ON THE NAMES OF PLACES IN TANJORE. 



43 



in. 



ON THE NAMES OF PLACES IN TANJORE. 



The following list of place-names was collected during the 

 camping season of 1877-78 whilst conducting the Madras Coast 

 Series of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India through 

 the Tanjore District. My prime object was to find out "by 

 personal inquiry on the spot the correct vernacular form of 

 all the names of places that I must submit to the Surveyor 

 General for publication on the charts and records of the work. 

 The list comprises, therefore, the names of all the survey 

 stations, the topographical features of the ground mentioned 

 in describing them, the surrounding villages, and the divisions 

 of the district to which they belong. A few other names 

 of interest met with are also included. 1 



The English seem peculiarly unhappy in their rendering of 

 Indian proper names. Most of them would perhaps admit so 

 much, but yet be quite averse to learn and adopt any system 

 of transliteration or orthography by which alone the stigma 

 may be removed. The earlier sheets of the engraved map of 

 the country — the Indian Atlas — are covered with irregularities 

 of orthography and mistakes, many of them misleading and 

 often extremely ludicrous. Some of them are due to the 

 ignorance of the engraver in London and the bad writing of 

 the manuscript, but had there been any uniform or acknow- 

 ledged system of orthography, the copyist might have detected 



1 The remarks and etymologies here offered must be regarded as crude 

 suggestions "by the way, and not as having any pretensions to scholarship 

 or independent research. They are simply a desultory collection made by a 

 travelling official in a certain locality, during a busy tour of a few months, 



