Who won the Battle of Plassey?
The British East India Company under Robert Clive won the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757, defeating Siraj ud-Daulah, Nawab of Bengal, despite being outnumbered more than ten to one. The battle was decided less by fighting than by treachery: the Nawab's general Mir Jafar held most of the army back after a secret deal with the Company. Plassey gave the Company control of wealthy Bengal and is seen as the foundation of British rule in India.4
On a monsoon day in 1757, outside a mango grove at Plassey in Bengal, a few thousand soldiers of the British East India Company faced a Bengali army many times their size. Yet the battle was half-won before a shot was fired, through a secret bargain, and its outcome set Britain on the road to an Indian empire.5
Part of Battles of India · Before: Sinhagad, 1670 · Next: Third Panipat, 1761
The Company and the Nawab
By the 1750s the Mughal Empire was in decline, and Bengal, one of its richest provinces, had become in practice an independent state under its own nawabs, ruling from Murshidabad. The British East India Company, chartered in 1600 to trade in the East, had grown into a power with its own troops and a fortified base, Fort William in Calcutta. Across India it was locked in a long struggle with its French rival, a contest that merged into the global Seven Years' War.6
In April 1756 the young Siraj ud-Daulah, still in his early twenties, became Nawab of Bengal. He resented the Company's new fortifications and its meddling in his court, and in June he marched on Calcutta and took it after a short siege. British prisoners were shut overnight in a small, airless cell; according to one survivor, 123 of 146 died. The "Black Hole of Calcutta" became a byword in Britain and a justification for revenge.7
The Company sent Robert Clive from Madras. Clive had made his name in the south in 1751, holding Arcot through a 52-day siege and then beating the enemy again at Arni; by 1755 he was a lieutenant colonel. He retook Calcutta early in 1757 and in March seized the French fort of Chandernagore. Clive believed the Nawab was planning, in his own words, "our ruin by a conjunction with the French." He was badly outnumbered and far from help, and he looked for another way to win.8
A conspiracy before the battle
Rather than rely on arms alone, Clive and the Company plotted with discontented figures at the Nawab's court. Chief among them was Mir Jafar, one of Siraj's commanders, who agreed to hold his large part of the army out of the fight in exchange for being made Nawab himself. The powerful Jagat Seth banking family, whose head, according to the National Army Museum, feared that the Nawab would seize the family's huge wealth, threw their weight behind the plot. The battle was, in effect, decided in advance.9
The march to Plassey
Clive marched north from Chandernagore on 13 June and reached the fort of Katwa on the 18th, taking it with its food stores. Then he hesitated, with the river between his army and the Nawab's. After a council of war Clive took about an hour to make up his mind, then crossed the river on the evening of the 22nd and marched through the night, reaching the grove at Plassey by one in the morning. The National Army Museum puts Plassey about 100 miles (160 km) north of Calcutta; Britannica gives about 80 miles (130 km).10
Clive's army was tiny. Britannica and the National Army Museum count about 3,000 men: some 800 Europeans, among them 600 regular soldiers of the 39th Foot, and about 2,100 Indian sepoys, with ten field guns and two small howitzers. Clive himself wrote of about 1,000 Europeans, 2,000 sepoys and eight cannon. Against them the Nawab brought some 50,000 men, including 16,000 cavalry and about 50 guns, part of them served by French gunners.11
The fight at the mango grove
At daybreak on 23 June the Nawab's army spread out in a great arc in front of the grove. By six it opened a heavy cannonade that lasted for hours. Clive kept his men behind the grove's mud banks, where the enemy guns did little harm; attacking the widely spaced batteries across the open plain was, he wrote, next to impossible.12
After hours of cannonade a monsoon downpour soaked both sides, but the Company kept its powder and cannon dry under tarpaulins while the Nawab's artillery fell silent, apart from a small party of French gunners who kept firing from the bank of a pond in front of the grove. Believing the British guns were silenced too, the Nawab's cavalry charged when the rain eased. They were met by disciplined Company fire from the grove, and the Nawab's loyal general Mir Madan was killed by a cannon shot.13
Treachery and collapse
As the fighting wavered, Mir Jafar and his huge contingent stood aside, exactly as arranged. Mir Madan's death shook the Nawab, and about noon, Clive wrote, the enemy drew its artillery back into its entrenched camp. Clive's second-in-command, Major Kilpatrick, seeing the enemy pull back, advanced without orders. Clive followed up, sent a detachment with two field guns to take the high-banked pond from which the French guns had harassed him, and the British stormed the high ground and a corner of the enemy camp with little loss.14
A general rout followed. The British pursued for six miles, passing more than forty abandoned cannon and a great train of baggage. By about five in the afternoon it was over. Clive reported 22 killed and 50 wounded, mostly sepoys, and estimated the enemy dead at about 500. Siraj, seeing himself betrayed, fled on a camel, was later captured by Mir Jafar's men and was stabbed to death. Company losses were trivial; the day was won at little cost in blood and much in intrigue.15
Why Plassey mattered
Plassey handed the Company control of Bengal, the richest province of India, and its revenues. Mir Jafar became a puppet Nawab, and the Company the true power behind him. The Nawab's treasury was divided among the victors; Clive's own share was worth a fortune, and Mir Jafar granted him the rents of the lands around Calcutta. For the French East India Company, Britannica notes, the defeat of its Bengal ally was a heavy blow.16
Clive became governor of Bengal. When a later Nawab of Bengal, the Nawab of Awadh and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II combined against the Company, they were beaten at Buxar in 1764, and in 1765 Clive obtained from Shah Alam the diwani, the right to collect the revenues of Bengal. Those revenues paid for further trade and conquest across India: over the next century the Company extended its rule to the south with the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799 and to the Punjab with the Second Sikh War of 1848 to 1849. Clive himself went home enormously rich and was given a peerage.17 › The Battle of Buxar, 1764
Historians treat the battle as the foundation of British rule in India, a turning point won as much by money and betrayal as by arms. It stands with Buxar, Panipat and Kohima among the greatest battles in Indian history.18 › The Battle of Assaye, 1803
Plassey in memory
Clive himself called Plassey a revolution and worked hard to present it as a great victory, and Victorian textbooks and celebrations made it the founding moment of British India. Its anniversary kept its power for a century. On 23 June 1857, exactly a hundred years later, the rebels of the Indian uprising attacked the British entrenchment at Cawnpore.19
The village of Palashi, from which the English name comes, lies just east of the Bhagirathi River in West Bengal; it probably takes its name from the palash tree, whose red flowers are used to make the colored powder thrown at Holi. A monument marks the battlefield today, though the river has shifted its course and washed part of the field away.20
