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 — BIL

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The black comcattle, disturb their rites, and impede their progress. plexion, ferocious aspect, barbarous habits, rude speech, and savage yells of the Dasyas, and the sudden and furtive attacks which, under cover of the impenetrable woods and the obscurity of night, they would make on the of the Aryans, might naturally lead the latter to speak of them, in the highly figurative language of an imaginative people in the first stage of civilisation, as ghosts and demons, or even to conceive of their hidden assailants as possessed of magical and superhuman powers, This state of things might last for some time. or as headed by devils The Aryans, after advancing some way, might halt to occupy, clear, and cultivate the territory they had acquired, and the aborigines might continue in possession of the adjacent tracts, sometimes at peace and sometimes at war with their invaders. At length the further advance of the Aryans would either drive the Dasyas into the remotest corners of the country, or lead to their partial incorporation with the conquerors as the lowest stage of their community."

encampments

In the age of Brahmanical depression and Buddhist ascendancy, this tract, seems to have been held by the Thatheras, till, at the period of Brahmanical revival, in, probably, the ninth or tenth century A. D., a band of Raikwars under Raja Sri Ram crossed over from Kanauj, and in the usual fashion expelled them. The Ganges then seems to have flowed close under the lofty tila on and round which Bilgram is built, and to have made the site an admirable one for purposes of defence and trade alike. So the Raikwar chieftain founded a town on it, and called it after his own name, Srinagar, and the Raikwdrs held it till the Muhammadan conquest. To this day they own five of the villages of the pargana. like the rest of the district,

Srinagar could not have grown into a town of much importance by the time of Sultan Rlahmud's Kanauj campaign (1018 A. D.), otherwise from its vicinity to Kanauj it would have been noticed by the contemporary historians, and by the author of the Mira-at-i-Masaildi in his mention of the places to which Sayyad Salar despatched detachments from Satrikh in his Oudh campaign (1032 A. D.).

The Shekhs of Bilgram boast that they came with Mahmud and expelled the Raikwars in 405 H. (1014 A. D.) and re-named Srinagar Bilgram. They recall the date of their incursion in these memorial lines Musalman rasida ba Hindustan Zi qauman hami bud Siddic[iaa

Jinud

bud ansariau o aghwau Busarian Zi chir sad o khams Hijri tamam Srinagr ra nam sbud Bilgram. jalas

Turukwan

But I can find no trustworthy basis for this pretension. The real conquest of Bilgram did not take place till 1217 A. D. It is not at all impossible that Srinagar may have been visited and despoiled, as was Kanauj itself by Mahmld's army, or that some Shekhs may have remained behind more probably from Sayyad Salar's than from Mahmud's expedition, was the case at Gopamau and Mallanw^n but there could have been no political displacement at this date of Raikwars by Muhammadans. there,

as



The oldest Shekh tomb to which the Shekhs can point is that of a half mythical personage,KhwajeMadd-ud-din, a holy man and disciple ofKhwaje