A History of the Mahrattas v2.c35.65

v2.c35.65

¹ A savage race inhabiting the wilds of Gondwaneh. [The Gōnds (Goands) are the most important non-Aryan or Dravidian forest-tribe of India. In 1911 they numbered three millions, of whom more than two millions inhabit the Sātpurā plateau in the Chhindwāra, Betūl, Seonī, and Mandla Districts, and the inaccessible hill-ranges in the Chhattisgarh and Chanda Districts of the Central Provinces. The name of the tribe is probably a Telūgū corruption of Khōnd—another large forest-tribe which may originally have formed one tribe with the Gōnds, and have obtained a separate name and language after the tribe migrated north into the Central Provinces and Orissa from its original home in South India. By the fourteenth century Gōnd kingdoms had been established in parts of the Central Provinces, the Gōnds having probably subverted the former Rājpūt dynasties between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, when Muhammadan invasions had weakened the central power of the Hindus. The Gōnd States were governed tolerantly and beneficently, but could not combine for defence, so that in the eighteenth century the plain country fell an easy prey to the invading Marāthās. Under Marāthā treatment the Gōnds lost their civilization and became cruel and treacherous savages; but after the introduction of British rule they settled down and became timid and inoffensive labourers. The Gōnds proper have two aristocratic sub-divisions, the Rāj-Gōnds, or land-holding class, and the Khatolas; but a number of separate functional castes have developed out of the tribe. The tribe is organized on a totemistic basis, and supplies evidence of survivals of the Matriarchate, of marriage by capture, and of service for a wife (cf. the case of Jacob and Rachel). The Gōnds worship village godlings presiding over crops and disease, their ancestors, and the weapons and creatures of the chase. (For a full account, see Russell, T. and C.C.P. (1916), vol. iii; also Sleeman, Rambles, &c., ed. V. A. Smith (1915), pp. xxiii, 68, 102, et passim.)]