Who was King Bhoja ?

The uniform was a coat, red for the British and blue for the French, waistcoat and tricorne hat, worn according to the demands of the weather. In some instances white was worn instead of blue or red. Sepoys wore shorter coats of their employing nation’s colour.

The headgear for sepoys was a local variant of the tricorne. European troops wore stockings, gaiters and heavy shoes. Sepoys wore native clothing on their lower body, with sandals or bare feet.

Contemporary accounts of the wars refer to ‘European’ troops, rather than British or French. Both British and French East India Companies recruited whatever European soldiers were prepared to join their armies, regardless of nationality. If captured, a European soldier was very likely to enlist with his captor, rather than remain in prison, so that the British forces contained Frenchmen, along with soldiers of many other European nationalities, with a predominance of British. Equally so with the French.

There were so many Frenchmen in Clive’s army at Plassey that it was a consideration in deciding at Katwa whether to attack or to wait that Monsieur Law’s French contingent might join Siraj-ud-Daulah’s army, thereby causing Clive’s Frenchmen to desert.

By 1757 the English East India Company Army was reinforced by His Majesty’s 39th Regiment of Foot. The 39th fought at Plassey.

Robert Clive’s early successes were in the south east of India, based on the East India Company’s Madras settlement.

The other important trading centres for the East India Company were in Bombay on the west coast of India and, pre-eminently, at Calcutta in Bengal, at the northern end of the Bay of Bengal in the east of the sub-continent.

The English East India Company was enabled to establish a permanent presence on the Hugli River, on which present day Calcutta stands, in around 1645, with the consent of the local rulers.

The purpose of this establishment was to trade with the merchants and manufacturers in the area and to send the goods acquired by sea to England for profit. The settlement was provided with minimal fortifications and defences.

The East India Company built up an increasing influence in the area. Bengal was subject to repeated invasions by Afghans and Mahrattas from the north and west and the Company’s substantial financial contributions to the defence of the area were important to each Nawab, who ruled Bengal.

In 1689 the East India Company withdrew from the Hugli to Madras, due to the excessive demands of the Nawab of Bengal, Shaista Khan.

The following year the Nawab’s successor, Ibrahim Khan, persuaded the company to return. The new settlement was established on the Hugli River, but further south in a group of villages near the site of Calcutta.

The equivalent French and Dutch companies were already established on sites further up the Hugli River, the French at Chandranagar.

In 1741, Alivardi Khan became Nawab of Bengal, after overthrowing and killing his predecessor, Sarfaraz Khan

The Mughal ruler at Delhi was much weakened by a series of invasions by the Mahrattas and left the magnates in Bengal to sort affairs out among themselves. Alivardi Khan was quickly confirmed in his position.

Bhoja is one of the highly revered names of kings of India that, in different eras, make multiple entries into history, mythology and folklore .

The Bhoja name appears as the patron of Kalidasa (folklore), he appears as foster father of Pandava mother Kunti (mythology), he appears in the Aitreya Brahamana; he is a protagonist of Sinhaasan Battisi (folklore), a king of Silaharas (history), another king of Gurjara-Pratihaara (history), one of the Yadava kings with Krishna (mythology), and in many more places.

Alivardi Khan spent the years 1741 to 1756 repelling the repeated invasions of his realms of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa by the Mahrattas, but was eventually forced to come to terms with them.

In that way, he is like Vikramaditya -a name that also appears multiple times in Indian history and folklore. In fact, in Simhasana Dvatrimsika - more famous by its Hindi name of Sinhasan Battisi - there are stories with 32 descriptions of Vikrama’s character, with Bhoja’s character falling short each time. The Bhoja in this story book always wanted to emulate and exceed Vikaramaditya.

there was very much a historical Raja Bhoja (r 1015–1055) of Dhar (Madhya Pradesh), whose fame it was that was etched into the Indian psyche. He was a contemporary of Rajendra Chola, Jayasimha II of Western Chalukyas, Anandapala of Shahi dynasty in Kabul, Bhima I of Chaulukya in Gujarat, Suryavarman I of the far away Angkor.

The foreign traders established along the Hugli were little affected by the wars fought by the Nawab. They probably profited from them as increasing numbers of merchants moved east to escape from the depredations of the Mahrattas.

The East India Company obtained permission to build defensive works around its settlement, which were begun but not finished.
In 1756, Alivardi Khan died and was succeeded by his grandson Siraj-ud-Daulah.

But his one famous contemporary was Mahmood of Ghazni with whom he tussled and perhaps defeated in Panchala. His reputation is as a scholar king: he was a great Sanskrit aesthete and patron of arts. Two of his works still survive Sarasvati-kantabharana and Shringara-Prakasha.

Siraj-ud-Daulah did not share his grandfather’s esteem for the English settlement. He immediately resolved to evict the East India Company from Bengal.

He also patronized engineers who built lakes around Dhar and designed the town rainwater collection system of Mandu. A polymath, he wrote treatises on architecture, medicine and veterinary sciences. His Bhojeshwar Shiva temple was recently partially restored by Archaeological Survey of India.