— BENGAL.
2’]0
name
has at
periods
different
Francis Fernandez applies
it
borne very different significations. from the extreme east of
to the country
Point Palmyras in Orissa, with a coast line which Purchas estimates at 600 miles, running inland for the same distance, and watered by the Ganges. This territory would include the Muhammadan Province of Bengal, with parts of Behar and Orissa. The loose idea thus derived from old voyagers became stereotyped in the archives
Chittagong to
of the
East
India
Company.
All
its
north-eastern
factories,
from
Balasor, on the Orissa coast, to Patna, in the heart of Behar, belonged
and as our conquests crept higher up be applied to the whole of Northern India. But during the last forty years, the tendency to a greater exactitude in the civil administration has gradually brought about a corresponding The Upper precision in the use of Indian geographical names. Provinces date their separate existence from 1832. Since that year, they stand forward under a name of their own as the North-Western to the ‘Bengal Establishment;’
the rivers, the term
Provinces,
in
came
to
the Lower Provinces of Bengal. new territorial entities, and the northern now mapped out into six separate Govern-
contradistinction to
Later annexations have added
Presidency of Bengal
ments
— the
is
Punjab, the North-Western Provinces with
Oudh, the
Central Provinces, Lower Bengal, Assam, and Ajmere. Three of the Provinces of the Lieutenant-Governorship of Bengal
—
namely, Bengal Proper, Behar, and Orissa consist of great river valleys; the fourth, Chhota or Chutia Nagpur, is a mountainous region, which
them from the Central Indian plateau. Orissa comprises the Mahanadi and the neighbouring rivers, bounded by the Bay of Bengal on the south-east, and walled in on the north-west by Tributary Hill States. Proceeding eastward, the Province of Bengal Proper stretches along the coast from Orissa to British Burma, and separates
rich deltas of the
Its southern portion is inland from the seaboard to the Himalayas. formed by the united deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra ; its
northern consists of the valleys of these great rivers and their tributaries. Behar lies on the north-west of Bengal Proper, and comprises the higher valley of the
from the
Provinces.
and deep
Ganges, from the spot where it issues south-eastwards Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western
territories of the
Between Behar and
Orissa, but stretching farther westward,
into the hill country, lies the Province of
Nagpur.
—
Chhota or Chutia
The territory, thus hemmed in, except at its Physical Aspects north-western frontier, by the unchangeable landmarks of Nature the mountains and the sea consists chiefly of two broad river valleys. .
—
—
By the western one, the Ganges brings down the wealth and the accumulated waters of Northern India. The eastern valley forms the route by which the Brahmaputra, after draining the Tibetan- plateau on
