Plassey 1757: The Mango Grove, the Forged Treaty and the Day a Company Bought Bengal

Past midnight on 23 June 1757, a column of tired, wet men stumbled into a mango orchard on the east bank of the Bhagirathi, a channel of the Ganges about 150 kilometres north of Calcutta. The orchard was called Lakhbagh, the garden of a hundred thousand trees. Beside it stood a hunting lodge of the Nawab of Bengal. The village nearby took its name from the palash, the flame-of-the-forest tree: Palashi. The English wrote it Plassey.

The man leading them was Robert Clive, 31, a former clerk of the East India Company who had made his name as a soldier in the south. He had about 3,000 men. Roughly 2,100 of them were Indian sepoys; the rest were European soldiers, gunners and sailors, with a handful of field guns. Across the plain, in a vast camp, lay the army of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah: around 50,000 men by the usual count, with dozens of heavy guns and war elephants.

Two days earlier Clive’s own council of war had voted not to cross the river. He had agreed with them, gone off alone, and then changed his mind. What made the gamble thinkable was a piece of paper. Siraj’s paymaster and senior general, Mir Jafar, had signed a secret treaty promising to change sides. Clive did not know whether he would keep his word.

By sunset the next day, Mir Jafar had kept it, more or less, by doing nothing at all. Fewer than two dozen of Clive’s men were dead. The richest province of the Mughal empire had a new master, and the master was a trading company. This is how it happened, and how differently the British, the Indians and the Bangladeshis still tell it.

Murshidabad, April 1756. The old nawab Alivardi Khan, who had held Bengal for sixteen years against Maratha raiders, died in his eighties. He left the throne to his favourite grandson, Siraj-ud-Daulah, then about 23.

Bengal was the treasure house of the Mughal empire, weaving the muslins and silks Europe craved. Clive would later write that Murshidabad was

as extensive, populous, and rich as the city of LondonRobert Clive, on Murshidabad, 1757

The young nawab had enemies before he had a crown. An aunt, Ghaseti Begum, and a cousin, Shaukat Jang of Purnea, wanted it for themselves. Many senior men at court, Mir Jafar among them, resented being passed over. The great banking house of the Jagat Seths, who handled the province’s revenue and minted its coins, did not trust him. Ghulam Husain Khan, a nobleman of the time who wrote a famous history of the age, the Siyar-ul-Mutakherin, painted him as rash, cruel and insulting to the old nobility.

Siraj also had a quarrel with the foreigners. The English were strengthening Fort William in Calcutta, without his leave, against an expected war with the French. Company servants were using the Mughal trade pass, the dastak, which freed the Company’s own goods from customs, to shield their private trade too, and the nawab lost the duties. And Calcutta was sheltering Krishnadas, son of a Dhaka official, who had fled with government money.

Siraj ordered the new walls pulled down. The Calcutta governor, Roger Drake, sent back an answer the nawab took as an insult. In early June 1756 Siraj seized the English factory at Kasimbazar, near his capital; a young clerk named Warren Hastings was among the Englishmen taken. Then he marched south on Calcutta.

Calcutta, 16 June 1756. The nawab’s army reached the town and began to push through its outskirts. Fort William was weak and badly led. On 19 June Governor Drake and other senior men slipped away to the ships on the river, leaving much of the garrison behind. John Zephaniah Holwell, a Company official and surgeon, took command of those left. On 20 June the fort surrendered. Siraj renamed the town Alinagar.

That night, the European prisoners were locked into the fort’s punishment cell, a room about 18 feet by 14 with two small barred windows, in the heat of a Bengal June. In the morning the door was opened. What happened inside became the most famous horror story of the British Empire.

Holwell, who survived, wrote it up in 1758. He said 146 people had been forced into the room and only 23 came out alive. His account of men fighting for air at the windows was retold and taught for nearly two centuries. In Britain it became proof of the cruelty of the nawab, and a reason for what came next.

The doubts began in Bengal. In the 1890s the historian Akshay Kumar Maitreya, in a Bengali life of Siraj, pointed out that the event was hardly mentioned by others writing at the time, Indian or British, and asked how 146 adults could fit in such a room. The British scholar J.H. Little, who translated his work, went further in the journal Bengal Past and Present in 1916 and called Holwell’s story a hoax. The modern view sits between them. The historian Stanley Wolpert, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, put the numbers at about 64 locked in and 21 surviving.

