Black Hole Monument (Holwell Monument) — Attraction in Kolkata

The Black Hole of Calcutta was a small prison or dungeon in Fort William, Calcutta where troops of Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, held British prisoners of war for three days on 20 June 1756.

John Zephaniah Holwell, one of the British prisoners and an employee of the East India Company, said that, after the fall of Fort William, the surviving British soldiers, Anglo-Indian soldiers, and Indian civilians were imprisoned overnight in conditions so cramped that many people died from suffocation and heat exhaustion, and that 123 of 146 prisoners of war imprisoned there died.

Fort William was established to protect the East India Company's trade in the city of Calcutta, the principal city of the Bengal Presidency. In 1756 India, there existed the possibility of imperial confrontation with military forces of the Kingdom of France, so the British reinforced the fort.

Siraj-ud-daula ordered the fortifications to be stopped by the French and British, and the French complied while British did not.

In consequence to that British indifference to his authority, Siraj ud-Daulah organised his army and laid siege to Fort William. In an effort to survive the losing battle, the British commander ordered the surviving soldiers of the garrison to escape, yet left behind 146 soldiers under the civilian command of John Zephaniah Holwell, a senior bureaucrat of the East India Company, who had been a military surgeon in...

After the battle of Plassey, Holwell erected a brick and plaster monument at the north-west corner of the Dalhousie square in memory of the victims of the Black Hole Tragedy where 146 prisoners were forced into a dungeon of 14 ft. by 18 ft. with a single tiny window, on the night of 20th June, 1756. Due to the heat and suffocation, 123 of them died but Holwell somehow survived. The octagonal monument had six marble tablets inscribed with the name of the victims.

But with the passage of time, the condition of the monument deteriorated and finally under the orders of the Governor General Francis Rawdon Hastings, the memorial was dismantled in 1821.

Much later, Lord Curzon took the initiative to build a marble replica of the Holwell Monument and placed it in the same position as the old one. The replica was erected on 19th December, 1902. He had not only built the replica but also placed brass lines and marble plaques, marking the site of the original or old...

The monument is situated inside the St. Jones church and you have to buy ticket of Rs.10(INR) to visit the place. The Black Hole is a memorial built by the British in memory of the British prisoners of war who died in the Black Hole tragedy. According to history, during the seize of Calcutta, Nawab Siraj Ud-Daulah took 146 British prisoner and confined them in a room measuring 14 feet by 8 feet and locked them up overnight. Only 23 survived, the rest 123 perished of suffocation and heat stroke. John Holwell one of the survivors, who later became the Governor of Bengal, left this account. It was he who built this memorial in honor of the deceased soldiers. However, during the last years of independence movement in 1940’s, the monument was moved to the compound of St. John’s Church. The octagonal obelisk styled memorial contains the names of 123 people who were “killed” in the Calcutta Black...