egypt Plassey which gave to the sons of her middle-classes the finest field for the development of their talent and industry the world has ever known … the conviction of which underlies the thought of every true Englishman." It was Plassey, nevertheless, that also exposed South Asia's internal slanderous plots and inequities.Īs another Victorian author, George Alfred Henty, wrote in 1894, "the whole of the circumstances that followed the signature of the treaty, the manner in which the unhappy youth was alternately cajoled and bullied to his ruin, the loathsome treachery in which those around him engaged with the connivance of the English, and lastly the murder in cold blood, which Meer Jaffier, our creature, was allowed to perpetrate, rendered the whole transaction one of the blackest in the annals of English history." George Bruce Malleson, in The Decisive Battles of India (1885), styled Plassey as the most inglorious English victory. The Bengal army comprised about 50,000 infantry, 15,000 cavalry, soldiers, 300 cannons, and 300 elephants.
The army consisted of approximately 3,000 troops (including 9 cannons, 200 Topasses, 900 Europeans, and 2,100 sepoys), while they faced a Bengal army that was twenty times stronger. On June 23, 1757, the Battle of Plassey witnessed the bewilderingly absurd takeover of Bengal by Robert Clive's army.
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