Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/41

 CHAPTER

its

III.

The surface and soil of the province, its rivers and its lakes, animals, and the plants which contribute to human existence,

have been passed in review. The people, with their castes and have been described; and we have seen them bound, as perhaps no other race of the world is bound, in the chains of a superstition which is not without features of nobility, and which seems equally incapable of development and impervious to decay. Now it becomes necessary, in a brief historical sketch social system,

avoiding as much as possible subjects of controversy, to trace the progress of the various elements whose combination produced the political position which confronted us at annexation, and to fecount the measures by which that position has been dealt with. Long before the dawn of authentic history, Oudh stands out Ajodhya, its eponymous in the fuUiblaze of legend and poetry. of that happy kingdom in which all that the city, was the capital was realized as it can never be Hindu race reveres or desires of the glorious dynasty which began realized again, and the seat with the sun and culminated after sixty generations of blameless Whether rulers in the incarnate deity and perfect man, Rama, criticism will finally enroll the hero among the highest creations of pure imagination, or accord him a semi-historical personality and a doubtful date, it is barren to speculate history is more nearly concerned with the influence which the story of his life still has on the moral and religious beliefs of a great people, and the enthusiasm which makes his birth-place the most highly venerated of the sacred places to which its pilgrims crowd. Under any circumstances, the colonization of this province must have been very early, and the burial-place of the great Muni Agastya, on© of the first pioneers of Aryan progress, is pointed but near Colonelganj, a few miles to the north of the Gogra. At when, the Aryan race, the commencement of true history, which, expelled from religion, through Buddha, gave birth to the than a third of mankind, more its original home, still dominates Sravasti from by not the Oudh was a populous country, ruled Madhyadesha or of Hindustan least important of the six kings the prophet's earliest and of scene the was capital Its proper.