SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BATTLE OF PLASSEY

 The battle – rather the rout of Plassey – was hardly important from the military view-point. It was a mere skirmish. The total casualties were 65 on the Company’s side and 500 in the Nawab’s army. The English army showed no military superiority either in maneuvers or strategy of the battle. It was desertion in the Nawab’s camp that gave Clive the victory. After Mir Mudan’s death treacherous commanders held the field. If Mir Jaffar and Rai Durlabh had remained faithful the outcome of the battle would have been different. It was treason that drove the Nawab from the battlefield, it was treason that removed the Nawab’s army from the battlefield, it was treason that made Clive the victor.

Perhaps it was in the game of diplomacy that Clive excelled. He played on the fears of the Jagat Seths, worked up the ambition of Mir Jaffar and won a victory without fighting. K. M. Pannikar believes that Plassey was a transaction in which the rich bankers of Bengal and Mir Jaffar sold out the Nawab to the English.

The Battle of Plassey is important because of the events that followed it. Plassey put the British yoke on Bengal which could not be put off. The new Nawab, Mir Jaffar, was dependent on British bayonets for the maintenance of his portion in Bengal and for protection against foreign invasions. An English army of 6000 troops was maintained in Bengal to help the nawab maintain his position. Gradually all real power passed into the hands of the company. How hopeless was the position of Mir Jaffar is clear from the fact that while he wanted to punish Diwan Rai Durlabh and Ram Narayan, the deputy Governor of Bihar, for disloyalty, the English held his hand. Mr. Watts, the British resident at Murshidabad, held considerable influence.  Gulam Husain Khan, the Muslim historian noted that English recommendation was the only sure way to office. Very soon, Mir Jaffar found the English yoke galling and intrigued with the Dutch to oust the English from Bengal. Clive thwarted this design and defeated the Dutch at Bedara (Nov 1759). When Mir Jaffar refused to read the writing on the wall, he had to give place to Mir Kasim a nominee of the company in 1760.

The Battle of Plassey and the subsequent plunder – for there was not much different then between fair trade and plunder – of Bengal placed at the disposal of the English vast resources. The first instalment of wealth paid to the Company immediately after Plassey was a sum of 800,000 pounds, all paid in coined silver. In the graphic language of Macaulay, ‘the fleet which conveyed this treasure to Calcutta consisted of more than a hundred boats’. Bengal then was the most prosperous province, industrially advanced and commercially great. ‘The immense commerce of Bengal’ wrote Verilst in 1767, ‘might be considered as the central point to which all the riches of India were attracted. Its manufactures find their way to the remotest part of India’. The vast resources of Bengal helped the English to conquer the wars of the Deccan and extend their influence over northern India.

A great transformation came about in the position of the English company in Bengal. Before Plassey, the English Company was just one of the European companies trading in Bengal and suffering various exactions at the hands of the Nawab’s officials. After Plassey the English Company virtually monopolized the trade and commerce of Bengal. The French never recovered their lost position in Bengal, the Dutch made a last bid in 1759 but were humbled. From commerce the English proceeded to monopolize political power in Bengal.

Plassey proved a battle with far reaching consequences in the fate of India. ‘There never was a battle’ writes Malleson, ‘in which the consequences were so vast, so immediate and so permanent’. Col. Malleson certainly overstates the case when he writes that it was Plassey which ‘made England the great Mohammedan power in the world; Plassey which forced her to become one of the main factors in the settlement of the burning Eastern Question; Plassey which necessitated the conquest and colonization of the Cape of Good Hope; of Mauritius, the protectorate over Egypt’. Nevertheless, the battle of Plassey was an important event in the chain of developments that made the English the masters of India.

Eric Stoker, a modern writer, describes ‘the Plassey Revolution as the first English essay in private profiteering on a grandiose scale’. The consequences of Plassey shaped the form of British overrule and the modes of cultural contact.