The Black Hole that (N)Ever Was

‘Just as we continue to live in the age of nation-states, so have we not transcended the age of empire’, concludes Partha Chatterjee in his recent book (p. 345). There are many who announced the end of imperialism and colonialism in the second half of the twentieth century; Chatterjee contests such pronouncements. His riveting account uses as a narrative peg the incident of the night of 20 June 1756, when 123 out of 146 Europeans incarcerated on the orders of the nawab (governor) of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, in the much-too-close confines of a prison cell – later known notoriously as the Black Hole of Calcutta – allegedly died of suffocation. This episode occurred after Siraj had captured the English East India Company’s Fort William in Calcutta following a pitched battle in which many British and other European personnel (constituting about half the numbers), in addition to Indians and Armenians who had been given shelter, had either fallen or fled. The justification for the nawab’s attack was that the Company had been misusing the various trading privileges granted it since at least 1717 and was also now infringing on the sovereign rights of Bengal’s governor by strengthening the fortifications at its settlement. By the twentieth century the sole printed account of an eye-witness, narrated by John Zephania Holwell, elected Governor of Fort William when his superiors had ‘deserted’ and among the few survivors of the night’s confinement, would no longer be undisputed. Indeed, the numbers of those imprisoned and of those who died, as well as their identities, have all been thrown in doubt. The memorial erected by Holwell no longer exists and the replica built by Viceroy Curzon in the early twentieth century was removed from its original site to a corner of a churchyard in Calcutta.

Yet despite the tenuous evidence and the protean nature of its memorialization, each retelling of the infamous occurrences of that night reflects, according to Chatterjee, shifting ideologies and norms of empire and of the principles governing the interaction of mostly Western nation-states. And as Indians picked up and narrated the story, they used it to shape and reshape anti-colonial nationalism. Even now, Chatterjee argues, the ‘ground remains fertile’ for the continued reproduction of the tale of the Black Hole as a template for the way in which the sovereignty of certain nations is posited and maintained over that of others.

Chatterjee’s is not the first recent book to point to the present-day relevance of older imperial pasts. Among others, Nicholas B. Dirks in his 2006 study The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain directed our scrutiny to the continued efforts to cleanse empire of the taint of corruption that has tarnished it since the mid eighteenth century not only in India but in other parts of the world. Dirks peeled away the self-legitimizing justifications of governments claiming to act in the name of liberty, democracy, or a ‘civilizing’ impulse, insisting that we recognize them for what they were: projects of ‘domination and exploitation’ begun and mired in scandal.¹ Every effort to expose the corruption was, Dirks argued, a very public charade intended to enable empire to emerge stronger than ever. In a similar vein, Chatterjee reveals another hidden but vital pillar of empire: the privilege exercised by a certain group of Western powers of declaring and naturalizing what was deemed exceptional about the colony and the colonized. According to both writers, the politico-military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 by the USA and its allies is only the latest manifestation of Western imperialism. Discursive thaumaturgy, smoke screens, camouflage, ‘secret veil[s]’; all worked then to disguise colonial domination and work now to mask its survival. The death knell of empire may have indeed been sounded too soon and the jubilation or mourning – depending on one’s perspective – may have been premature.

Siraj’s taking of...