Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924073057352).pdf/297

 SAL 289 class. The great Gharwár Rája, Mánik Chand, whose descendants now possess the ráj of Kantit in Mirzapur, had no sons; he had given the daughters of thousands of indigent Brahmans in marriage, hoping thereby to propitiate the gods and obtain male issue, but all his lavish gifts proved useless. As a last resource he gave his adopted daughter (a girl whom his ráni is said to have picked up at the Manikpur ghát on the Ganges, and for whom various offers of marriage by other Chhattri chiefs had been made) to the devotee, not in marriage, but as a living offering presented at his shrine. The pandit accepted his votive offering, and in due time, the damsel gave birth to a male child which the Pandit named Kánh;" and so on. "A very pretty piece of word-painting no doubt," remarks Mr. Carnegy, "and from this Kảnh are said to descend the Kanhpuria clan, with its fifteen rájas and chiefs.” From Mr. W.C. Benett's very able little work on the “Family History of the chief clans of the Rae Bareli district," I extract the following regarding this clan :- "These trace their descent from the celebrated Rishi Bharat Dwaj and their blood is enriched by the piety of eighty-three generations of saints and anchorites. The birth of Kánh, their first Chhattri ancestor, is involv- ed in much obscurity. “The common tradition is shortly as follows:-Suchh, a saint of distinc- tion, lived at Mánikpur in the reign of the great Mánik Chand. A fable of Brahmanical invention describes and accounts for his marriage with the daughter of the rája.* and the other Chhattri. The Chhattri was Kánh, the eponymous hero of his tribe, who married into a Bais family, abandoned Mánikpur, where be had succeeded as his mother's heir to the throne of Mápik Chand, to his wife's relations, and founded the village of Kánhpur on the road from Salon to Partabgarh. The present tribe deity of the Kanhpurias is the Mahesha Rakshasa (buffalo demon), to whom they offer one buffalo at every third Bijai Dasami, and another for every wedding or birth which has oc- curred in their chief's family since the last sacrifice. I regard this tradition as extremely important. All the leading tribes, of whose immigrati their can be no doubt, retain distinct legends of their former homes. Here it is admitted that the founder of the tribe in these parts was also the first of his people who was admitted into the Hindu caste system, as his father, the Rishí, and his ancestors, the eighty-three preceding anchorites, were of course of no caste at all. The connection with the Bais is more important than that with Mánik Chand, as the latter is introduced into legends of every date from Mahmúd Ghaznavi down to Husen Shah Sharqi. “Kánh's sons, Sáhas and Rábas, completed the conquest of the territory to the north-west of Kánhpur by inflicting a decisive defeat on the Bhars, alliances, and to have transmitted the ráj and the Gharwár blood by each." 37
 * From this marriage two sons were born, one of whom turned Brahman
 * This princess, the only daughter of Mánik Chand, seems to have contracted several