INTRODUCTOEY 13 



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 

 going naked, or clothed in leaves, living in trees, and 

 practising cannibahsm. " 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 inter- 

 esting journey in 1795, from Benares to Rajamandri, 

 gives us almost all the information we possess of many 

 parts of the interior.' " ^ Till within a few years, " un- 

 explored " was written across vast tracts in our best 

 maps; and, though lying at our very doors, unexplored 

 in reality they were. With few exceptions, the civil 

 officers of those days never dreamt of penetrating the 

 hilly portions of their charges ; and the writer is acquainted 

 with one district containing some 3000 square miles of 

 forest country, and inhabited by between 30,000 and 

 40,000 aborigines, in which one officer held charge for 

 eleven years without once having put foot within this 

 enormous territory. All accounts of such tracts were 

 filtered through Hmdii or Mahomedan subordinates, whose 

 horror of a jungle, and its unknown terrors of bad air and 

 water, wild beasts, and general discomfort, is such as to 

 ensure their painting the country and its people in the 

 blackest of colours. 



But a new era dawned on these dark regions, when 

 the conscience of the British rulers of India was awakened 

 to the wants of their great charge, after a rebellion which 



^ Gladwin's Ayeen AJcberee, vol. ii. p. 59. 



2 " Introduction to the Central Provinces Gazetteer," by Charles 

 Grant, Esq., C.S. 



