318 



PLACiUE IN INDIA. 



these Satara villages, as I have others from districts farther south. 

 But the type is the same in all those black-soil valleys of the Deccan 

 watered by the Krishna and its numerous affluents. What Sir 

 Thomas More said of the towns of his mediseval Utopia may be said 

 of them: 



Whoso knoweth one of them kuoweth them all. they be all so like one to 

 another, as far forth as the nature of the place permitteth. 



They are all mud villages inclosed Avithin a ring fence of bushes, 

 sometimes with gates and remains of a wall. Many of them are 

 large, with i)opulations up to 4,000 or over, comparatively few of 

 those that recur in the i)lague lists having their population, as given 

 on the margin, under four figures. In the first season of plague 

 among them, 1898, some villages lost more than a fourth part of their 

 inhabitants in two or three months. Thus the village of Shelwadi, 

 taluka of Navalgund, district of Dharwar, with a i)opulation of 

 4,222, had 1,12() jilague deaths in eight weeks of October, November, 

 and December. In the following tal)le I have taken out the figures 

 for a cluster of seven villages in the taluka of Hubli, to show the 

 severity of their first plague season and the extent to which they have 

 F:uffered in subsequent years : 



7)cf////s' from jiUif/iic in seven villa ffes near Ifiihli from ISOff to 191) f/. 



Two villages which I visited, one 12 miles from Belgaum, the other 

 7 miles from Dharwar, will serve as samples of the large villages in 

 the black-soil basin of the Krishna, each of them having had five epi- 

 demics in the course of seven years. 



A BELGAUM VILLAGE. 



The Belgaum village was considered a rich one, the bulk of the 

 cultivators being prosperous Lingayats. The po])ulation in 1891 had 

 been 4,586, it had an area of 2,600 acres, and it w^as the cattle market 

 for the extensive pastures on the hills and clowns to the northwest. 

 The 800 houses of the village coA^ered 64 acres, about 600 of them occu- 

 pied by Lingayats and other castes of Hindus, 200 by Mohammedan 

 butchers and cattle dealers in a separate quarter. It was inclosed by a 



