ABSTRACT
The English and the Dutch had their regular establishments as soon as they realized that the city was to be their scene of operations. The Dutch found opium growing in plenty and they started sending it to Batavia in Indonesia, their headquarters in North-East Asia. The Patna opium also found a market on the Coromandel and Malabar coasts. The Arab geographers and Europeans who visited India between the eighth and the sixteenth centuries mostly wrote about the coastal areas and peninsular India. Hence from the 1620s onwards for the next two centuries the flow of European travellers to Bihar continued unabated. Prof. Ray has presented to the English-speaking world for the first time the narratives of German Tieffenthaeler and the French Modave on Bihar. Modave is different from Tieffenthaeler because he describes his journey through Bihar meticulously and describes the different places in the order in which he passed through from September 1774 onwards on way to Delhi.
