of the BIHAR AND ORISSA RESEARCH SOCIETY For the year 1922. Patron. His Excellency the Governor, ex-officio. Vice-Patrons. The Hon'ble Sir William Henry Hoare Vincent, Kt., The Hon'ble Maharajadhiraj Bahadur Sir Rameshwar Maharaja Bahadur Sir Raveneshwar Prasad Singh, His Highness Maharaja Bahadur Sir Bir Mitrodaya The Hon'ble Sir Thomas Fredrick Dawson Miller, Kt., K.C. President. The Hon'ble Sir Havilland Le Mesurier, K.C.I.E., C.S.I. Vice-President. The Hon'ble Sir B. K. Mullick, Kt., I.C.S. General Secretary. Dr. Hari Chand Shastri, D.Litt., I.E.S. Joint Secretary. Professor G. S. Bhaté, M.A., 1.E.S. Treasurer. Professor J. N. Samaddar, B.A. Journal Committee. History. Professor G. S. Bhaté, M.A., I.E.S. (Secretary). 2, Professor J. N. Sarkar, M.A., I.E.S. (Member). Journal of Francis Buchanan (Patna and Gaya Districts): I.-Introduction. The Buchanan Journal and Maps. PRACTICALLY the whole of the information which is now available concerning the life and work of the author of this Journal, including an account of the circumstances under which his great statistical Survey of Bengal was undertaken, and the subsequent history of the manuscripts connected therewith, is to be found in Sir David Prain's admirable Memoir published in Calcutta in 1905, entitled "A Sketch of the life of Francis Hamilton (once Buchanan) sometime Superintendent of the Honourable Company's Botanic Garden, Calcutta". It is therefore unnecessary to attempt a summary here, particularly as Sir D. Prain himself has been good enough to promise a contribution to the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society on the subject. The Journal, which is now published for the first time, forms only a small part of the manuscripts relating to the Survey, on which Dr. Buchanan-as he may still be called for present purposes since he did not 1 2 Bea I assume the name of Hamilton until three years after his retirement from India-was employed between the years 1807 and 1815. It is the official daily Journal which he kept during his tour of the districts of Patna and Gaya in the cold-weather months of 1811-12, i.e., the fifth season of his work on the Survey. The original manuscript is in his own handwriting and extends over 224 pages, bound up with other papers in the last of those three volumes of the Buchanan Manuscripts in the Library of the India Office which are concerned with Patna and Gaya. As regards other districts of Bihar included in the Survey, similar Journals kept during the cold-weather tours of Bhagalpur, etc., in 1810-11 and Shahabad in 1812-13 are also in existence in the Library, and occupy 250 and 175 pages respectively in the corresponding volumes of the series, but the Journal of the tour in Purnea undertaken in the season 1809-10 cannot now be traced, and apparently has never been in the Library's possession. There also appear to be no Journals in existence relating to the Bengal Districts of Dinajpur and Rangpur, and the United Provinces District of Gorakhpur.* The three Journals which still remain are quite distinct from Buchanan's Reports on the corresponding districts, and are only to be regarded as supplementary to the latter. It is necessary to lay emphasis on this difference in order to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, especially because on page xxxviii of his Memoir Sir D. Prain refers to the Reports themselves as "a journal of the utmost value, which has never been completely published or properly edited", while in later pages when describing the attempts which have been made to publish the Reports, he continues to refer to them as a "journal". It seems possible that when he wrote he was under the impression that Buchanan had drawn up his Reports in the Bengal Survey in the same form as that adopted in his "Journey from Madras, through the countries of * I am indebted to Mr. C. E. A. W. Oldham, 1.c.8., retired, for this nformation. Mysore, Canara and Malabar" which was undertaken in 1800-01. This was a daily Journal, which was published in London in 1807 in the form in which it was written, although in the preface Buchanan explained that he had intended to abridge it and alter its arrangement before publication, but could not do so, as the printing had commenced before his arrival in England on leave in the previous year. Taking warning by this experience and by the criticisms of the form in which the work appeared, his methods were altered when he undertook the Survey of Bengal. His study of each district which he then surveyed was arranged so as to occupy a whole year. After an extended cold-weather tour, during which he and his assistants collected a very large amount of information additional to that actually recorded in his daily journal, he established his headquarters at some town in or near the district concerned, and spent the following hot-weather and rainy seasons in completing his enquiries and in writing his Report. Each of these Reports is therefore a self-contained and carefully finished work which was clearly intended for publication. Not only was it drawn up in strict accordance with the detailed instructions issued to Buchanan by the Government at Calcutta in September 1807, as recorded in pages viii to x of the Introduction to "Eastern India", but in its arrangement it followed the actual order of these instructions. The Journals, on the other hand, were evidently not intended for publication, and unfortunately were not maintained during the period spent at headquarters. Much of the information recorded in them has been included in the Reports, and has often been transferred without any substantial modification, but in all cases it has been rearranged under the appropriate sections. Of the Reports and their various Appendices, with the sole exception of the Journals, two copies are known to be in existence, one of which is in the India Office Library, as already mentioned, and the other in the Library of the Royal Asiatic Society. The original manuscript cannot be traced and appears to have been destroyed, as neither of the sets is in Buchanan's own handwriting, but both have been written in a beautifully clear hand by the same copyist. There is some uncertainty about the identity of a set of the Reports which was in the possession of the Indian Government at Calcutta about 1833 and, as Beveridge suggested, it is possible that a third copy may still be in India, even though the efforts to trace it made by Sir W. W. Hunter, Sir D. Prain and others have been unsuccessful. It seems much more probable, however, that not more than two copies were ever made, and that the volumes now in the possession of the Royal Asiatic Society are in fact the set of the records which were formerly kept in Calcutta, and referred to in the following extract from the preface to the Report on Dinajpur, published at Calcutta in 1833: "The original records, occupying twenty-five folio volumes. in manuscript, were transmitted by the Indian Government to the Honourable Court of Directors; a copy of the whole having been previously made and deposited in the office of the Chief Secretary at Calcutta. Duplicates of the drawings and maps were unfortunately not preserved with the rest, probably from the difficulty at that time of getting them executed in India." This duplicate copy was made after Buchanan had left India in February 1815, and the originals sent to London were received there in the following year. As regards the copy then retained in Calcutta, it is known that in 1831 the M. S. Report on Dinajpur was made over by Mr. G. Swinton, who was then Chief Secretary, to Captain Herbert, the editor of Gleanings in Science, in order that it might be published by instalments in that Journal: and three years later James Prinsep, the first editor of its still living successor-the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal-in the preface to Volume II, while announcing with regret that the publication of the remaining Reports would have to be discontinued. owing to lack of support, mentioned that on completion of publication of that on Dinajpur : "The Government meantime placed the remaining volumes of Buchanan in the Editor s hands, with an intimation of its desire that the printing of these records should be continued." |