16 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA. 



left almost to themselves in the management of their 

 internal affairs. Our early administrators were too fully 

 occupied with the work of restoring prosperity in the 

 open country to have much time to spare for the Gond 

 and liis wildernesses ; and thus we find that the interior 

 of their country remained an almost unexplored mystery 

 up to a very recent period. 



Two and a half centuries ago the great Akber knew 

 nothing of the Gonds but as a " people who tame lions 

 so as to make them do anything they please, and about 

 whom many wonderful stories are told ; " " and within 

 the last twenty years even they have been described as 

 o-oinsc naked, or clothed in leaves, livino- in trees, and 

 practising cannibalism. "So lately as 1853, when the 

 great trigonometrical survey of India had been at work 

 for half a century, and the more detailed surveys for 

 some thirty years, Sir Erskine Perry, addressing the 

 Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, wrote : 

 'At present the Gondwana highlands and jungles com- 

 prise such a large tract of unexplored country that they 

 form quite an oasis in our maps. Captain Blunt's 

 interesting journey in 1795, from Benares to Eajamandri, 

 gives us almost all the information we possess of many 

 parts of the interior.' "t Till within a few years, 

 " unexplored " was written across vast tracts in our 

 best maps ; and, though lying at our very doors, un- 

 explored in reality they were. With few exceptions, 

 the civil officers of those days never dreamt of pene- 

 trating the hilly portions of their charges ; and the 

 writer is accpainted with one district containing some 



* Gladwin's " Ayecn Akberee," vol. ii. p. 59. 

 t " riitroiluction to the Central Provinces Gazetteer," by Charles 

 Grant, Esq., C.S. 