Two things are agreed by most. Prisoners did die in that room that night. And Holwell himself did not say Siraj ordered it; he blamed junior officers acting out of revenge, though he said the nawab showed no pity afterwards. Wolpert concluded Siraj neither ordered the imprisonment nor knew of it.

Holwell’s figure: 146 locked in, 23 alive next morning. Modern estimates (Wolpert; the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography): about 64 locked in, 21 alive. Either way, people died; the argument is over how many, and over who was to blame.

The news reached Madras in August 1756. The Company sent Clive with soldiers and Admiral Charles Watson with warships of the Royal Navy. They came up the Hooghly in December, and on 2 January 1757 Calcutta was back in English hands.

On 5 February Clive attacked Siraj’s camp outside the town in a dawn fog; neither side won cleanly, but the nawab was shaken. On 9 February he signed the Treaty of Alinagar, restoring the Company’s privileges and allowing it to fortify Calcutta and mint coins.

Europe was now at war, and Clive turned on the French. Siraj wavered over letting them fight on his soil. The English attacked, and the French settlement of Chandernagore fell on 23 March after Watson forced his ships past the river blockade. The nawab had lost his only European counterweight to the English. By then the men around him were already talking to Clive.

The conspiracy that toppled Siraj had many fathers, and historians still argue over whose idea it was. The names are not in dispute.

Jagat Seth Mahtab Rai and his cousin Maharaja Swarup Chand ran the biggest bank in India; they had made and unmade nawabs before. Mir Jafar, a veteran soldier related by marriage to Alivardi, wanted the throne. Rai Durlabh, a senior Hindu general and finance officer, and Yar Lutuf Khan, a cavalry commander who at first hoped to be nawab himself, joined in. Omichund (Amir Chand), a rich Calcutta merchant who had long supplied the Company and carried messages between Calcutta and the court, became the go-between. Company records describe him as Punjabi by birth and a follower of Guru Nanak; other writers call him a Hindu merchant.

On the English side, the Company’s agent at Murshidabad, William Watts, worked the plot from inside the city. On 4 June 1757 Mir Jafar signed the secret treaty. It promised the Company restitution of 22 million rupees, about £2.75 million then, with gifts for the army, the navy and the Calcutta council, and confirmed the Company’s trading rights and lands around Calcutta.

William Dalrymple, whose 2019 history The Anarchy tells this story, puts the money at the centre. The bankers, he argues, paid the Company to do a job for them.

Clive fought Plassey on Marwari wages.William Dalrymple, The Week, 2020

Then Omichund made his move. He knew everything, and he asked for 30 lakh rupees and five per cent of the treasure, or he would tell. Clive’s answer was two treaties. A real one, on white paper, left Omichund out. A fake one, on red paper, gave him his share and was shown to him. Admiral Watson refused to sign the fake. On Clive’s orders, Watson’s name was written on it anyway.

On 12 June Watts slipped out of Murshidabad. Siraj, who by now suspected Mir Jafar, made a show of reconciling with him. The next day Clive began his march north.

At about eight in the morning the first shot came from the nawab’s side, fired by a small French gun crew under an officer named St Frais, who had escaped from Chandernagore and still had a war to fight. The nawab’s great army spread in a long curve around the grove. Mir Jafar, Yar Lutuf Khan and Rai Durlabh commanded most of it. Nearest the British, ready to move, stood the men who had not been bought: the artillery chief Mir Madan and the general Mohan Lal, with about 12,000 horse and foot.

Clive pulled his men back behind the mud banks of the grove, and for three hours the two sides traded cannon fire. Then, around midday, the sky opened. A heavy monsoon downpour swept the field. The British, by their own account, threw tarpaulins over their powder. The nawab’s gunners did not, and their powder was soaked.

Thinking the English guns were drowned too, Mir Madan led his horsemen forward. The Company’s guns opened up with grapeshot. A cannon shot struck Mir Madan, and he was carried back to the nawab’s tent dying. The French gunners and Mohan Lal fought on. Nauwe Singh Hazari, a commander of musketeers, and Bahadur Ali Khan, an artillery captain, died with their men.

