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.In 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 that was the battlefield.“It is not an accurate depiction,” says Sumila Khatun of the faculty of history at the Plassey College. “But it may give an orientation. We should do much better, especially here”.Mir Jafar, who had negotiated terms with Clive, simply did not move his forces. He broke ranks.West Bengal, indeed India, trades allegations of “Mir Jafar-giri” to this moment. In Bengal today, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress is calling the breakaway MLAs led by Ritabrata and MPs led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar Mir Jafars. Suvendu Adhikari, the chief minister, is a Mir Jafar because he broke ranks with the TMC to lead the BJP. The rebels, in turn, insinuate that Mamata Banerjee herself is a Mir Jafar, having broken away from the Congress to form the TMC in 1998.Also read: Bengal, A Month Later: It’s Time to Get RealHere at the site of the “original sin” in Polashi – the name is derived from palash, the flame of the forest, a flower, corrupted to Plassey by the English – students of the college write exams in the ambient noise.The college’s governing body is dissolved. That is the case with all of Bengal’s government and government-aided colleges. They are now directly administered by the state education department’s Joint Director (Public Instruction) since May 4 when Adhikari swept to power. The Plassey College is affiliated to the University of Kalyani.“We should be able to learn from defeat,” says Gopa Mukherjee, general secretary of the forum that is conducting proceedings near the monument. “That is why we observe the day every year even if many people are still ashamed of those events. It was because we were divided that Clive won.”“We also want tourists to come here,” she adds.In front of the dais, under a mango tree, five young men debate if and how Plassey can be turned into a tourist site. They refuse to be photographed but are willing to discuss. They are here for the forum’s programme – the main function will be held later in the evening.“The thing is, it will be good for us because it will open up a market,” says the young man resting on his motorcycle. He is wearing a karateka suit. He teaches the martial art to school students in Polashi. “But a lot will depend on how we tell the history because now the BJP has come to power and what we learned in history is not how they narrate it,” says his friend.During the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Amrita Roy, the BJP’s candidate who lost to the TMC’s Mohua Moitra in the Krishnanagar constituency in Nadia (that includes Polashi), campaigned on the Hindutva narrative that Siraj-ud-Daulah was cruel to Hindus.Her ancestor, “Maharaja” (title gifted by the British East India Company) Krishna Chandra Roy, was one of Clive’s conspirators against Siraj. Amrita Roy insisted during a telephone conversation with Narendra Modi (audio publicised by the BJP later) that had Siraj not been defeated by Clive, she and her folk, and indeed Bengal, would have been forced to convert to Islam.Also read: Bengal BJP Candidate Claims Ancestor Backed British to ‘Protect Hindus’This is a disputed narrative. Siraj – his ancestry traces to Mesopotamia, now Iraq – was Persian and he had Hindu officials and generals like Mir Madan in his administration.Some 53 km north, under another monument with a gateway high enough through which an elephant carrying a mutilated human body can pass, five women talk about the Annapurna scheme that has replaced Mamata Banerjee’s Lakshmi Bhandar.“How do we fill up these forms?” one of them asks. “They [points to a makeshift BJP office] are charging Rs 50 to fill up 12 pages.”With Annapurna Bhandar, the BJP has promised Rs 3,000 per month to women in Bengal. It replaces the Rs 1,500 per month under Lakshmi Bhandar. But it comes with many riders. Agnimitra Paul, the Bengal government’s minister and spokesperson, has said people whose names do not figure in voters’ lists after the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, were not entitled to the amount.More than 90 lakh names were deleted from the rolls or are “under adjudication”. The Lakshmi Bhandar did not discriminate when it paid nearly 2.2 crore women.Behind the women, who too refuse to be photographed, the Namak Haram Deorhi – Traitors’ Gate or Gate of Treachery – is a crumbling mass of small burnt brick and black walls in caverns with a hollowed out roof. It has fallen to neglect. This is the gateway to Mir Jafar’s palace through which Siraj-ud-Daulah’s mutilated body on elephant-back will pass on July 2, 1757, nine days after the defeat at Plassey.Namak Haram Deorhi, also known as Traitor’s Gate, Jafarganj Deorhi or Jufarganj Palace, was the