by two saints - Brahmananda Giri and Atmaram Giri based on the idol of Mata Bhuvaneshwari, the Kuladevi of Sabarna Roy Choudhury family. It was Padmabati Devi, the mother of Laksmikanta Roy Choudhury who discovered the fossils of Sati's finger in a lake called Kalikunda. This made Kalighat as one of the 51 Shakti Pithas. Panchannagram and Kali-Kshetra The East India Company obtained from the Mughal emperor Farrukhsiyar, in 1717, the right to rent from 38 villages surrounding their settlement. Of these 5 lay across the Hooghly in what is now Howrah district. The remaining 33 villages were on the Calcutta side. After the fall of Siraj-ud-daulah, the last independent Nawab of Bengal, it purchased these villages in 1758 from Mir Jafar, and reorganised them. These villages were known en-bloc as Dihi Panchannagram and Kalighat was one of them. It was considered to be a suburb beyond the limits of the Maratha Ditch.Cotton, H.E.A., Calcutta Old and New, first published 1909/reprint 1980, pages 103-4 and 221, General Printers and Publishers Pvt. Ltd. Kalighat was originally called Kali-Kshetra, which is widely accepted as the origin for the word Kalikata, and in turn Calcutta or Kolkata. The Kalighat Hoard Some time in 1783, a fisherman found a treasure hoard of more than 200 Gold Coins somewhere near the now defunct Strand on the Adi Ganga, near Kalighat. Not knowing what to do with it, he sold it off to Raja Nabakrishna Deb, Zamindar of Shovabazar-Sutanuti. Seeing the coins as an opportunity of gaining confidence with the then Governor General of India, Warren Hastings, Nabakrishna Deb gifted him with the coins. Keeping a few with him, Warren Hastings sent 172 coins from the horde to London, to the East India Company. These coins belonged to the Gupta Kings, testaments to India's glorious past, but since no one knew of the Guptas back then (It would not be before another half a century or so that Alexander Cunningham would find out about the glorious age of the Guptas), these coins held little value to the people involved. However, for all practical purposes, the hoard was thought to be lost, as the Company directors sent most of the coins to the melting pot, and some to a few collectors. When Hastings returned to London, he found only 24 of them in the collection of the British Museum. This astonished him beyond measures. He thought he