Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/469

 DIG

891

The settlement returns give 1,064 hamlets, and the census 710 hamlets, and 369 detached houses. The population is returned at 90,582, giving an average of 577 to the square mile, and 88 to each hamlet. There are no towns and if the returns show what seem to be populous villages, it is only where a number of petty hamlets have been included' within one boundary, and denoted by a common but generally inappropriate name. Only 1,456 Muhammadans, or less than two per cent, of the whole population, are found, to 87,694 Hindus. Females are found in the fair proportion of 956 to the hundred of male Hindus, and 1017 of Muhammadans. The whole populatioii is purely agricultural, and the average farm is five acres; the average area to a plough four acres. The census gives

department.



21,647 inhabited houses, the settlement returns only 18,026, exhibiting averages of 4'1 or five inhabitants to each house. Of these, the settlement return assigns 4,237 houses to Brahmans, who therefore, by the settlement average of five persons to a Ihouse, must number 21,185. Thakurs, on the same calculation, number 8,100, Koris 9,905, Ahirs 8,990, and Kahdrs There are no other very' numerous castes. It will be observed 6,610. that a third of the whole population consists of the two higher castes. Of these, the majority are the old village proprietors, who are far more numerous here than in any other part of the district, except perhaps the Mahadewa pargana. None of these will touch a plough, and they subsist miserably on the rents they can screw out of the industrious classes, or the produce of slave labour in the fields they call their own. With few exceptions, the 10,000 Koris are all bondsmen in the Sawak form, -which is described in the district article, and receive the minimum of clothes and food which will enable them to work an overtasked soil for the support of their numerous and idle masters. Eighty-six of the 110 villages are held

by taluqdars, the largest proprietors being, of course, Rdja KrishanDattRd,m and the late Maharaja Man Singh. There are absolutely no manufactures, and the cotton and salt must be provided by the exportation of rice and Indian-corn. The pargana has no history. Its name is said to be derived from the Digsaria Ghhattri who founded the village of Digsar, but it is obvious that the village named him. The real etymology is probably Dirgeshwara, or lord of the world, and it is not unlikely that the term was drawn from some now forgotten shrine of Mahddeo. The earhest traditions are connected with the Dom rdj of Gorakhpur, and^ many of its villages are said to have been founded by grants of Raja Ugrasen, the last and most famous of the low-caste chiefs. On the destruction of that State in the commencement of the fourteenth century, it became a part of the great Kalhans raj of Khurdsa, and when the last of the Kalhanses perished zamindars of Digsar in the great flood of two centuries later, the petty acknowledged the sway of the Bisens of Gonda. lord paramount of the Till annexation, the Gonda raja was the admitted pargana, and took zamindari dues throughout but he only kept two or three villages in his private management, not caring to interfere with the numerous coparcenary communities under him.

There of

Ram

is

a small

fair at

Chandar with

importance.

Kamipur in Aghan to commemorate the marriage Sita,

but no other religious meetings of any