The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c6.28

v1.c6.28

[ 5 ] The first, however, included Midnapur, Mahakaunghat, and Narainpur, and the province of Orissa, therefore, may be said to have extended from Midnapur to Raj-mahindri. According to Sterling, “at the opening of Muhammad Taki Khan’s administration, A. D. 1726, who governed as the Naib or Deputy of the Nazim of the three provinces, the most authentic revenue records exhibit the Subah of Orissa as extending from a place called Radha Dewal, seven *coss* beyond the town of Midnapur, to Tikali Raghunathpur, one of the estates in or near the Mahendramāli range of hills in Ganjam, a computed distance of 176 *coss* ; and on the west from False Point to the Bermul Pass, reckoned at *coss* eighty-five.²¹ Its nothern limits was, however, never well settled ; it advanced or receded according as the Muhammadan *subahdars* of Bengal proved weak or powerful, and the success of border warfare told in favour of the Uriyās or their neighbours. A little before the time when the East India Company assumed the Dewany of Bengal, Behar and Orissa, the northern boundary of the last named province was the south of the Rūpanārāyaṇ River, and that was probably its extreme limit to the north ; for it is up to that line that the Uriyā dialect was always current, until pressed back to the bank of the Subarṇarekhā when Midnapur was transferred to the commissionership of Burdwan. Its southern boundary was, likewise, never permanently fixed, and oscillated between the Cilkā lake and the banks of the Godāvarī. But it seems never to have been reduced to shorter limits than the Subarṇarekhā River on the one side, and the Cilkā Lake on the other. “Certain it is,” says Mr. Sutton, “that within these limits, at the present day, the Uriyā language is spoken in its greatest purity, and Uriyā manners and customs, weights and measures, everywhere prevail ; while to the north of these limits, the Bengali accent and terminations to some nouns and verbs are current, just as on the south of Ganjam, the Uriyās vary their pronounciation of certain words after the fashion of the Telingas or Telegus.²²