The contents of the following pages are the result of researches of several years, through files of old newspapers and hundreds of volumes of scarce works on India. Some of the authorities we have acknowledged in the progress of the work; others, to which we have been indebted for in-formation we shall here enumerate; apologizing to such as we may have unintentionally omitted:-
Selections from the Calcutta Gazettes; Calcutta Review; Orlich's Jacquemont's; Mackintosh's Travels; Long's Selections; Calcutta Gazettes and other Calcutta papers; Kaye's Civil Administration; Wheeler's Early Records; Malleson's Recreations; East India United Service Journal; Asiatic Researches and Asiatic Journal; Knight's Calcutta; Lewis's Memoirs of Thomas; Orme's History of India.
We do not aspire to be historians, we simply profess to lay before our readers some curious reminiscences illustrating the manners and customs of the people of Calcutta during the rule of the East India Company.
Our scenes are laid principally in Calcutta, but we have occasionally travelled up-country that we might exhibit life in the mofussil, and in some few instances we have given notices of occurrences in the other presidencies.
Our residence during the time that we have been employed in this compilation, having been far removed from the Metropolis, and our access to newspapers and publica-tions in consequence limited, we have been able to note only a few of the events of the times alluded to. But these notes will afford both amusement and instruction, showing as they do how rapidly improvement and progress have been going on, both in the condition and lives of the English in India, and we may add especially of the natives also, during the Government of the East India Company between the years 1600 and 1858.
The work was first taken up as amusement during the leisure hour, but in the course of our reading, so many interesting records came under notice that it occurred to us, that the present generation might take an equal interest with ourselves in a narrative of events which happened during the two centuries alluded to in Calcutta and India generally.
Like another Herculaneum that had been buried for ages and afterwards exposed to view to a race unborn at the time of its entombment, the habits and amusements of people which had passed away from the face of the earth are reproduced in the pages we now present to the reader. We seem here to live again among those who were contemporaneous with our great grandfathers, and we can in imagination see a little into their customs and habits, so old fashioned in our eyes as to rise a smile of contempt or ridicule. We see Calcutta before it possessed a single building of magni-ficence or even of importance, and when the Honorable Company of merchants were only in their infancy and ruled the country with a jealous eye and iron hand. The Press was gagged and unable to offer an independent opinion. Adventurers were not allowed to land without a permit from the Honorable Court in Leadenhall Street; and those who had licences were not permitted to go more than ten miles distant from Calcutta, without another permit.
We now present the result of our labors to an appreciating public.
Hindu (932)
Agriculture (123)
Ancient (1103)
Archaeology (794)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (923)
Biography (728)
Buddhist (549)
Cookery (166)
Emperor & Queen (576)
Islam (246)
Jainism (322)
Literary (891)
Mahatma Gandhi (387)
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