THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTKAL INDIA. 



history — the Mahabharat and Eamayan epics — speak of 

 all India south of the Jamna as a vast wilderness in- 

 habited by hostile demons and snakes. Religions 

 hermits of the northern race are described as dwellinsf 

 in leafy bowers in their midst, while heroes and demi- 

 gods wandered about like knights-errant, protecting the 

 devotees from their hostile acts, which seem more like 

 the pranks of frisky monkeys than the actions of human 

 beings. The snakes and demons have been conjectured, 

 with some probability, to have been the black aborigines 

 of the country, and the scenes of the epics to portray 

 the gradual advance of the Aryan race and religion into 

 their midst. The wandering Rajiis are frequently de- 

 scribed as allying themselves in marriage with the 

 daughters of the potent demons, and so far the poems 

 agree with what is otherwise shown to be probable. 

 Nothing like a connected historical narrative is, how- 

 ever, to be extracted from the mass of Brahminical 

 fiction ; and whatever value such materials may yield to 

 the investigation of the history of the Aryan or con- 

 quering races, they are worth nothing as bearing on 

 that of the wild men of the wilderness, who are through- 

 out regarded as being as much beyond the pale of 

 humanity as their country was beyond the Aryan pale — 

 the land of clearings and the black antelope. 



We have a few architectural remains and inscriptions 

 that tell of Aryan chiefs holding power in parts of the 

 Narbadd valley and the central plateaux, between the 

 fifth and the fourteenth centuries. But who and what 

 they were, and what was really their position, there is 

 nothing to show. Remains of religious edifices sur- 

 rounded by fortifications point to the probability of their 

 having been the heads of isolated bands of the warlike 



