Listen to this article:

Polashi and Namak Haram Deorhi: The hunting lodge in the mango orchard has mixed with the earth under jute, sugarcane and paddy for the better part of three centuries. On June 23, 1757, it was the Englishman’s perch. Paintings show him with a telescope to his right eye sussing the battlefield.

On June 25 that year, the last “independent” nawab of the Bengal Subah (province), Siraj-ud- Daulah, is fleeing. He has fled from Plassey – Polashi – to Murshidabad after the betrayal 48 hours earlier, taken a boat up the Bhagirathi and will soon be found in Rajmahal, now in Jharkhand’s Sahebganj district. Danish Fakir will see through his disguise because of his footwear and report him to Mir Jafar and Robert Clive.

At Polashi today, the Plassey College is as good a perch as that hunting lodge. The building is still painted a vivid blue from the Trinamool Congress years. Inside, semester examinations are being held.

On June 23, Tuesday this week, in the 269th year, Subhajit Ghosh, the head of the history department, takes a break from invigilation, to describe what it is like to teach the Battle of Plassey.

“The oft-asked question from the students is why here? Why did the English and the French and the Nawab’s soldiers fight here? Why did Mir Jafar betray here? Why did Clive come here? What is so special about Polashi that it should change the course of the history of the subcontinent, as if it were like the Bhagirathi that twists and turns so?”

In Polashi, history is lived every day. On Tuesday, near the monument to the fallen English soldiers and sepoys that was built by the English in 1883, twenty-six years after the battle, there is a small group calling itself the Bangla Bharat Pakistan Peoples’ Solidarity Forum.

It has a small dais from where patriotic songs and elocutions are being performed. About five kilometres behind, through fields that can be either walked or negotiated by two-wheeler, there are three obelisks to Siraj’s generals who were killed around two in the afternoon of June 23, 1757 – Nauwe Singh Hazari, Bakshi Mir Madan and Bahadur Ali Khan – three who did not join with Mir Jafar.

A cannonball stuck the Hindu General, Mir Madan, on his thigh, wounding him fatally.

At two in the afternoon it is steamily hot here. The clouds are low and unless it rains there is to be no relief from the heat and the sweat. The clouds broke around this time in that battle, drenching, by most accounts, the gunpowder for Siraj’s 50 pieces of artillery cannon and 50,000 men.

Clive, who had battled his way up from Madras’ Fort St George and then Falta and Calcutta, after Siraj sacked the old Fort William in Calcutta a year ago, was smarter with the monsoon. He had kept the powder dry with tarpaulin sheets for his 10 pieces of cannon and howitzers and the paltry number of 3,000 men.

Siraj’s forces not only outnumbered him but were deployed in an arc, a reverse half-C. The division of his army’s paymaster and general, Mir Jafar, was in position to outflank Clive’s men from the right.

There is a frayed sand model of the battlefield today at the site. It shows the bends of the Bhagirathi in the north of the wetland........

© The Wire