Page:The Indian Antiquary, Vol. 4-1875.djvu/122

 Aran, 1875.] HOUGH XOTES OX KHANDESH. ]09 was civilized by them into BhojApur, 'the town of the burden. ' The late district of Kliandesli contained almost to an acre the country known in native conversation and to physical geography by that name — extending from the Sat ma la, Chan- dor, or Ajanta range (the first is the native name, Europeans use the other two) on the south to the S a t p u r a s on the north, and from the Hat i hills (which form the western face of the range that culminates at Gavilgadh) on the east to the Sahyadri on the west. These two latter boundaries are both broken at their northern extremities by the Tapti and its allu- vial plain, across which I would draw at each end an imaginary line — -on the east a few miles east of Burhanpur, though that city is now included in modern and official Nimar; and on the west at the Haran Pal of the Tapti, a little west of Kukamiunda, though the boundary of the present district lies thirty miles further into what is really a part of Gujarat. The country so described forms the first and easternmost member of that great fan-shaped drainage area the ribs or radii of which have for a centre or handle the Arabian Sea, and which may be said to extend from the above- mentioned S a t m a 1 a hills, south of which the sacred G a 5 g a or G o d a v a r i Hows eastwards into the Bay of Bengal, to the mountains which divide the Red Sea from the Basin of the Kile, The modern district, however, of which only I have any experience, has been shorn not merely of its ancient capital of B u r h a n p Q r and the upper plain of the TApti, but of three south- western talukas — Xandg.'im, MalegArii, and Bagl ana —added in 1869 to the Dekhan Col- lectorate of Nasik. la recompense lor this, it not only includes the Nowapur PetA — in lan- guage, soil, and position, a part of Gujarat — but stretches an arm across the SAtpurAs at its nor tli -west corner to grasp the AkrAni ParganA, whose waters flow into the Narmada. There is no modern race that has made KhAudesb its own, and the term Kh • expresses merely the accident of birth. Lying between Central India, Gujarat, and the Dekhan tableland, regions having each its distinctive population, the basin of the Tapti has been colonized by immigrants from all these, so as to produce a wonderful mixture of tribes, prevented by the laws of caste from fusion into a homogeneous race, and using a patois like the speech of Sir Hudibras, ■ A particoloured dress Of patched and piebald languages." It is a common thing there to hear a native address his neighbour in Marathi, finishing the sentence in Hindustani; and he will very likely be answered in a speech characterized by the use of the GujarAti genitive in ' «a.' The Marathi, of coarse, prevails in the south-west, where the MarAtha cultivators, called here Dekhanis, form the bulk of the population. In the north-west GujarAti is the prevailing element, and in the north-east the colloquial speech of the poorest cultivators is much like the patois called Neinadi — a cross betwixt Mara- thi y,nd bad Hindi ; but the Gujar element is there also very strong among the richer cul- tivators, and affects their speech, as might be expected. The use, however, of Marathi by the officers of the" PeswAs' and our Government and in Government schools is giving it a considerable ascendency ; though GujarAti is here, as through- out the north of the Presidency, the language of commercial correspondence ; and the Masal- inaus of course stand, as usual, aloof, and disdain to learn the speech of idolaters — contenting themselves with a vocabulary aa scanty as the ideas it is expected to express, and an atro- ciously corrupt pronunciation of what they are pleased to call Hindustani. The most marked local tendency of all these languages, however, is to drop every possible consonant. Liquids go first, of course, as in Koi for Koli, Mu'i for Mali; but they are often followed by sibilants, as in ra?ta for rasta, and by gutturals, as in fo for Wdgdeo. Of course tho lower you go in the social scale the stronger ib this pro- vincialism, width I cannot help endeavouring to trace to the rafraenco of tho aboriginal races, among whom it is most marked- {A.) B rah mans. (/,'.) Shankarjatya, or mixed castes, chiefly traders and artizans. These two classes much resemble their con- geners in tho Dekhan. In the third class, how- ever, (C), that of military and cultivating races, we find a curious inversion of the conditions of the MarAthA and Rajput. For though the MarathAs of KhAndesh are not so exclusively military in disposition as the Rajputs of the