As the English had taken no heed of his movements, they could not oppose him at the time with success;* but afterwards they collected a large army, and marched boldly towards Murshidabad. They also brought over Jafar Ali Khan to their interest, upon the promise of making over the province of Bengal to him.* When their array reached within one or two marches from Murshidabad, Siraj ud-Daulah advanced to oppose them.* Jafar Ali Khan, who had the command of all his forces, wished to capture and surrender him to the English without any battle being fought; but Siraj ud-Daulah soon became acquainted with his intentions, and seeing himself in a helpless situation, secretly embarked alone in a boat and fled.
After his flight the English assigned the province of Bengal to Jafar Ali Khan, who established his rule there, and appointed his deputies in all its districts. All the property of Siraj ud-Daulah was taken and divided between him and the English.* When Siraj ud-Daulah had gone thirty kos* from Murshidabad, he stopped for a while, and ordered his servant to land in the jungle, and try to get some fire for his hukka.* Accordingly the servant disembarked, and seeing the cottage of a darwesh,* he approached it, and asked the occupant for some fire.
* The East India Company could not move without their inspirational general, Robert Clive, who had to be recalled from England where he was settling down with his new wife. See Blind Date. Siraj had not attempted to justify the Black Hole incident, and indeed had offered compensation, but the developing situation in The Seven Years’ War (1756-63) meant that from London’s point of view, Bengal had to be secured.
* This arrangement between the British East India Company and Jafar Ali Khan, brokered by William Watts (?1722-1764), became infamous. In India, it was because Jafar Ali Khan betrayed his Nawab. In England it was because Robert Clive, who was pressed for time, faked the signature of Vice Admiral Charles Watson (1714-1757) on a letter confirming Jafar as Nawab of Bengal in the event of a British victory. Years later, this was brought up in Parliament during an unsuccessful impeachment of Clive over his time as Governor of Bengal. Some at the East India Company hoped the shady deal with Jafar might be used to justify seizing Clive’s fantastic Indian wealth for the financially troubled Company — “without the smallest idea” as one observer drily remarked “of restoring to the injured natives of India the territories and revenues said to have been so unjustly acquired”.
* They met at Plassey (Palashi) on June 23rd, 1757. See a map of India in 1763. Plassey can be found towards the upper right, a few miles north of Calcutta at the northern tip of the Bay of Bengal. The battle pitted the Nawab’s army, backed up by the French East India Company and the Kingdom of France, against the militia of the British East India Company commanded by Clive of India. The British East India Company was a shareholder company tasked with advancing British interests overseas, empowered to act in the Crown’s name and granted what we would now dignify as a ‘peacekeeping force’. The Company enjoyed a legally-binding monopoly on British trade with India, acting as a middle-man, and its tax revenues and loans were a major source of income for the Treasury.
* This too was a bone of contention in the impeachment of Robert Clive, since he was the man who handled the English side of the division. Under Jafar’s indulgent eye, he had been led through Bengal’s treasury and invited to take whatever he pleased for his own personal use; later, he would remark that under the temptation placed before him he had shown uncommon restraint. The Company, hoping to be the beneficiaries of some kind of compensation, insinuated that he had ransacked the treasury, which with the appreciative Mir Jafar at hand was hardly necessary.
* According to Sir Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, the kos is an Indian measure of distance which the British standardised to 2 miles 4 furlongs and 183½ yards, or 2.6 miles.
* The same word as ‘hookah’, transliterated from Bengali.
* The same word as dervish, a member of a Muslim brotherhood