Faridpur

Faridpur, or Furreedpore, a town and district of British India, in the Dacca division of eastern Bengal and Assam. The town, which has a railway station, stands on an old channel of the Ganges. Pop. (1901) 11,649. There are a Baptist mission and a government high school. The district comprises an area of 2281 sq. m. The general aspect is flat, tame and uninteresting, although in the northern tract the land is comparatively high, with a light sandy soil, covered with water during the rainy season, but dry during the cold and hot weather. From the town of Faridpur the ground slopes, until in the south, on the confines of Backergunje, it becomes one immense swamp, never entirely dry. During the height of the inundations the whole district may be said to be under water. The villages are built on artificially raised sites, or the high banks of the deltaic streams. Along many of the larger rivers the line of hamlets is unbroken for miles together, so that it is difficult to say where one ends and another begins. The huts, however, except in markets and bazaars, are seldom close together, but are scattered amidst small garden plots, and groves of mango, date and betel-nut trees. The plains between the villages are almost invariably more or less depressed towards the centre, where usually a marsh, or lake, or deep lagoon is found. These marshes, however, are gradually filling up by the silt deposited from the rivers; in the north of the district there now only remain two or three large swamps, and in them the process may be seen going on. The climate of Faridpur is damp, like that of the other districts of eastern Bengal; the average annual rainfall is 66 in. and the average mean temperature 76.9° F.

The principal rivers of Faridpur are the Ganges, the Arial Khan and the Haringhata. The Ganges, or Padma as it is locally called, touches the extreme north-west corner of the district, flows along its northern boundary as far as Goalanda, where it receives the waters o£ the Jamuna or main stream of the Brahmaputra, and whence the united stream turns southwards and forms the eastern boundary of the district. The river is navigable by large cargo boats throughout the year, and has an average breadth during the rainy season of 1600 yds. Rice is the great crop of the district. In 1901 the population was 1,937,646, showing an increase of 6% in the decade. The north of the district is crossed by the line of the Eastern Bengal railway to Goalanda, the port of the Brahmaputra steamers, and a branch runs to Faridpur town. But most of the trade is conducted by river.