Battle of Plassey

Background

The Mughal empire had fragmented, and in Bengal the nawabs governed from Murshidabad. The East India Company had traded there since the 1650s from Calcutta and its Fort William, and claimed duty-free trade under a 1717 imperial grant that the nawabs resented. When Siraj ud-Daulah succeeded his grandfather Alivardi Khan in April 1756, aged about 23, he objected to the Company's new fortifications, its abuse of trade passes and its sheltering of his subjects. When talks failed he took Calcutta in June 1756. Many of the prisoners held overnight in the fort's cell, the 'Black Hole', died, and the episode later served to justify British revenge.

A relief force from Madras under Colonel Robert Clive and Admiral Charles Watson retook Calcutta in January 1757, forced the Nawab into the Treaty of Alinagar in February, and, with Britain and France now at war, took the French settlement of Chandernagore in March.

Clive and the Calcutta council then set out to replace the Nawab. Siraj had alienated his uncle Mir Jafar, the army's paymaster, and the Jagat Seth bankers, who feared for their wealth. Company agents William Watts and Luke Scrafton worked with the merchant Omichund and the discontented courtiers; Mir Jafar signed the treaties in early June. Bengali historians stress that the Company engineered the plot rather than merely joining one. Clive marched north on 13 June, took Katwa on 19 June, and after a divided council of war crossed the Bhagirathi on 22 June to meet the Nawab's army, which had been delayed at Murshidabad by troops refusing to march until paid their arrears.

The armies

Clive had about 3,000 men. Rather fewer than a thousand were Europeans: men of the 39th Foot, the only King's regiment in India, the Madras and Bengal European companies and a few from Bombay, with Topasses and a handful of sailors. The rest were some 2,100 sepoys, many recruited from the Dusadh community. He had no cavalry. His artillery, about ten light field guns and two howitzers, was the decisive arm; the Bengal company survives as 9 (Plassey) Battery, Royal Artillery. His subordinates included Major Kilpatrick and Major Eyre Coote of the 39th.

The Nawab's army numbered about 50,000: infantry with matchlocks, swords, pikes and rockets, and perhaps 16,000–20,000 cavalry with swords and lances. Its fifty-odd heavy guns, 18- to 32-pounders, rode on raised wooden stages drawn by forty or fifty yoke of oxen, with an elephant pushing behind. About 50 Frenchmen under St Frais worked a few lighter pieces of their own. Its quality was uneven but its loyalty was the real problem. Only the division of Mir Madan and Diwan Mohanlal, about 5,000 horse and 7,000 foot, was firmly committed to Siraj. The rest, some 45,000 men, stood under Rai Durlabh on the right, Yar Lutuf Khan in the centre and Mir Jafar on the left nearest the British, all three named among the conspirators.

The battle

The field. Clive's army reached Plassey at about 1.00 on 23 June and occupied Laksha Bagh, a mango grove about 800 yards long and 300 wide, enclosed by a ditch and mud bank and set at an angle to the river. Clive took a walled hunting lodge on the bank just north of it as his quarters. About a mile to the north the Nawab's army lay behind earthworks running inland from the river and then north-east for some three miles, with a gun redoubt at the angle and a wooded hillock beyond. Between the armies stood two water tanks ringed by earth mounds.

Morning: the cannonade (8.00–about 11.00). At daybreak the Nawab's army came out and spread in a great arc from the hillock to within 800 yards of the grove's southern corner, threatening to envelop it. St Frais set his guns on the mound of the larger tank, inside a mile of the grove, with Mir Madan and Mohanlal behind him. Clive, watching from the lodge roof for a sign from Mir Jafar, drew his men up in front of the grove: Europeans in the centre in four divisions, three 6-pounders on each flank, sepoys on the wings, two guns and the howitzers forward by some brick kilns. At 8.00 the French fired the first shot and the Nawab's whole artillery opened. By 8.30 Clive had lost about 30 men and pulled back behind the grove's bank, leaving the forward guns in place. Much of the Bengali shot flew high. For three hours neither side moved, and Clive's officers agreed to hold the grove until dark and try a night attack on the camp.

Midday: the rain. A heavy monsoon storm then broke. The Company's gunners kept their powder under tarpaulins; the Nawab's men did not, and their fire slackened. Assuming the British guns were also silenced, Mir Madan led his cavalry forward as the rain eased and was driven back by grapeshot, mortally wounded. Accounts disagree on the timing and the manner of his death.

