Tell about Battle of Plassey ?

Carried by four ships of line commanded by Vice Admiral Charles Watson, Clive's force re-took  Calcutta and attacked Hooghly.  After a brief battle with the Nawab's  army on February 4, Clive was able to conclude a treaty which saw all  British property returned.

Concerned about growing British power in  Bengal, the Nawab began corresponding with the French.  At this same  time, the badly outnumbered Clive began making deals with the Nawab's  officers to overthrow him.  Reaching out to Mir Jafar, Siraj Ud Daulah's  military commander, he convinced him to switch sides during the next  battle in exchange for the Nawabship.

The Nawab opened the battle with an ineffective cannonade which ceased around noon when heavy rains fell on the battlefield. The Company troops covered their cannon and muskets, while the Nawab's men and the French did not. When the storm cleared, the Clive ordered an attack. With their muskets useless due to wet powder, and with Mir Jafar's divisions unwilling to fight, the Nawab's remaining troops were forced to retreat.

Clive's  army suffered a mere 22 killed and 50 wounded as opposed to over 500  for the Nawab.  Following the battle, Clive saw that Mir Jafar was made  nawab on June 29.

Deposed and lacking support, Siraj-ud-Duala attempted to flee to Patna but was captured and executed by Mir Jafar's forces on July 2. The victory at Plassey effectively eliminated French influence in Bengal and saw the British gain control of the region through favorable treaties with Mir Jafar. A pivotal moment in Indian history, Plassey saw the British establish a firm base from which to bring the remainder of the subcontinent under their control.

An infamous incident which was prelude to the Battle of Plassey is amazingly believed to have inspired the term Black Hole used in astrophysics.

Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah seized the fort St. Williams in an effort to stop interference of British East India Company. All the captured soldiers, civilians and Anglo-Indian war prisoners were held in a very small dark dungeon which was not even meant to accommodate one percent of them.

There was no ventilation, no window, no source of light inside that hole. All the inmates suffered from suffocation and anxiety.

Chiu told Trimble that he recalled a seminar in Princeton, about 1960 or 1961, when the physicist Robert Dicke was talking about gravitationally collapsed objects. Dicke, according to Chiu, described the objects as “like the Black Hole of Calcutta.”

According to Hong-Yee Chiu, a long-time astrophysicist at NASA, the Black Hole of Calcutta was the inspiration for the term black hole referring to regions of space-timeresulting from the gravitational collapse of very heavy stars.

Bartusiak then related that Martin McHugh, who is working on a biography of Dicke, told her that Dicke’s children remember that “when something was lost at the Dicke household, Dicke would shout out, ‘Ah, it must have been sucked into the black hole of Calcutta.’”

Battle of Plassey, (23 June 1757). Victory for the British East India Company in the Battle of Plassey was the start of nearly two centuries of British rule in India. For an event with such momentous consequences, it was a surprisingly unimpressive military encounter, the defeat of the Nawab of Bengal owing much to betrayal.

In India, Britain was represented by the British East India Company, a venture that had been given a royal charter in 1600 to pursue trade in the East Indies that included the right to form its own army.

The French East India Company had a similar remit. From 1746, the rival companies fought the Carnatic Wars for advantage in India, where they maintained trading posts, and sought influence over local rulers.

In 1755, Siraj ud-Daulah became Nawab of Bengal and adopted a pro-French policy. He overran British trading posts, including Calcutta, where British prisoners were allegedly left to die in the infamous "black hole of Calcutta." Lieutenant Colonel Robert Clive was sent from Madras to retake Calcutta and from there began plotting the overthrow of the nawab.

One of the nawab’s discontented followers, Mir Jafar, was bribed secretly with a promise of the throne if he would back the British. Other Bengali generals were also suborned.

Clive advanced on the Bengali capital, Murshidabad, and was confronted by the nawab’s army at Plassey (Palashi) by the Bhaghirathi River. The balance of forces seemed to make a British victory impossible.

The nawab’s army numbered 50,000, two-thirds infantry armed at best with matchlock muskets. The French had sent artillerymen to bolster the Bengali cannon to more than fifty guns. Facing this host, Clive arranged his force of 3,000, composed of European and Sepoy troops and a much smaller force of artillery.

The French artillery opened fire first, followed by the Bengali guns. The British guns returned fire. Due to the close proximity of the Bengali cavalry to the French guns, Clive’s bombardment missed the artillery but caused damage to the cavalry, forcing the nawab to pull them back for protection.

When the nawab’s infantry advanced, Clive’s field guns opened fire with grapeshot along with volleys of infantry musket fire, and the Bengali troops were held back. Mir Jafar, with around one-third of the Bengali army, failed to join in the fighting, despite pleas from the nawab, and remained isolated on one flank.

The battle appeared to be heading for a stalemate when it started to rain. Clive had brought tarpaulins to keep his powder dry, but the Bengalis had no such protection. Thinking that the British guns were rendered as ineffective as his own by damp powder, the nawab ordered his cavalry to charge. However, the British guns opened fire and slaughtered many of the cavalry, killing their commander Mir Madan Khan.

The nawab panicked at the loss of this valued general and ordered his forces to fall back, exposing the French artillery contingent. This was rushed by the British and captured. With the French cannon taken, the British bombarded the nawab’s positions without reply and the tide of the battle turned.

The nawab fled the battlefield on a camel, and Mir Jafar was duly installed in power as a British puppet. The victory had cost the lives of only twenty-two soldiers on the British side, while achieving a major stride toward British control of Bengal.