Description
About The Book : Mr. Talboys Wheeler called attention to the existence of these Diaries, and in 1878 he gave a few very meagre extracts from them in his Early Records of British India. Last year, guided by Mr. Talboys Wheeler’s Report, the old papers were searched out for me by the kind officials of the Imperial Record Department,and the Government of India most graciously accorded me permission to copy and publish them. In a letter to Warren Hastings, dated August 29, 1776, Mir Kasim Khan, in pleading for pardon and permission “ to return to his home and hearth with a view to proceeding finally on a pilgrimage to the holy shrines,” gave his own version of the circumstances leading to the massacres of Patna, and attempted to lay the burden on the shoulders of the late Mir Jafar, whom, he contended, had intrigued with Sumroo for the murder of the English in order that he (Mir Kasim) might be so ruined in the consideration of the English, that all future opportunities of a reconciliation between the Company and himself might be cut off. With this plea we need only contrast the words which Mir Kasim wrote to Major Adams, on the 9th of September 1763, (after the murder of Amyatt) : ” Know of a certain that I will cut the heads of Mr. Ellis and the rest of your chiefs, and send them to you. ” The unfortunate victims were not all slain on the same day, and this circumstance in itself proves the deliberation with which these murders of helpless prisoners were accomplished. That the crime was carried out by a European renegade is a circumstance which adds to the horror of the story.
