View of Pirpahari at Monghyr with figures in the foreground, and an elephant procession beyond

The view seems to be of Pirpahari, a small hill which commands the northward facing peninsula round which the Ganges flows at Monghyr. On top was the mansion built for himself by Gurghin Khan, the Armenian general of Nawab Qasim 'Ali Khan, when the latter abandoned Murshidabad as his capital and established himself at Monghyr in 1761. Hodges reached Monghyr in 1781, and would have met his second great patron in India, Augustus Cleveland, based at nearby Bhagalpur. When the Daniells reached Monghyr in October 1788, they included the house in distant views of Monghyr, but on their return in December 1790, Thomas Daniell's drawing now at Yale shows the house to be falling into ruin (M. Archer, Artist Adventurers in Eighteenth Century India: Thomas and William Daniell, Spink, 1974, pl. 10)