Inside the tent, Siraj sent for Mir Jafar. In the story told by later chroniclers, the young nawab threw his turban at his general’s feet and begged him to defend it. Mir Jafar advised him to call off the fighting for the day and attack again tomorrow; Rai Durlabh said the same. Siraj ordered Mohan Lal to fall back. As the loyal troops pulled back, their lines broke up, and Mir Jafar’s great wing of the army, closest to the English, simply stood and watched.

By the Company’s own accounts, Major Kilpatrick, one of Clive’s officers, saw the retreat and advanced without orders; Clive, furious, took over and pushed the whole force forward. By about five in the afternoon the Company held the nawab’s camp. Siraj had already fled on a camel with a couple of thousand horsemen. Clive reported 22 of his men killed and about 50 wounded. He estimated the nawab’s dead at about 500.

Siraj reached Murshidabad around midnight. Hardly anyone would stand by him. The next night, 24 June, he slipped out of the city by boat with his wife Lutf-un-Nisa and a few servants, heading for Patna, where the French might help.

Near Rajmahal he was recognised; local tradition blames a fakir he had once wronged. He was brought back to Murshidabad a prisoner. On the night of 2 July 1757, on the orders of Mir Jafar’s son Miran, he was stabbed to death by a man named in most accounts as Muhammadi Beg. He was about 24. The next morning his body was paraded through the city on an elephant, and carried through the gate of Mir Jafar’s palace, which Murshidabad still calls the Namak Haram Deorhi: the traitor’s gate.

Siraj lies in the garden cemetery of Khushbagh across the river, beside his grandfather Alivardi. Lutf-un-Nisa outlived him by more than thirty years and, by local tradition, tended his grave until she died.

On 29 June Clive led Mir Jafar into the palace at Murshidabad and seated him on the throne. The treasury held less than promised, so the payments came in instalments.

Mir Jafar paid the Company 17.7 million rupees in compensation, and gave Clive personally more than two million rupees. Clive’s share is usually put at about £234,000, which made him one of the richest men in Britain. He also received the Company’s rent from the lands around Calcutta, a jagir worth about £27,000 a year for life. Watts got more than a million rupees.

Omichund got nothing. On 29 June he was told the red treaty was a fake. Robert Orme, the Company’s historian, and later Lord Macaulay wrote that the shock drove him mad and that he soon died. He did not: he lived in Calcutta for another ten years and died in 1767, leaving money in his will to a London orphanage. Admiral Watson, who had refused to sign the fake treaty, died of fever in Calcutta that August.

When Parliament investigated the Company in 1772 and 1773, Clive was asked about his fortune. He said he could have taken far more.

I stand astonished at my own moderation.Robert Clive, to a committee of the House of Commons, 1773

The House cleared him and praised his great and meritorious services. On 22 November 1774 he died at his house in London, aged 49, from a cut throat; most writers believe he killed himself, though some historians argue it was an overdose of opium.

Mir Jafar soon found that the throne came with a creditor. The Company and its servants kept asking for money he did not have. In 1760 the Company replaced him with his son-in-law, Mir Qasim, who paid well for the post.

Mir Qasim was abler and wanted to rule for real. He moved his capital to Monghyr, built up an army, and in 1763, sick of Company servants abusing the dastak, scrapped customs duties for everyone, so that Indian traders paid no more than the English. The Company went to war. Mir Qasim lost battle after battle; in his fury his men killed English prisoners at Patna, and the Jagat Seth cousins, by most accounts, were killed too. The Company put old Mir Jafar back on the throne.

Mir Qasim fled west and joined the Nawab of Awadh, Shuja-ud-Daula, and the Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II. On 22–23 October 1764, at Buxar on the Ganges in Bihar, their armies, put at more than 40,000, met about 7,000 Company troops under Major Hector Munro, most of them sepoys. This time the Company won a real battle, and won it outright.

Clive came back to Bengal in May 1765 as governor. On 12 August 1765 at Allahabad, the defeated emperor granted the Company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha: the right to collect the land revenue of three provinces. In return Shah Alam got the districts of Kora and Allahabad and an annual tribute of 26 lakh rupees. A nawab still sat in Murshidabad, but the Company now held the money.

The autumn rice harvest of 1768 was poor. In 1769 the monsoon failed. By the spring of 1770 people in Bengal and Bihar were eating seed grain, leaves and, by some reports, each other. About 30 million people lived in the affected region.

