Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/24

 XIV

INTRODUCTION.

not a single collection of houses, but a small arbitrary revenue subdivision, corresponding more nearer with the parish than with any other institution in England. Th& number of hamlets in any particular village varies with its area and the convenience its lands offer for building from only one to sometimes as many as fifty ; and by far the greater majority of the second rank of towns which the Oudh census, taking as was ua avoidable the revenue divisions for its framework, recorded as having populations of from 2,000 to 10,000 souls will be found on examination to be really many separate groups of houses scatWith tered over units of property of more than the average size. the exception of the few small local marts, where the rural population of the neighbourhood collects on stated days of the week for the petty household barter, the congregations of human beings Extremis living on contiguous sites are generally minute indeed. accuracy in a case where old sites are constantly being deserted and again occupied is hardly attainable, but the census must be substantially true when it gives the number of separate hamlets at over 77,000, and the average aggregate of inhabitants to each at only 150. The people are nowhere drawn together by the more complex wants of the civilization with which we are familiar. Their simple huts can be run up in a few weeks on any spot which is sufficiently elevated above the rain-floods, and their almost only object is to be as near as possible to the fields they new settler, especially if he be of high caste and cultivate. tent a considerable tenement, will generally prefer to build a detached house close to his own fields. In the course of time his children and grandchildren will relieve the overcrowded house by adding houses of their own, and these, with the hovels of the low caste attendants, the chamar and the slave ploughman, will form a hamlet which, if of sufficient size, may eventually attract a blacksmith, a carpenter, a washerman, or a barber. Small centres of trade where all the wants of the rural community are provided for occur everywhere at distances of only a few miles apart. They consist usually of a few mud huts along the sides of a road, with perhaps one or two buildings, whose upper storey and roof of tiles mark them out as the residences of the leading grain-dealers and money-lenders, professions which Besides these there is the brazier, who are commonly combined. supplies the brass pots for eating and drinking, which constitute almost the whole household furniture of the bulk of the people, a few clothiers with scanty stocks of low-priced cotton goods or coarse woollen blankets, a sweetmeat-shop, and one or more sheds under which a grain-parcher prepares oyer his fire of dead leaves

The

village in

A

Oudh

is