Page:The Imperial Gazetteer of India - Volume 2 (2nd edition).pdf/370

 BHANDARA.

360 It

has a

Government school

The residents Bhandara.— District in

and a

sardi.

for boys, a police station-house, post-office

are chiefly gardeners.

the

Nagpur Division of the Chief Com-

missionership of the Central Provinces, lying between 20° 38' 30" and 21° 44' N. lap, and between 79° 29' 30" and 80° 43' e. long. bounded

on the north by Seoni and Balaghat, on the south by Chanda, on the east by Raipur, and on the west by Nagpur. Population in 1881, area, 3922 square miles. The administrative head-quarters Bhandara, which is also the principal town. Physical Aspects Towards the west, Bhandara stretches out in an

683,779; are at

.

open

—

plain to the banks of the

Wainganga, which flows along about half on the north and east, hills, inhabited

the length of the western border chiefly

by Gonds and other wild

third of the attain to

District

is

any considerable

tribes, shut

covered wnth jungle. size.

it

in.

Few

Upwards of oneof

its

mountains

Several small forest-clad ranges, branch-

ing from the great Satpura chain, run into the interior, generally in a

southerly direction.

Another low range, known as the Ambagarh or

Sendurjhan', skirts the south of the

The

Chandpur pargand.

only

and Nawagaon Hills. These consist mostly of granitic rock, but near the Wainganga sandstone shows itself in patches among the heights on the west bank of the Garhvf and Bagh rivers. In the upper portion of the course of the Bagh, porphyry is extensively disclosed, with crystals of quartz, and of white and sometimes red felspar, imbedded in a dark mass of the same materials. Of the rivers of Bhandara, the Wainganga alone retains water through the hot season. Into the Wainganga fall the Bawanthari, the Bagh, the Kanhan, and the Chulban, the only other important streams in the District. But it is the lakes and tanks, of which there are upwards of 5000, that form the most striking feature of Bhandara. By taking advantage of the dips and hollows afforded by an undulating country, or by excavating artificial basins and throwing long dams across sloping ground, sheets of water, often of enormous size, have been formed. These tanks,’ writes a former Chief Commissioner, Sir Richard Temple, ‘are so numerous and some of them so large, being many miles in circumference, that this tract might almost be called the lake region of Nagpur. Here a tank is not a piece of water with regular banks, crowned with rows or avenues of trees, with an artificial dyke and sluices, and with fields around it, but it is an irregular expanse of water; its banks are formed by rugged hills covered with low forests that fringe the water, where the wild beasts repair to drink; its dykes, mainly shaped out of spurs from the hill, are thrown athwart the hollows, a part only being formed by masonry its sluices often consist of chasms or fissures in the rock its broad surface is often, as the monsoon approaches, lashed with surging' and crested isolated peaks worthy of notice are the Bahahi, Kanheri,

‘