palace of Mir Jafar. It is located in the Lalbagh area of Murshidabad town, West Bengal. Credit: Jagadhatri, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia CommonsThere are still conflicting accounts on whether the butcher, Mohammedi Beg, first mutilated his body by stabbing it and then beheading it or was the beheading first and the mutilation later. It is certain, though, that Beg was commanded by Mir Miran, Mir Jafar’s son, to execute Siraj.It is certain that the gateway at Namak Haram Deorhi is tall enough to accommodate an elephant with a mutilated human body. It is certain, too, that Siraj’s body on elephant-back was paraded through the streets of his capital, Murshidabad.Mir Jafar and Clive’s co-conspirators and sponsors, the Jagath Seths, lived, among other places in the district at Azimganj, across the Bhagirathi from Jiaganj. The title of Jagath Seth (bankers to the world) was granted by farman (proclamation) by a later Mughal emperor to Marwari Jain businessmen who had migrated from what is now Gujarat and Rajasthan. They traded in silk and boats and amassed huge wealth.The house of a ‘Jagat Seth’ in Murshidabad. Credit: Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia CommonsAt a palace in Azimganj today, Jagath Seths continue to be feted, though they are reviled in popular Bengali discourse. Inside the palace, there are life-size portraits of the Jagath Seths, bejewelled and turbaned, some with large handlebar moustaches, wearing ornate gowns.The palace with Victorian double-beds of Burma teak – preserved and still in use, doubling as a resort for those who want to experience a night or two as a Seth – sits on the west bank of the river, its waters lapping creaky wooden ghats where rafts powered by diesel engines ferry people and vehicles. Opposite it is the town of Jiaganj, now famous not so much for the late nawab but because the musician Arijit Singh took premature retirement from Bollywood to settle in his native place.From early in the morning, the ululations of the women in the temples of Jiaganj and Azimganj mingle with the azaans from the many mosques on either side of the water.Here, the river, the Bhagirathi that becomes the Hooghly, is a narrow channel on a bend. It looks serene but the current is evident because the fallen branches from the trees on the banks flow swiftly south. Clive’s forces came up the west bank of the river, Subhajit Ghosh, the Plassey College history department head, will explain to his students.That was on June 22, the evening before the battle. At Katwa, after coming up from Fort William, Calcutta, Clive brainstormed with his lieutenants if the conspiracy he had crafted with Jagath Seth, the rajas of Krishnanagar and Sovabazar with Mir Jafar at its fulcrum, will work. He had second thoughts. But decided after a lull that it is best to cross the river with his men and materiel as soon as possible.Siraj’s forces were already camping on the east bank, having come down from the north in Murshidabad. He had calculated that the wetlands of Plassey would bog down Clive’s troops. His large tent was almost in the middle and he had brought nautch girls along. The first of Clive’s troops that made the landing on the east bank could hear the merrymaking.“I wish this sand model could explain it all”, says Subhadip Ghosh, another faculty in the Plassey College history department. He has grown up in Murshidabad where he still lives and from where he commutes to the college. “It may be about tragic history but this is where it all began – or ended – and time changed.”The shortest distance for Clive from Katwa was to Plassey. Plassey was the closest wetlands for Siraj to trap the enemy in – or so he thought. The plains of Plassey today are not what they were 269 years ago. There were redoubts that became natural fortifications for Clive and the few shells that Siraj’s artillery’s slow rate-of-fire permitted flew over the heads of soldiers into a mango orchard.Siraj was all of 24 years of age. He is buried in his grandfather, Alivardi Khan’s graveyard, in Khoshbag, Azimganj. His wife Lutf-un-Nissa’s grave is also in the same enclosure.Clive returned to England years later and faced a parliamentary inquiry for, guess what, possessing assets disproportionate to known sources of income. He went mad before he died. He was 49 years old.Danish Fakir, the man who saw through Siraj’s disguise and betrayed him to Mir Jafar and Clive was killed by Mir Miran’s men because, he was told, “if you can betray Siraj you can betray us too”.Mir Jafar’s promised nawabhood was all too shortlived. He was killed too. In the history that is unfolding, he lives amongst us. From Parliament to Assembly to Traitors’ Gate surveyed from a hunting lodge in a mango orchard in a Bengal battlefield.Sujan Dutta is an independent journalist.