1874.] J. Wise —Notes on Sunargaon, Eastern Bengal. 93 
the remains of a ghat. This tank has been gradually silting up, and in the 
month of April there is only six feet of water in it. In former days its banks 
were covered with the huts of weavers, who found that its water made their 
muslins remarkably white. The weavers have died out; but the dhobis 
who wash clothes in the tank now, assert that the purifying quality of the 
water surpasses that of any other tank or well. 
Regarding the site of the old fort of Sunargaon the residents can give 
little information. They state that a fort and a mosque, with its dome 
made of lac, formerly stood on the east of the modern village of Baid Bazar, 
where the Megna now flows. This is the most likely place for it to have 
stood, as it would have protected the city from the incursions of piratical 
ships coming up the river on the east. 
Any account of Sunargaon would be imperfect that did not mention 
the changes in the course of the Brahmaputra, which must have had a 
most important influence in the selection of the site and on its prosperity. 
It is a curious fact that the Kalika Purana poetically relates, that when 
Balaram cut though the Himalayas with his axe to allow a passage for 
the pent up waters of the Brahmakund, the goddesses Lakhya and Jabuna 
both sought to marry the youthful Brahmaputra. The god made choice 
of the former, and their streams were blended into one. Within the last 
century, however, the waters of the Lakhya have been gradually drying 
up, while the main stream of the great river has joined with that of the 
Jabuna. 
In the neighbourhood of Sunargaon are two places connected in story 
with the earliest Hindu epics. Nangalband, i. e., the place where the 
plough stopped, is the spot where Balaram checked his plough when he 
undertook to plough the Brahmaputra from its source. Near this is Pancho- 
mi Ghat, where the five Pandu brothers, while in their twelve years’ exile, 
are traditionally said to have bathed. At both of these places thousands 
of Hindus annually resort to bathe, when the moon of the month of Chait 
is in a certain lunar mansion. These ancient legends appear to point to a 
period when the cultivated land terminated at Nangalband. The red laterite 
soil, which extends from the Garo Hills through the Bhowal jungles, crops 
up here and there in the northern parganahs. In Sunargaon, however, no 
traces of it are visible. That the alluvium washed down from the hills 
should first of all be deposited at the termination of this hard formation is 
most probable, and it was perhaps on this account, as well as on the 
inaccessibility of the place itself, that the Hindu princes expelled from 
Central BengaPwere induced to found a city here. 
In the distribution of the sirkars of Bengal by Rajah Todar Mall, 
the Brahmaputra* is said to have bounded Sunargaon on the west. It 
does so at the present day ; but the stream that bears that name is a shallow 
* Ibn Batuta calls the Brahmaputra Al-nahr ulazraq, ‘ the blue river’. 
