Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/619

 GON

541

on the condition that he -would get the rfja into his power by inducing to accept some present. He went to the raja's family priest, and gave him a sacred cord, with the direction that he was to invest his enemy with it. Achal Narain Singh put it on, and then asked where it had come from. When told from the hands of Ratan Pande, his conscience struck him, and he cast it away in terror. But it was too late, the present had been accepted and a few days later, on the 13th of the light half of Aghan, a lofty wave rushed up from the Sarju through the Mahadewa pargana, and on its crest sat the angry wraith of Ratan Pande. When it reached Liirhia Ghat it broke, and overthrew the raja's fortress, carrying away everything in indiscriminate ruin, and leaving not a member of his household alive. A deep lake is still shown, under which it is said that in the hot weather the fisherman can strike with his punt-pole the ruined towers of the old palace and all around the shore are large brick mounds, the remains of ancient mansions, and the palm and date trees of former gardens. Coins are occasionally disinterred by the rains, and I have myself, found a copper piece there of a mint which I could not recognise myself or identify in Prinsep. It would of course be a vain task to attempt to disentangle the elements of fact from this singular tradition but the story is told with a circumstantiality and vividness which render it hard to imagine that it is purely an invention or even an ordinary myth.

him







The

exact date

stiU in existence,

is

given, the descendants of the avenging Brahman are disaster was certainly at

and the scene of the asserted

one time the site of a populous town. The Mahadewa pargana is seamed all over with the channels of rivers which have dried up or changed their course, and there is no difficulty in believing either that a Brahman did starve himself to death at the raja's gateway, or that the palace was destroyed by some extraordinary natural convulsion, possibly an earthquake, which drove the waters of the Tirhi into a new channel.

Some time before this the north of the district had been occupied by Janwars, whose forest kingdom comprised the whole of the sub-Himalayan tarai. It appears, though the vague traditions of this period make certainty impossible, that they had more than once been brought into hostile collision with their southern neighbours, and the Goraha Bisens relate that the jagir of the Mahadewa pargana was conferred on their ancestor in reward for his having made a raja of Ikauna prisoner, and delivered him bound to the Kalhans raja. At any rate, up to this time the Janwars and Kalhanses divided among them the chieftainship of the whole of the district, the former holding the tar^i, the latter the uparhar table-land in the centre, and the low lands known as the tarhar which The fall of the Kalhans dynasty lie between the Tirhi and the Gogra. was followed by an anarchy of several years, out of which the present system of chieftainship was developed. The posthumous son of Achal Narsiin Singh maintained himself in a small principality, including Babhnipair and Blirhapara in this district and Rastilpur Ghaus in Basti. The Bandhalgotis became independent in Manikapur, and their chief eventually assumed the title of r£ja ; while another family of Kalhanses, the present thakurs of Chhedwara, who assert, though the claim is not universally allowed, that they are descended