160 The “ Kols” of Chota-Nagpore. 
were great hunters, and could sing and dance and make merry. The 
Oraon youth and maidens speedily acquired the songs and the steps, 
and this I doubt not aided greatly the harmonious blending of the 
two peoples. : 
There are no ancient temples or other antiquities on the plateau of 
Chota-Nagpore to indicate that the early Braminical races or 
Buddhists ever obtained a footing there; there is no tradition even 
of the ‘‘ Munis” having sought retreats amongst its rocks or by its 
waterfalls for their devotional exercises. We find such monuments 
in Sirgoojah to the very foot of the western face of the plateau ; and, as 
I have recently described in a paper dovoted to the antiquities of 
Manbhoom, we find numerous remains of Arian colonization close to 
its southern and eastern approaches, but none on the platean itself. 
Left to themselves, the Kols increased and multiplied, and lived a happy 
arcadian sort of life under their republican form of government for 
many centuries; but it is said that a wily Bramin at last obtained a 
footing amongst them, and an important change in the form of 
government was the résult. 
The Rajah of the °° — of which Satyomba was the head quarters, 
was a Moondah named Mau. His occupation of the supposed 
eradle of the race gave him precedence in the confederate councils ; 
and a child of his house, reared in it if not born there, was, through 
his influence and by the advice of a Bramin he had taken into his 
service, elected supreme chief over the whole confederacy ; but as it 
would not suit the noble family, his descendants, to have it supposed 
that their ancestor was one of the despised race called Kol, they have 
adopted the following legend as their origin :— 
“When Jonmajoya, Rajah of Hustinapoor, attempted the destruc- 
tion of the Nags or Serpent race, one of them, Poondorik, assumed the 
form of a Brahmin and went to the house of a Bramin at Benares 
to study the ‘ shasters.’ The Benares Bramin, pleased with the 
intelligence and grace of his pupil, gave him his only daughter 
‘ Parbutee’ to be his wife. Poondorik and his wife, Parbutee, 
together visited Juggernath, and on their return, passing through this 
country, then called ‘Jharkhund,’ the forest land, she was seized 
with the pains of labour near Satyomba, and gave birth to a child 
and died. 
