10 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTEAL INDIA 



protection of tlie old gods; but the gods themselves, and 

 all their belongings, were bodily borne mto exile along 

 with their votaries. New scriptures were revealed, in 

 which the religious myths of the race were transplanted 

 wholesale, and fitted to local names and places. The 

 Narbada became more holy as a river than the Ganges. 

 The mountain of Kailas, the fabled heaven of Siva beyond 

 the snows of the Himalaya, jutted to heaven in the peaks 

 of the Mahadeo range. Krishna and Eama passed their 

 miraculous boyhood, and achieved their legendary feats^, 

 in these central forests, instead of in the groves of Mathura 

 and the wilderness of Bindraban. Some remarks will be 

 offered in another place on the social and religious influence 

 of this contact with Hinduism of the aboriginal races who 

 retired before the invaders. A few remained in_ the 

 country occupied by the Hindus, chiefly in the position 

 of agricultural serfs, of watchers of the villages against 

 the inroads of their wilder brethren or of wild beasts, of 

 hewers of wood, prevented only by the rules of caste 

 from being also their drawers of water. A social status 

 was assigned them below that of all but the outcasts of 

 the other race; and they were compelled to segregate 

 themselves in humble hovels, beyond the limits of the 

 comfortable houses and homesteads of the superior 

 castes. 



The semi-aboriginal principalities of Mandla Deogarh 

 and Kherla, which included the whole of this highland 

 region, were thus permitted, by the policy of successive 

 Mahomedan rulers, to maintain a little irksome feuda- 

 tory position until the Maratha power began to supplant 

 that of the Moghuls in the latter part of the eighteenth 

 century. Then the irrepressible hordes of the Deccan, 

 having swallowed up the more settled dominions of the 

 Moslem, began to overrun also the country of the Gonds. 

 Before the close of the century, the three kingdoms had 

 been entirely broken up, and are heard of no more in 

 history. They seem to have at no time been more than 

 a feudal agglomeration of numerous petty chief ships; 

 and on the ruin of their heads they resolved themselves 

 again into the same elements. The conquest of the Mara- 



