District Records Bengal Rangpur, Vol.I. 1770-1779.

Abstract

letters from No. 10 onwards are preserve# at the Collectorate Records Room at Rangpur. The local archives contain a number of circular letters Issued to all the Collectors and a large number of covering letters The circulars should be dealt with in a separate volume: the covering etc will be dealt with in a calendar in such a way that no names of the officer Offices, heads of accounts, etc., will be lost to Instoncal research. Writers of District Histories based on district records have often to confess that the records for certain periods are not to be found in_ the local record-rooms. The inference that the missing papers have perished is not infrequently correct, but i£ a greater attention had been paid to the history of the evolution o£ the Rural Administration under the English in Bengal, it would have been found that the reason why Rangpur, for instance, has no locally preserved records for certain periods is because its affairs were in the hands of officials resident at Dinajpur. One most valuable series of Rangpur papers has recently been discovered at Dacca. The materials for district histories will not really be available until the reooras of the Comptrolling Council of Marshidabad and' the Provincial Councils of Revenue have been dealt with, but the separate publications of station records will in the meantime be an enormous gain to students of history. Sir William Hunter, in his volumes of Bengal MS. Records, in which that distinguished writer gives a far too brief precis of select paper preserved at the Revenue Department Record Room, adopts the scientific The orthography of .place-names and revenue terms,—a method which might suggest the idea that eighteenth-century collectors anticipated Sir William Jones’ system, and that George Boyle, for instance, would have written Khan for Gawn, Khanpur for Cawnpore, baghi for buggy, etc., etc. The method p£ attempting to make writers in by gone times write what we think they ought to have written is not satisfactory. Mr. Richard Barwell used to call the place we now, by convention, accept as Allahabad “ Elliabas.” Something would be lost to history if we altered BarwelFs word in an edition o£ Barwell’s letters associate himself. _ Glazier’s valuable Report on the District of Rungpore has been included in the present publication as a memoir pour server. It appeared in 1872. It has not been held necessary to include in this reprint of Mr. Glazier s Report the documents he reproduced, as they appear in the body of the present work.