The drought was nature’s work. What happened next was not. The Company had pushed land revenue up by about 30 per cent within a few years of taking over collection. As the famine began, its Calcutta council raised the land tax by 10 per cent on the advice of its Indian deputy, Muhammad Reza Khan. Company servants and their agents were accused of cornering rice and selling it at famine prices. Relief was small. Warren Hastings, reporting in 1772, admitted that collections had been ‘violently kept up’.

How many died is fiercely disputed. The Company’s own directors and Hastings spoke of a third of the population, a figure often given as about 10 million; the economist Amartya Sen, in 1983, called 10 million the best estimate. The historian Rajat Datta, working from district records, argued in 2000 that the figures were inflated and proposed about 1.2 million deaths. The demographer Tim Dyson, in 2018, called 10 million barely credible, and pointed out that many who vanished from villages had fled rather than died.

Whatever the true number, the Company went on collecting tax from a starving province. Two years later the Company itself was near bankruptcy, and Parliament began to take its Indian empire away from it.

The 1770 famine, by who says what. Company directors and Warren Hastings: about a third of the people (often given as 10 million). Amartya Sen (1983): 10 million. Rajat Datta (2000): about 1.2 million. Tim Dyson (2018): 10 million ‘barely credible’, at least 1 million.

For the British Empire, Plassey was a founding legend. Robert Orme, the Company’s historian, and later Macaulay wrote of a heroic colonel, a tyrant nawab and the Black Hole as the crime that justified everything. In 1901 Lord Curzon, the viceroy, put up a marble monument to Holwell’s dead in the heart of Calcutta.

Bengalis answered. Nabinchandra Sen’s long poem Palashir Yuddha (The Battle of Plassey) in 1875 mourned a lost freedom. Maitreya’s biography defended Siraj. In 1940 Subhas Chandra Bose made the Holwell monument the target of a campaign, and was arrested on the eve of a planned protest; that July the monument was taken down and moved to the churchyard of St John’s in Kolkata, where it stands today.

In Bengal, and across the border in Bangladesh, the name Mir Jafar became a word: a traitor. In 2026 Trinamool Congress leaders in West Bengal called MLAs and MPs who broke away from the party ‘Mir Jafars’, and the rebels threw the word straight back, according to The Wire. In the 2024 election a BJP candidate in Krishnanagar, Amrita Roy, whose ancestor Maharaja Krishnachandra had backed the conspiracy, argued that Siraj had been cruel to Hindus and the plotters had protected them, The Wire reported; historians point out that some of Siraj’s most loyal generals, such as Mohan Lal, were Hindus.

In Bangladesh, Siraj is honoured as the last independent nawab of Bengal, and 23 June is remembered as the day independence was lost. The Awami League was founded on that date in 1949, and Sheikh Hasina tied the party’s birth to Plassey. In Pakistan, the poet Muhammad Iqbal put Mir Jafar of Bengal beside Mir Sadiq of Mysore, who betrayed Tipu Sultan, as the great traitors.

a stigma on humanity, on religion, and the countryMuhammad Iqbal on Mir Jafar and Mir Sadiq, Javid Nama (English rendering)

At Palashi itself, a forum of local people marks the battle every June. Its general secretary, Gopa Mukherjee, told The Wire in 2026:

We should be able to learn from defeat.Gopa Mukherjee, Palashi, to The Wire, June 2026

Plassey was not a great battle. It was a business deal with gunfire at the end. A young nawab who had made enemies of everyone with money; bankers who wanted a safer ruler; generals who wanted the throne; and a company that wanted Bengal’s revenue and was willing to forge a signature to get it. Each side’s favourite story leaves something out. The British left out the forgery and the famine. Some nationalist retellings leave out how many Indians signed the treaty.

What came after is not in doubt. Within eight years the Company held the right to tax three provinces; within thirteen, Bengal starved while the revenue was collected. The Company’s Bengal army, paid for with Bengal’s money, went on to beat the Marathas, Mysore and finally the Khalsa: see our story of the Anglo-Sikh Wars and the fall of the Sikh Empire. Exactly one hundred years after Plassey, the sepoys of that same army rose against it: read the full story of 1857.

At Palashi the river has moved and the mango grove is gone. The three small obelisks for Mir Madan, Nauwe Singh Hazari and Bahadur Ali Khan, the men who did not change sides, are still there.