ART. II.-Map of Calcutta, 1792-3. By A. Upjohn.

THE rapid changes that are taking place in Calcutta, owing to the increasing European population, and to the facilities of intercourse afforded by steam,-the spread of English education and of English habits among natives,-together with the more extensive changes that are likely to occur, when railways may make Chauringi as the city of London is now, a residence for keránis, and mere offices for merchants, suggest to us, that for the information of future residents, as well as for the pleasure derived from contrast,-it may be useful to jot down here, in a cursory way, the glimpses of the past that we have obtained, through old and rare books, as well as from conversation with the few that still remember the "days of auld lang syne." There yet survive two residents in Calcutta, who remember Sir W. Jones and Warren Hastings, who have heard the tiger roar adjacent to the spot where now a noble cathedral and episcopal residence rear their heads, who remember the period when Chauringi was out of town, when shots were fired off in the evening to frighten away the dakaits, and when servants attending their masters at dinner parties in Chauringi left all their good clothes behind them, lest they should be plundered in crossing the maidan-the Hounslow Heath of those days; and when the purlieus of China Bazar formed the aristocratic residences of the "big-wigs" of Calcutta-but these things have been.

Let not the City of Palaces, like another Babylon, be too proud, basking in the sunshine of prosperity: she may be hereafter as Delhi and Kanauj are now. Macaulay vividly depicts to us the supposed meditations of a New Zealander gazing, in some after ages, from a broken arch of London-bridge, on the ruins of the once mighty English metropolis. A similar fate may await Calcutta.

Calcutta is the sixth capital in succession which Bengal has had within the last six centuries. The shifting of the course of the river, which some apprehend will be the case in Calcutta, contributed to reduce Gaur to ruins, though it had flourished for 2,000 years, though its population exceeded a million, and its buildings surpassed in size and grandeur any which Calcutta can now boast of. Rajmahal, "the city of one hundred kings," favourably located at the apex of the Gangetic Delta-Dháká, famed from Roman times-Nuddea, the Oxford of Bengal for five centuries -Murshidabad, the abode of Moslem pride and seat of Moslem revelry, (for a vivid painting of which, consult the pages of the Seir Mutakherim.)--These were in their days the transient

metropolitan cities of the Lower Provinces; but they have ceased to be the seats of Government and centres of wealth.

There have been other leading towns. Malcondi, on the west bank of the Hugli, is mentioned by one writer as the capital of Bengal, in 1632, and Rennel refers to the city of Bengala at the eastern mouth of the Ganges. Calcutta, "the commercial capital of Bengal," is now in the ascendant, though its political influence on India, happily for the welfare of the peasantry, is on the wane, and late events in the Panjab have given more of their due influence to the North West and to Mofussilite interests. A hundred and fifty years ago, Calcutta was like St. Petersburgh, when Peter the Great laid his masterhand on it-the New Orleans of the East-a place of mists, alligators and wild boars, though now it has a population of 500,000, of which 100,000 come in and pass out daily. Were Job Charnock to rise from his lofty tomb in St. John's Churchyard, and survey the spot where once he smoked his huka, and had the black fellows" flogged during dinner to serve as his music, he would probably not be more surprised than would a denizen of Chauringi, who has never seen the rice grow, and is as much surprised at the sight of an Indian pig as at a shark, should he a century hence wake from the tomb and find Bombay the commercial port of India, Calcutta a town of the size of Patna, a residence only for those who are not able to enjoy the comfort of villas in the neighbourhood of Hugli, Pandua, &c. &c.

Opinions differ as to the etymology of the name Calcutta,called Galgotha by an old Dutch traveller, (and not amiss in the days when one-fourth of its European inhabitants were cut off by the diseases arising in the rainy season.) We find that in Europe various cities received their names from the circumstance of monasteries and castles having been first erected on a spot which formed the nucleus of a town, as English words ending in chester (castra) show in the middle ages this occurred very frequently. Now as tradition, existing rites, Puranic authority, &c., indicate that the Ganges formerly flowed over the site of Tolley's Nala, and as Káli Ghat, one of the holiest shrines in Bengal, has, from ancient times, been a place celebrated as one of the pitha sthans, why may not the name Calcutta be a corruption of Káli Ghaut? Holwell writes, in 1766:"Káli Ghaut, an ancient pagoda, dedicated to Káli, stands close to a small brook, which is, by the Bramins, deemed to be the original course of the Ganges." When Job Charnock landed, on the 24th of August, 1690, fifty years after the first settlement of the English at Hugli, and smoked his pipe

probably under the shade of the famous old tree that stood at Baitakhana, Chauringi plain was a dense forest, the abode of bears and tigers: a few weavers' sheds stood where Chandpal Ghat is now: there was, consequently, no object of interest nearer than Káli Ghat. Is it not likely then that the old patriarch called the locality after the most conspicuous object the same as the field of Waterloo is named from the largest village near it, and not from St. Jean, which is still nearer? We throw this out merely as a conjecture-quantum valeat. However, the author of Sketches of Bengal sides with us: he states "Calicotta takes its name from a temple dedicated to Caly." Another derivation has been given from the Mahratta ditch or Khál Khattá, which served as its boundary; before 1742, when this ditch was dug, we have not seen the name given.

The Dutch, French and Danes chose the right bank of the river, fully exposed to the river breezes, but the English selected the left: three reasons have been assigned, the deep water ran at the left side-numbers of weavers lived there, members of the patriarchal family of the Sets, who dealt with the Company,-and the Mahrattas never crossed the river. Job Charnock left Ulubaria on account of its unhealthiness, but he did not gain much by the change.

