L892.] Earaprasad Shastri — Notes on the Banlcsoffke Hugli. 193 



7. Notes on the Banks of the Hugh in 1495. — By Pandit Haraprasad 



Shastui. 



The writings and researches of Messrs. Blochmann, Long, Marshman, 

 Gaurdas Bysak, and, last though not the least, of Mr. Wilson our Philo- 

 logical Secretary, have roused an interest in the Antiquities of the Capital 

 of the British Empire, and the places in its vicinity, and people are doing 

 their best to search into old records in order to bring new and interest- 

 ing facts to light, and as an humble worker in the same field, I beg to 

 approach you, though with diffidence, with a paper on the subject. 



In the course of my search for Sanskrit Manuscripts I came across 

 in a rather out of the way corner of Bengal, viz., far in the Barasat 

 Sub-Division, two bundles of Bengali Manuscripts. One of the bundles 

 proved on examination to be the " Manasar Bhdsdn" by the joint author- 

 ship of Kshemananda and Ketakadas ; the other bundle contained 

 three Avorks, the first is a copy of the " Manasar Bhdscin," the second a 

 work on Manasd, or the Goddess of serpents, by a perfectly unknown 

 author named Bipradas. This work is incomplete. It has only 31 

 leaves without the first page ; and the third is also an incomplete 

 copy of the same work without the first page. The first 45 pages of 

 the second fragment are written on old paper, and in old handwriting, 

 and the rest with a new pagination is written on more modern paper and 

 in newer handwriting. 



The name of Bipradas as a Bengali poet, is not at all known. In 

 both the copies he gives copious information about himself, about the 

 time in which he wrote, and the circumstances under which the book was 

 written. He belonged to the Rarhiya distribution of Brahmans in 

 Bengal ; he was a descendant of Bdtsija Muni, and the village which his 

 Bengali ancestors obtained from the descendants of Raja A'disur who 

 brought the five Brahmans in Bengal, was Pippalai. He professed the 

 Sama Veda in its Kauthuma S'dkhd. He lived from his earliest childhood 

 at Batagram near Baduria. The readings of the two copies of the name 

 Baduriya do not agree. In one place it is distinctly Baduria and in an- 

 other it is Namurya. The year is indicated by the words f%» T/^ #^ *r€t 

 that is s>\«^. By the well-known rule of inverting the digits we come to 

 the S'aka year 1417, and this is corroborated by the fact that the author 

 mentions Hussain Shah as the reigning Sultan of Bengal. Saka 1417 is 

 1495 A. D., that is, three years before Vasco de Gama landed at Calicut. 

 Chaitanya was then only ten years of age. The writer says that the 

 Goddess of serpents inspired him in a dream to write a poem in her 

 honour. This is the stereotyped way of pleading divine inspiration for 

 writing poetry. It is a fact, however, that the worship of the goddess 



