When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of
Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight
in a cramped prison. Of the group, 123 died of suffocation. While this
episode was never independently confirmed, the story of "the black hole
of Calcutta" was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an
atrocity committed by savage colonial subjects. The Black Hole of
Empire follows the ever-changing representations of this historical
event and founding myth of the British Empire in India, from the
eighteenth century to the present. Partha Chatterjee explores how a
supposed tragedy paved the ideological foundations for the "civilizing"
force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India.
Chatterjee takes a close look at the justifications of modern empire by
liberal thinkers, international lawyers, and conservative
traditionalists, and examines the intellectual and political responses
of the colonized, including those of Bengali nationalists. The two sides
of empire's entwined history are brought together in the story of the
Black Hole memorial: set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821,
restored by Lord Curzon in 1902, and removed in 1940 to a neglected
churchyard. Challenging conventional truisms of imperial history,
nationalist scholarship, and liberal visions of globalization,
Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the
history of the modern state.
