84 Annual Address. [Feb. 



the third time to Sutanuti, they again settled on the lands of the 

 "Calcutta" village; but the official designation of the settlement 

 appears to have been '' Chuttanuttee," for the " diaries " are dated 

 from there. How the change of name originated and the little village of 

 Kalikata came to give its name to the city of Calcutta is not yet fully 

 accounted for. It seems to me that the change explains itself in this 

 wise. The early diaries of the English Settlement between 1688 and 

 1698 are all called "Chuttanuttee Diaries." These diaries always run 

 from the December of the preceding year to the November of the 

 following year. The diary for 1699, that is to say, for December 1698 

 to November 1699, is the first dated from Calcutta ; for I find that 

 the diary for 1704-5 is called the seventh from Calcutta.^* It follows 

 that the change of name, from Chuttanuttee to Calcutta, must have 

 taken place shortly before December 1698. Now in July 1698, the 

 Company became the revenue collector, for the Moghul Government, of 

 the three villages Sutanuti, Calcutta, and Govindpur. In the Ain-i- 

 Akbari, the village of Kalikata (Calcutta) is enumerated as one of the 

 mahals or revenue subdivisions of the District of Satgaon.^^ As such it 

 belongs to the fiscal survey, made in 1587, by Todar Mall, the well- 

 known Finance Minister of the emperor Akbar. The villages of Suta- 

 nuti and Govindpur, founded shortly before, in 1530, are not mentioned 

 in the fiscal survey ; they evidently lay within the fiscal subdivision of 

 Calcutta. It is natural to conclude that when the English Company 

 acquired the collectorate of that subdivision in 1698, they made its old 

 and well-known fiscal name the official designation of their settlement, 

 especially as their factory and fort lay within the limits of the village 

 of Kalikata. 



For the very early age of that village a curious piece of evidence 

 was discovered in 1892, by Mahamahopadhyaya Pandit Hara Prasad 

 Shastri.^^ He found in an old manuscript aa account of a voyage down 

 the river Hugli, written in l495 by a Baijgali author named Bipra Das. 

 That writer enumerates all the towns and villages which the voyager, 

 a certain Cand Sadagar, passed on both sides of the river. Among 

 them occurs the village of Kalikata, but neither Sutanuti, nor Govind- 



B* See "Wilson's Early Annals, p. 236, where it is called Calcutta Diary No. 7. 

 The full name of the Calcutta diaries was Diary and Consultation Book of the 

 London Company's Council at Fort William in Bengal. This is accounted for by 

 the fact that the Old Fort was completed in 1697, just before the change of name 

 took place. 



55 See Colonel Jarrett's Translation, Yol. II, p. 140. The Ain-i-Akbari was com- 

 pleted by Abul Fazl in 1597. See also Mr. J. Beames' paper in the Journal, Royal 

 Asiatic Society, for 1896, p. 102. 



W See his paper in our Proceedings for 1892, p. 193. 



