Decline of Bhagirathi-Hooghly Channel - The Ganga: Water Use in the Indian Subcontinent - page 59

Chapter 6
Decline of Bhagirathi-Hooghly Channel
It has been established beyond doubt that until the 15th century AD, the major flow
of the Ganga passed through its south-western channel, the Bhagirathi-Hooghly. A
great volume of water passed through the Bhairab-Jalangi channel in Nadia district
too. These two diversions built the south Bengal basin between them, through which
the Ganga flowed into the sea. Only afterward, more and more water of the Ganga
flowed into its south-eastern course, the Padma, making it the main channel. Some
expert opinions, supporting this phenomenon are summed below.
Hamdi Bey wrote in The Sunday Statesman Miscellany (23 November 1986) that
river Hooghly, the lower reach of the Bhagirathi was named after the busy Hugly
town and port, well-known in the 16th and 17th centuries, by Portuguese settlers on
its banks. He believes, Emperor Ashoka voyaged from Patliputra (modern Patna)
to Tamralipta (now Tamluk) through the Hooghly. The river then fell into the Bay
of Bengal which then extended some 150 km north from its present shore, near
Diamond Harbour. Romans who came to India for trading in the 1st century, voy-
aged across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, to places on the Western and
Eastern coasts, respectively, entered Bengal through river Hooghly. Roman coins
and potteries, found in various places on the east coast, conspicuously in Orissa and
24-Parganas district of West Bengal testify to this trade. Seals with inscriptions in
Roman script have been discovered in excavations in Malda.
By 1520 AD, Portuguese merchants sailed from Bay of Bengal to the Hooghly
but probably not beyond, to evade customs duty and in view of their notoriety for
piracy, abduction and forcible conversion of local people to Christianity, or because
of heavy silting of the Bhagirathi, as mentioned in their records. They traded from
Hugli town and anchored most of their ships at Betor in Howrah, opposite the city
which later came to be known as Calcutta. Dutch, British, French and Danish traders
followed the Portuguese and settled at or near Hugli, Chinsurah, Chandannagar and
Serampore. Even flat-bottom steam ships of low draft, which began plying from
1838, could not sail along the Bhagirathi for most of the year, because of shallow-
ness. The volume of trade from Kolkata increased so much that an alternative route
to the city's hinterland had to be found. The discovery of a steamer route through
the creeks of the Sundarbans to the joint estuary of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra
in present Bangladesh in the 19th century enabled foreign merchants to navigate up
to Allahabad by steamers and up to Agra by boats.