1876.] P. Carnegy— The Bhars of Audi and Bandras. 303 



before our era, it has been said that the Bhars who peopled and held the 

 soil and who are as modern as the Muhammadans, were aborigines. If so, 

 they must have had a language. But they had not. Documents of older 

 date have been found, but no Bhar writing was ever heard of ; and we have 

 it on the authority of an Ouseley, an honoured name in oriental lore, that 

 the Bhars were of Sanskrit- speaking origin, otherwise that they were 

 Aryans, otherwise that they were demoralized Hindus. The parganas of 

 Bhardoi, Bharosa, Bahraich, and Bharoli, and the town of Bhartipur (near 

 the Bhar capital, Kusbhawanpur alias Sultanptir,) are all believed to derive 

 their names from the Bhars ; in modern times they have assumed the pro- 

 nunciation of Badoi, Barrosa, Baraich, and (Bai) Bareli. Sleeman also 

 mentions a large district of nearly a thousand villages near Mahamdi, which 

 even in his day was known as Bharwdrd, now occupied by Ahban Bajpiits. 

 On the point of religion we have no reason for supposing that the 

 Bhars were by any means devout, still they were no doubt superstitious, 

 and in some sort of way they reverenced and made sacrifices and offerings 

 to the powers of creation and destruction. In Baiswara the universal belief 

 is, that the Bhars of the past are the Ahirs of our day. That of course 

 amounts to an admission that they were Hindus. It also accounts for an 

 Ahir origin being given to so many of our Bajpiit clans, as already pointed 

 out. Sir Henry Elliot, too, traced an affinity between Bhars and Ahirs. 

 Mr. Benett, in his history of the Bai Bareli clans, mentions that " the tomb 

 of the Bhar chieftains (Dal and Bal, slain by the Muhammadans,) is still at 

 Pakrauli, rather more than a mile from Dalmau, and is celebrated by a fair 

 in the autumn, at which great numbers of Ahirs collect, and offer milk to 

 the souls of the departed heroes." The writer has seen this shrine which 

 contains idols, supposed to be the headless bodies of the deceased chiefs who 

 were decapitated and turned into stone, but which are only hideous repre- 

 sentations of the goddess of destruction. These idols are worshipped not 

 only by Ahirs (whom, according to Sir George Campbell, other Hindus include 

 amongst the respectable classes, because they are in charge of the sacred 

 cow), but by all other Hindus as well, including even Brahmans. Had the 

 Bhar chiefs whom these idols are said to represent, been pagans, or other 

 than Hindus, it is scarcely to be supposed that their tomb would have 

 remained to this time the object of Brahmanical adoration. 



Since the writer first addressed himself to the consideration of subjects 

 akin to the present, his views and opinions in regard to the working upwards 

 in the religio- social scale of the different sects of Hindus, have received 

 most unexpected and remarkable confirmation from the very able writings 

 of Mr. Alfred Lyall, B. C. S., on Hinduism as a missionary religion, &c 

 He has already instanced cases of the movement upwards by marriage. He 

 can at this moment lay his hand on families of Brahmans who were made 