We shall, in the present article, limit our researches to one branch of the subject-the localities of Calcutta. Our remarks will be simply gleanings. Many causes render it very difficult to pierce into the darkness of the past. Natives themselves give little aid they show no lively interest in antiquarian or historical research, as the Records of the Asiatic and other Societies evince; but the maxim of Cicero holds good now as when penned " Nescire quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum."

We call our article "Calcutta in the olden time;" some may say how can you call a city of a century and a half, old? We have only to say,-Reader, such is the state of the British in India, so crowded has been the succession of important and stirring events, and so shifting have been the actors on the scene, that what would appear in England quite modern, bears here, as in the United States of America, the air of the antique, and we look back on our predecessors in Calcutta of last century with a similar interest to that with which a Bostonian reads the

Though allowed by the Mogul the choice of any site below Hugli, he selected, perhaps, the most unhealthy spot on the whole river: the Salt-water Lake to the east left masses of putrid fish in the dry season, while a dense jangal ran up to where Government House stands now.

Wanderings of the Pilgrim Fathers, or a Scotchman, The Tales of Border Life, and The Adventures of Prince Charles. Our descriptions are only Fragments drifted from the Wreck of Time.

A few books have survived the destruction which so certainly awaits old works in India, from apathy, frequent removals, or the climate: as of some of these, only one or two copies exist, and as they are not accessible to the generality of our readers, we shall occasionally make some extracts to illustrate various points in connection with Calcutta as it was in the last century. Though the books be old, the information may be new to many of our readers, and even to others may be useful in recalling their thoughts, in a busy and bustling age, to the dim visions of the past, the twilight of Calcutta history.

One of the earliest works that presents itself to our notice, is The Genuine Memoirs of Asiaticus. The author was Philip Stanhope, an officer in the 1st regiment of dragoon guards; his pamphlet, containing 174 pages, was published in London in 1785; he came to India in 1774, the victim of disappointed love, the lady to whom he was attached not being allowed by her father to go to India. He touched at Madras, dined with the Governor, and mentions p. 38-" We retired soon after dinner, according to the custom of the country, to take our afternoon's nap, which the heat of the climate renders absolutely necessary for the refreshment of our bodies, which ⚫ must necessarily be weakened by a continual perspiration."

In October of that year he arrived at Calcutta. It was the time when the huka, with its long pipe and rose-water, was in vogue:

Even the writers, whose salary and perquisites scarce amount to two hundred pounds a year, contrive to be attended, wherever they go, by their huka-burdaar, or servant, whose duty it is to replenish the huka with the necessary ingredients, and to keep up the fire with his breath. But extravagant as the English are in their huka, their equipage, and their tables, yet all this is absolute parsimony, when compared to the expences of a seraglio: a luxury which only those can enjoy, whose rank in the service entitles them to a princely income, and whose Haram, like the state horses of a monarch, is considered as a necessary appendage to Eastern grandeur.

He had been promised a situation by Warren Hastings, but failed, from the opposition given to all Hastings's recommendations by the new members of council:

The numerous dependants, which have arrived in the train of the Judges, and of the new Commander-in-Chief of the forces, will of course be appointed to all the posts of any emolument; and I must do those gentlemen the justice to observe, that, both in number and rapacity, they exactly resemble an army of locusts sent to devour the fruits of the earth.

He left Calcutta, after a few months' stay, for Madras, where

he spent three years in the service of the Nawab of Arcot. In 1778 he visited Bombay, where "the settlement not being di'vided by factions, there is more society than at Madras, and 'the sources of wealth being fewer, there is less of luxury and parade than at Calcutta." The same year he arrived in

London.

In 1780 Mrs. Fay, the authoress of Original Letters from India, presented herself on the stage. She was one of the first who tried the overland route; she was made prisoner at Calicut by Hyder Ali, and was imprisoned there; she arrived in Calcutta, and mentions her visiting Mrs. Hastings at Belvidere House, "a great distance from Calcutta." Her husband was a barrister, but joining himself to the party of Francis against Hastings, and uniting with others in resisting a proposed housetax, he was obliged, through want of briefs, to leave Calcutta in debt, his wife being deprived by the creditors of every thing except her clothes. She separated from her husband, and found refuge in the house of Sir R. Chambers, noted for his " immense library." After twelve months' residence, she left Calcutta for England in May, 1782, and arrived in England in February, 1783, experiencing the discomfort of hard-drinking gentlemen on board, with a large gun" in the port-hole of her cabin. She returned, however, to Calcutta, in 1784, and engaged in the millinery line -she failed, returned to England, but made another voyage to Calcutta.

66

We have lately met with a work called Hartley House, Calcutta, printed in London, 1789, which, under the guise of fiction, paints the manners and customs of Calcutta as they existed in Warren Hastings's days, when Calcutta was "the grave of thousands, but a mine of "inexhaustible wealth." The general vraisemblance of them is confirmed by an Octogenarian still living. We shall quote occasionally from this book.

A book called the East Indian Chronologist, published in 1801, by a Mr. Hawksworth, throws much light on various occurrences: it is a compilation of facts relating to British connection with India, gathered from sources which are now destroyed by white-ants and damp: the facts are arranged in chronological order, and present, in 100 pages quarto, an assemblage of many rare subjects.

A work was published in Calcutta called Historical and Ecclesiastical Sketches of Bengal, which gives the fullest notice we have seen of the early establishment of the English in India, a particular account of the Black Hole, the re-taking of Calcutta, the history of St. John's Church, the Old Church, Kiernander's mission, the Portuguese of Calcutta, the Armenians of Calcutta.