The Black Hole of Calcutta: How a dark chapter from British India inspired the term for collapsed stars in astrophysics

WHEN THE ENTIRE WORLD was taking steady strides in the field of astrophysics, and conferences and seminars discussed the lives of “dying stars” and "quasi-stellar" objects, a report sought to mention the term “black hole” while connecting it to the historical incident back in Calcutta 1756. 

There have been plenty of discussions and deliberations  on whether there is a “Calcutta-connection” to the studies in physics and Black hole. Amid all these, it begs the question for us to understand, how does this connection come about, and what is the “Black hole incident of Calcutta.”

What was the Black Hole of Calcutta Incident?

The East India Company had established its commercial ventures in Calcutta by the 1690s. After a war with the Mughals in Bengal, the Company sought to shift its main Bengal trading point from Hooghly to Calcutta, and began to coordinate its functions from Fort William. 

Bengal had been in the Company’s eye for long as one of the most strategically significant, and commercially profitable regions in the Indian subcontinent. 

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In April 1756 CE, Muhammad Siraj Ud-Daulah took the throne of Bengal. But the British expansion and fortification was not well received by Siraj Ud-Daulah. The then Governor, Roger Drake did not pay heed to Nawab’s repeated warnings. Finally, the Nawab organized his army of 50,000 troops and headed towards Calcutta, to siege Fort William.

In the confrontation, the Nawab’s forces triumphed over the relatively weaker armed resistance of the East India Company. It was then that the popular tale of “Calcutta’s Black Hole” had purportedly taken place. It was an account popularized by British survivor John Zephaniah Holwell that became the source of its revelation to the world. According to John, on the night of June 20, 1756, after Nawab sieged the fort, a group of British prisoners were confined in a small room inside Fort William. The room was overcrowded and poorly ventilated, resulting in the death of a number of prisoners from suffocation, heat, exhaustion. 

John was also the senior bureaucrat in Fort William, under whose command the East India Company’s forces were left by Governor Drake — who upon sensing danger had fled to Phalta (a place in South 24 Parganas of present-day Bengal). Holwell had noted that around 145 Europeans were confined in a dark room of 14 feet by 8 feet. Of 146 prisoners, 123 died of suffocation, and 23 pulled through. 

However, John Holwell’s account has been criticized by a number of researchers, historians and scholars alike, claiming that the numbers cited might have been exaggerated. Later, Siraj demolished the fort, and constructed a “new fort Williams” near Dalhousie Square of present-day Kolkata. 

While it is not certain that it was solely the analogy of Robert Dicke that led to the emergence of the term “black hole” in astrophysics, it does surely have a connection. The book by Marcia Bartusiak also noted the accounts of Robert Dicke’s children, who remember their father using the term to refer to ‘things-lost.’

How did the term “Black hole” come about in astrophysics? 

In January 1964, a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was held in Cleveland, USA.  In this meeting a report by Ann Ewing was discussed, where the nuances of “degenerate stars”, gravitational field and “black hole” were deliberated upon. This is where the term “black hole” is supposed to have made its debut in the “print” medium. 

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In her book, “Black Holes”, Marcia Bartusiak — MIT Professor and science writer — traced the origins of the term “Black hole.” According to her,  Hong-Yee-Chiu — an American astrophysicist — was the first person to have noted the term. In the 1960s, Chiu came across the term “Black hole” in a seminar at Princeton. It was a seminar lecture by physicist Robert Dicke, in which Mr Dicke used the term. While describing how dense stars collapse in their own gravitational field, Dicke used the analogy of “the Black hole of Calcutta.” Like the Calcutta incident, where the prisoners went in and did not come out, the dense stars too are collapsing in their own gravitational field. 

(Edited by Harsh Pandey)

[OG/AR/HP]

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