Page:Bulandshahr- Or, Sketches of an Indian District- Social, Historical and Architectural.djvu/24

 direction, and divides it into two almost equal portions. The Karwan, the Patwaiya and the Chúiya, are three minor water-courses, which frequently become broad and rapid torrents in the rains; at all other times of the year their bed is a mere shallow depression in the soil, with scarcely distinguishable banks, and is generally brought under cultivation. At some remote period, there seems reason to believe, the Chúiya was a permanent stream, of much greater importance than now; for the sites of several ancient towns and forts, as at Chandokh, Indor, Chimávali and Dibhái, can be traced on its banks; and recently, on sinking a well in its bed, the soil at a depth of 33 feet was found to be full of small shells. It probably depended for existence on the primæval forests, and gradually dwindled away as they were cut down. It still occasionally asserts its old strength, and on the 19th of September 1880, it suddenly rose and swept away a large masonry bridge, near the town of Dibhái, which the Public Works Department had finished only a few months previously.

Since the suppression of the Mutiny in 1858, Buland shahr, for administrative purposes, has been entirely separated from Delhi, which now forms part of another Province, the Panjáb. But the historical and social connection between the two localities is not so easily to be severed. The towers and domes of the ancient metropolis are visible from the border of the district, and in modern, no less than in pre-historic, times the special characteristics of the neighbourhood are mainly due to the action of Imperial influences.

According to tradition, the original seat of the earliest Hindu dynasty—which proudly traced its descent from the mythical Regent of the Moon—was at Hastinapur, a name that still survives, but attaches only to a desolate group of shapeless mounds overlooking the old bed of the Ganges, some twenty-two miles north-east of the Merath Cantonments. When king Dhritaráshtra divided his dominions between his hundred sons and five nephews, the latter, still famous in popular speech under their names of the Pándavas, founded Indra-prastha (now Indra-pat, or old Delhi) as one of their capitals, and gradually cleared the surrounding country both