Two hundred and fifty years ago, on 23 June 1757, the last sovereign nawab of Bengal (which included present-day Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa and Bangladesh) was defeated on the banks of the Ganga by an army under the command of the British East India Company's Colonel Robert Clive. The battle came to be known as the Battle of Plassey, after the mango orchard of Palashi, near Murshidabad, on which it was fought. Clive's victory and the subsequent annexation of Bengal allowed the East India Company to strengthen its military might across India, paving the way for it to make massive economic gains – some would say plunder.
In spite of the importance of this turning point in the region's history, however, media pundits and historians throughout the Subcontinent showed little interest this past June in remembering the death of Nawab Mirza Muhammad Sirajuddaula (see pic), of his commanders Mir Madan and Mohanlal, or of the hundreds of soldiers who lost their lives on the day that British colonialism established its first territorial foothold on Southasian soil. Even as academics queued up in hope of publishing their essays on the mutinous events of 1857, which took place a full 100 years after the battle, the memorial in Plassey remained largely neglected. No government official deigned to lay a wreath here.
A child of the royal family of Murshidabad, then the capital of Bengal, Sirajuddaula was groomed by his maternal grandfather, Nawab Alivardi Khan, as his successor. To acquaint the 13-year-old boy with the arts of governance and martial affairs, Alivardi took him to battle against the Marathas in 1746. In May 1752, the septuagenarian nawab named Sirajuddaula his heir, splitting Bengal's gentry along complicated lines of loyalty. With the death of Alivardi in April 1756, things took a difficult turn. The defeat of the army of the 24-year-old nawab, enthroned only 14 months earlier, was no feat of military brilliance, but rather a tale of colonial cunning.
Though discontentment within certain palace factions following Sirajuddaula's ascension were a shot in the arm for the British, the plot for the young nawab's overthrow had in fact been in place long beforehand. According to Robert Orme, an official historian of the East India Company, the British had prepared a blueprint for the conquest of Bengal soon after Alivardi named his successor. British private trade had been experiencing severe cash-flow problems since the late 1740s, and financial crisis had also engulfed the Mughal regime. Bengal, in the meantime, was incredibly rich. According to official colonial records, Shaista Khan, governor of Bengal from 1664 to 1688, had amassed 640 million rupees, excluding gold and jewellery; during the early 1680s, he had even been able to give a bribe of 20 million rupees to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for an extension of his governorship.