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Updated: June 6, 2025
It was said that their chiefs, when united by common peril, could bring eighty thousand men into the field. Sujah Dowlah had himself seen them fight, and wisely shrank from a conflict with them. There was in India one army, and only one, against which even those proud Caucasian tribes could not stand.
It is destiny. Those who fall by my hands would perish instead by pestilence or famine or wild beasts if I forbore to slay them. They die because it is the will of Allah." I listened in consternation to this frightful profession of fatalism by which Surajah Dowlah sought to decline the responsibility of his wicked acts. In the meantime he read the letter which I had brought from Colonel Clive.
What may be their earliest history it is impossible to state. All that is positively known of them is that they once formed two of the three eyes of the god Siva, and that they were abstracted from the head of the idol during the loot of the Hindu temples after Clive's defeat of Suraja Dowlah, in 1757.
Throughout the audience they kept their eyes fixed on us with a most bloodthirsty expression, as though expecting the signal to fall upon and slay us. Surajah Dowlah was little changed from when I had last seen him.
However, it is not my intention to dwell upon these disputes, to which I am only induced to refer by a spirit of loyalty to my old commander and friend, for such he permitted me to call him. "Remember," the Colonel said to me at parting, "above all, to show no fear of Surajah Dowlah. Mr. Watts is too modest in his behaviour, and for that reason the young tyrant despises and ill-uses him.
When the night did end and the awakened despot did allow the door of the Blackhole to be opened, only twenty-three out of the hundred and forty-six victims were alive. The hundred and twenty-three dead bodies were hurriedly buried in a common pit. It is simply impossible to exonerate Surajah Dowlah from the shame and stain of that deed.
They hastened to carry the news to the Nabob, and after a short time they returned and conducted me into his presence. Although scarcely three months had elapsed since I had last seen Surajah Dowlah, I observed a change for the worse in his appearance.
Omichund being thus cunningly bought over, Clive prepared for action, flung defiance at Surajah Dowlah, and marched against him. On June 23, 1757, the fate of England in India was decided by the famous battle of Plassey, or, as it should be more correctly called, Palasi. Plassey was a great victory.
At one moment he talks of sending messengers to Suraja Dowlah, to offer to pay any sum he may demand, in order to induce him to retire; the next he talks of defending the fort to the last. We can get him to give no orders, to decide on nothing, and the other officials are equally impotent and imbecile." On the 18th, the army of the nabob approached.
But in the year 1758 the Nabob Ali Vardi Khan died, and was succeeded by his grandson, Siraju'd Daulah, infamous in English history as Surajah Dowlah. This creature, who incarnated in his own proper person all the worst vices of the East, without apparently possessing any of the East's redeeming virtues, cherished a very bitter hatred of the English.
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