The Ganga: Water Use in the Indian Subcontinent

From time immemorial the Bengal Delta had been an important maritime des- nation for traders from all parts of the world. The actual location of the port of call varied from time to time in line with the natural hydrographic changes. From the early decades of the second millennium AD, traders from the European con- nent also joined the traders from the Arab countries, who had been the Forerunners in maritime trading with India. Daring traders and fortune seekers from Denmark, Holland, Belgium and England arrived at different ports of call along the Hooghly river. The river had been, in the meantime, losing its pre-eminence as the main outlet channel of the sacred Ganga into the Bay of Bengal, owing to a shift of ?ow towards east near Rajmahal into the Padma, which had been so long, carried very small part of the large volume of ?ow. On a cloudy afternoon on August 24, 1690 the British seafarer Job Charnock rested his oars at Kolkata and started a new chapter in the life of a sleepy village, bordering the Sunderbans which was ¿a tangled region of estuaries, rivers and water courses, enclosing a vast number of islands of various shapes and sizes. ¿ and infested with a large variety of wild animals. In the language of the British Nobel Laureate (1907) Rudyard Kipling (1865¿1936). ???? ???? Thus the midday halt of Charnock grew a city.