Cunningham suggested that the name of the hill island was originally Jahnavigira, or  “Jahnu’s house”, which was gradually shortened to Jahngira, just as Rajagriha became Rajgir. Confirming the origins of the name from Rishi Jahnu, he also quoted, but rejected, another contemporary local belief about the name having been derived from Jahangir, a Mughal Emperor, who was supposed to have issued a firman reinstating one Harinath Bharati, a Mahant or Sanyasi, who was driven away from the island by some Mohammedans. Cunningham made attempts to locate the firman, said to have existed on a copper plate, but, however, neither he nor his assistant Beglar, who stayed for a longer duration, could procure and see what everybody had heard of, but which only one Gajadhar Pandit professed to have seen. At present, nothing is known about any such firman. With the name spelt as Jahannabi-gira by an informant, he confirmed it as being a Persianized form of the Hindu Jahnavi-gira and calculated a date of around 1500 A.D. for the foundation of the concurrent site, correlating from the account of Buchanan, who had mentioned that the founding Mahant, of the order still in occupation of the island, had lived 13 generations prior to him, after assigning an average age of 25 years for each. In refutation of association of the site with Jahangir, he also noted that the masjid on the Baiskaran promontory, said to have been built after the Mohammedans had been obliged to give up the Jahngira rock, was a building of the Pathan style, and apparently of much older date or a full century before the reign of Jahangir.

To be continued....