Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924073057352).pdf/27

 NIG 19 shines like sand, and generally has a substratum of pure sand at a distance of from a few inches to a few feet below the surface. It is poor and unproductive, and known by the local name of tápa. In my report of pargana Bhar, I said that I believed the whole country between the high bank in that pargana and the corresponding high banks in Khairigarh formed once a large inland lake.* The general appearance of the country, its interminable network of lakes and streams, dry water courses, and gritty high land, and specially the alternate ridges and depressions of soil by which the high land gradu- ally slopes down into the river tarkis--- all seem so many evidences of a time when the whole country was part of a great inland lake. The absence of sákhu trees, which only grow in soils beyond the influence of fluvial action, may be mentioned as another argument; they grow in abun- dance to the south of the high bank in Bhúr, or north of the high bank in Khairigarh, but hardly anywhere between the two rivers. Though the period when the country was a lake has long ago passed from the memories and traditions of the people, the fact that the river Chauka or Sárda and the river Sarju were once the same stream is still fresh in their minds. These rivers are known to have been once connect- ed quite recently by a water-course now almost dry which passes near Newalkhár, and when they were thus connected, the waters passing down the stream flowing under Khairigarh, now called the Sarju, were called the Chauka, and far exceeded in volume those contained in the most southern channel of the Chauka. Now the case is exactly the reverse, and the name Chauka is restricted to the southern stream. I have men- tioned that the two rivers are even now connected by the Baita river which flows across this pargana. An argument that the rivers were once the same may be derived from the etymology of the words. Sarju is of course a mere euphonious con- traction of Sárda kojú; the river of Sárda, and as jú is Persian, the name must have been given first in Muhammadan times. This reduces the three names to two. Now Sárda is the title of a goddess, and is assumed both by Saraswati, wife of Barmha, and by Durga, wife of Shiva. The mytho- logy of the Brahmans, which assigns divine protectors to mountains, rivers, and all great natural features, necessarily provided a goddess for a stream mightier even than the Ganges; probabīy the goddess was originally Saraswati, but she receives now but scanty bonour. The Cháuka is now looked on by the residents on its banks as under the peculiar protection of Durga. İt is frequently called Maháráni or Chauka Maháráni; some- times Sárda, or Sárda Maháráni. These two names therefore are evidently the names of one river and of its tutelary goddess. The word Chauka the word tápa. For it is evidently the same as tápá, which in Hindi means au island, and I think the conclusion is possible that the patches of high land which have the goil now called tápa wero orginally islands in the middle of the large lake or inlend ses which once stretched from the Sarju to the Chauka; being the highest land, they are of course the parts of the plain which would first ba left-dry by the receding waters.
 * An argument in support of this conclusion may be drevn from the etymology of