Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/11



The latest annexed of the kingdoms of India forms the centre of that vast plain which has been for centuries the peculiar site of Hindu civilization, and is distinguished by the name of Hindustan proper from those other parts of the Indian continent where the colonization of the old Aryan conquerors has been less complete, and their religious and social system has less thoroughly eradicated or absorbed into itself the beliefs and languages of the aboriginal inhabitants. Stretching from the Ganges to the hills, and about equidistant from Delhi on the one side and the extreme east of Behar on the other, it divides this region into two nearly even parts; and as the scene of the great national epic, the two greatest of the reforming movements which have agitated the national religion, and the earliest as well as the last of those Muhammadan governments, in its resistance to which the national spirit was most severely tried and gave the most convincing proofs of its wonderful vitality, it is second to no part of the continent in its command over the sympathies of the native, and the interest and difficulty of the problems which it presents to its European administrator or historian. Nowhere are the traditions of the past more ancient and more vividly felt, and nowhere is the civilization--rooted in a soil of unsurpassed fertility and grown up in a population of exceptional density-more fully developed and more homogeneous than in this the last case where Western statesmanship has been brought face to face with the requirements of an Eastern people.

With a total area of 23,930 square miles, Oudh lies between the extreme latitudes of 25°34' and 29°6' north, and longitudes of 79°45' and 83°11' east. Only where the Ganges marks its south-western frontier is one whole side separated by a natural boundary from neighbouring governments. Naipál marches with it all along the north, with a frontier for the first sixty miles to the east, running along the foot of the lowest range of the Himalayas, and from that point advanced for some distance into the sub-Himalayan Tarai. To the east and the west it is enclosed by the older-acquired districts of the North-West Provinces--with Jaunpur, Basti, and Azamgarh on one side, and Shahjahanpur, Farukhabad, and Cawnpore on the other.