70 
concluding that the Patna of Tavernier’s “ Travels” is an 
editor's misrendering of the name of the less well-known 
town of Pabna. 
At the present day almost all the shells of the common 
chank or conch used in the bracelet-making industry are 
imported into Calcutta in the first instance. A few go 
occasionally to Chittagong, where bracelet-cutting is car- 
ried on by Muhammadan workmen for supply to the 
neighbouring hill tribes. With this exception Calcutta 
is the sole emporium for chank shells. 
The importers and wholesale merchants in Calcutta 
are chiefly men closely identified with the Dacca shell- 
cutters; and are either Dacca born or belong to Dacca 
families who have settled in Calcutta for trade reasons. 
Most of these chank importers are related to one 
another, their families for generations having followed a 
similar vocation. ‘They are indeed the representatives of 
lines of hereditary middlemen. The majority have estab- 
lishments in Dacca for the cutting of shells and the 
manufacture of bangles, but their chief f profits arise from 
wholesale dealing. A few Muhammadans from the Tamil 
coast (Labbais) are also concerned in the wholesale trade, 
having been admitted thereto as their special local 
knowledge is of much value to their Calcutta partners or 
principals as the case may be; these men act as local 
experts and buying agents at the fishery centres in Ceylon 
and South India. 
Under ordinary conditions the chief Calcutta import- 
ers have a business agreement among themselves, a form 
of co-partnery or syndicate by which the purchases are 
pooled and divided on a definite agreed basis. By this 
means they are usually able to maintaina monopoly of 
the trade and to a large extent to dictate their own terms 
both to the owners of the various chank fisheries and to 
the trade buyers inthe Bengal manufacturing towns. 
All the Bengal chank-cutters orginally were Hindus 
and their descendants claim that they belonged exclusively 
to a professional sub-division of the Vaisya caste ; at the 
present time the Dacca workers all claim to be Vaisyas 
and are known throughout the Presidency either as 
Sankhari Vaisyas or simply as Sankharis, or, as the word 
's corrupted in Eastern Bengal, Shakharis. According to 