Early afternoon: the Nawab loses heart. Siraj had spent the cannonade in his tent. Shaken by Mir Madan's death, he sent for Mir Jafar, threw his turban at his feet and begged him to defend it. Mir Jafar promised to, advised suspending the fight until the next day, and sent word to Clive to push on. Rai Durlabh urged Siraj to pull the army back behind the entrenchments and leave for Murshidabad. Siraj ordered Mohanlal to withdraw and rode off on a camel with about 2,000 horsemen.

14.00–17.00: the advance. About 14.00 the Nawab's army stopped firing and turned back to its lines, leaving St Frais unsupported. Kilpatrick, in command while Clive rested, took two companies of the 39th and two guns towards the tank without orders. Clive rebuked him, then brought up the whole army; the French fell back to the redoubt at about 15.00. A large body on the Nawab's left now lingered and edged towards the grove; Clive, not recognising Mir Jafar's division, checked it with three platoons and a gun, and it stayed out of the fight. From the tank mounds the British guns shelled the camp. Bengali matchlockmen kept up fire from ditches and bushes on the hillock, cavalry charged and were driven off, and the British took most of their losses now. Clive then attacked the redoubt and the hillock together. Coote's grenadiers of the 39th took the hill at about 16.30, its defenders retiring without firing; St Frais abandoned the redoubt; by 17.00 the camp was in British hands. Elephants and oxen stampeding, and an accidental explosion of powder, added to the confusion. Clive's army halted beyond Daudpur at 20.00.

Aftermath

The Company lost 22 killed and 50 wounded; Clive put the Nawab's loss at about 500. A Mughal historian, Ghulam Husain Khan, writing in 1781, praised the order and rapidity of the British artillery and musketry. Banglapedia's verdict is that the defeat was political rather than military: about two-thirds of the army merely watched.

On 24 June Clive met Mir Jafar at Daudpur and hailed him as Nawab of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, installing him at Murshidabad on 29 June. Siraj fled by boat towards Patna and Jean Law's French, but was betrayed at Rajmahal on 2 July and murdered on the orders of Mir Jafar's son Miran. The new Nawab owed the Company 22 million rupees in restitution, as well as land around Calcutta; Clive grew immensely rich and became Baron Clive of Plassey. Omichund, cheated by a forged second treaty, got nothing.

Mir Jafar proved a puppet and was later replaced by Mir Qasim; the Company's victory at Buxar in 1764 brought the diwani, the revenues of Bengal, in 1765. Clive called the battle 'a revolution'. Victorian Britain treated it as the birth of its Indian empire, while revisionist historians such as Jon Wilson argue it merely prolonged Bengal's political chaos. In Bengal Mir Madan and Mohanlal are remembered as the loyal heroes: obelisks to Mir Madan and two other fallen officers stand near the battlefield, a statue of Siraj was added beside the Plassey monument in 2007, and his fall has inspired Bengali poetry, plays and films.

Wargaming it

Plassey suits a one-day game at battalion or company level, with each Company division, gun section and Bengali brigade a unit and turns of 20–30 minutes from 8.00 to 17.00. The table is small and nearly flat: the walled grove and hunting lodge on one edge, the two tank mounds in the middle, the entrenchment, redoubt and wooded hillock on the other, with the river closing one flank.

The game's heart is hidden loyalty. Mir Jafar, Rai Durlabh and Yar Lutuf Khan should be controlled by secret rolls or an umpire, so that neither player knows when or whether those 45,000 men will move. The Company player wants to sit in the grove and let his guns work; the Nawab player has the numbers to envelop him but only Mir Madan's 12,000 he can trust. The rain needs a rule: random onset, with powder protection decided before the game. So does the Nawab's own morale, since Siraj's departure, not a defeat in the field, collapsed the army.

The 'what ifs' give replay value. What if the Nawab's gunners had covered their powder, or Mir Madan had lived? What if Mir Jafar had changed sides once more and attacked? What if Jean Law's French, two days away, had arrived? A night attack on the camp, as Clive's officers planned, makes an alternative scenario, as does the storming of Katwa four days earlier.

Maps and pictures