CENTRAL PROVINCES OF INDIA

BY SIR CHARLES GRANT, K.C.S.I.

(Late Acting Commissioner, Central Provinces, for 1879)

It is now pretty generally understood that India is not a single homogeneous country, inhabited by a people more or less uniform in language, religion, and descent; but is rather a continent, occupied by races differing as much from each other in habits as the nationalities of Europe, and more widely separated than they are in origin. Still, even in minds to which these facts are admitted as items of general information, there yet lingers a traditional image of India as a low-lying, flat country, thickly clothed with tropical forest, in which palm trees everywhere occupy the foreground. This picture, first drawn from our early experiences as traders planted on the coast lands and river deltas, has been, of course, largely qualified to the many travellers who now make the Indian tour in the pleasant winter months; but the course of their wanderings lies mainly to the historic cities of the North Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, and the rest-in the great Gangetic plain, where the life of the country has most strongly throbbed, and where its chief monuments lie; and Upper India, however widely it differs in its smooth, brown expanse from the tropical sealine, stands even farther apart from the inland region of rock and valley now known as the Central Provinces.

The name is not inappropriate, as they lie almost in the centre of the Peninsula, having the Upper Indian Provinces (separated from them, however, by a belt of native states) to the north, outlying portions

of the great province of Lower Bengal to the east, the Madras Presidency and the wide dominions of the Nizam of Hyderabad to the south, and the same prince's province of Berár and the Bombay Presidency to the west. Historical continuity might perhaps have been better served by reviving the old name of Gondwana-the country of the Gonds-one of the most powerful and numerous of the so-called aboriginal tribes, whose home, as far back as history goes, has been in these hills and valleys. Even before our era, probably, settlers of the higher Aryan races had begun to press upon the Gonds from the north, and by the eleventh century-perhaps before then-had established themselves, under princes of their own blood, in parts of Gondwána. These dynasties could not stand against the powerful Mohamedan states which sprang up in Central and Southern India after the Central Asian Mohamedans began to establish themselves in India; and they in turn gave way to the Imperial power founded by the great Moghal dynasty at Delhi in the early part of the sixteenth century. In the Moghal era the Gond chiefs appear as tributary princes of the Empire-a position which they retained for some two centuries, eventually giving place, in the middle of the eighteenth century, to the Maráthas, a western Hindu race, who from obscure beginnings rapidly rose to prominence, and in the decay of the Moghal Empire overran great part of India. Their progress was checked by the rising British power, and in 1818 the northern part of Gondwána fell to us, followed in 1854 by the rest of the province.1

From its secluded position and the inaccessibility of parts of the country, our new acquisition was little known outside its own limits, even in the half-century in which we are now living. So lately as 1853, when

1 The historical details in this paper are chiefly drawn from an official publication by the same writer.

the great Trigonometrical Survey of India had been at work for some fifty years, Sir Erskine Perry, addressing the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, wrote: "At present the Gondwána highlands and jungles comprise such a large tract of unexplored country that they form quite an oasis in our maps. Captain Blunt's interesting journey in 1795 from Benares to Rájámandri gives us almost all the information we possess of many parts of the interior." In this fascinating blank, imagination found a fertile field; old maps marked the southern forests as inhabited by men who lived in trees; and official reports brand large sections of the population with cannibalism. Now that the searchlight of prosaic inquiry has penetrated into these dark corners, the tree-dwellers have vanished into the region of myths; and of the cannibal tribes, one, which is described as disposing of old relations by destroying them and eating their flesh, is found to have earned its reputation by a harmless, if singular, taste for monkeys; whilst another race, described by the British Resident at Nágpúr as "hunting for strangers at certain times to sacrifice to their gods," are now known to be nothing worse than dirty, amiable savages, who must certainly on occasion have witnessed human sacrifices at state ceremonials conducted by their princes, but against whom nothing more damaging is known.

All these wild regions have now been brought under every-day official supervision; the tribes which inhabit them are on easy terms with district officers, and have been reported on by ethnological committees; their languages have been classified, and they have been included in the network of administration which covers the country, simplified, however, to meet their wants and habits. In the more settled portions of the province, which have in many cases been occupied for centuries by peaceable agricultural

immigrants, mainly from the north and west, and have been regularly governed since they became British territory, that is, from half a century to more than three-quarters of a century ago, railways have been made through the great river valleys, and have even commenced to cross the high plateaus, so that the principal cities, Nágpúr, Jabalpúr, and Saugor are now not unfamiliar names to any one who has a general acquaintance with India. But the inner features of the country, lying apart, as it does, both from the main currents of modern traffic and from the more absorbing vicissitudes of Indian history, have not even yet awakened much curiosity outside the little circle officially connected with the administration.

Although, judged by the large Oriental standards. of area, the Central Provinces rank low among the component portions of the Indian Empire, yet, compared with European states, they would take a good place. They are set down by the most recent accounts as extending to 115,887 square miles, almost exactly the size of Austria proper, but with not much more than half of its population-some thirteen millions of souls as against twenty-four millions. Indeed, many parts of the country are but ill fitted to support human life. Its main feature is a high, central table-land, known as the Sátpura plateau, which, running from east to west nearly six hundred miles, may be regarded as the barrier between Northern and Southern India. To the north lies the rich valley of the Narbada, and still beyond are two outlying districts on another and somewhat similar plateau formed by the Vindhyan hills. Southwards, again, of the Sátpura lie the valleys. of the Wardha and Wainganga, forming part of the Great Godavari basin, in which are the districts forming the old province of Nágpúr, and eastwards of that, in the basin of the Mahánadi, is a lowland tract, known as Chattisgarh, or the land of the thirty-six castles.

Even the valleys and so-called plains are broken by isolated peaks and straggling hill-ranges, so that scarcely anywhere is there room for a really dense population. In the best districts the rate is under two hundred to the square mile, whilst in the wilder regions, even of the plain, it falls to between sixty and seventy.

Thus guarded by natural obstacles, the country was in old days a great fastness, having the central plateau as its citadel, with its outworks in the outlying hill-ranges; and sources of defence, rather than means of access, in the rocky beds of the encircling valleys. When the earlier semi-savage tribes were forced back by the Aryan inflow from the north, they retreated into the highland country, where drivers of the plough did not care to follow them; and even when the vanguard of the higher race-impelled, as has happened elsewhere, by religious devotion-penetrated these then unknown regions, they found the so-called aborigines confident enough in their strength to receive them rather as butts for rustic practical jokes than as dangerous invaders. In the Rámáyana, the great Indian epic, written probably in the fifth century before Christ, the sufferings of the Aryan hermits are thus described: "These shapeless and ill-looking monsters testify their abominable character by various cruel and terrific displays. These base-born wretches implicate the hermits in impure practices, and perpetrate the greatest outrages. Changing their shapes, and hiding in the thickets adjoining the hermitages, these frightful beings delight in terrifying the devotees. They cast away their sacrificial ladles and vessels, they pollute the cooked oblations, and utterly defile the offerings with blood. These faithless creatures inject frightful sounds into the ears of the faithful and austere eremites. At the time of sacrifice they snatch away the jars, the flowers, the fuel, and the sacred grass of these sober-minded men."