Walter Francis

“ But on the whole the hill ryot is a cheery and well-nourished individual who can afford to dress his womenkind in bright cloths and load them with brass ornaments, keeps up to the local standard of comfort without undue effort, and every spring takes a clear month's holiday enlivened by songs, dances, beats for game, unlimited strong drink, and deep draughts of other pleasures of the flesh. ”

“ Old men point to country where there is now not a copse large enough to hide a sambhur for hundreds of square miles, and tell me that, in their youth, that land was covered with jungle. When civilization pushes back the wilder members of the hill-tribes into the yet unconquered jungle, they commence upon it by felling- and burning virgin forest on the side of the hills. ”

“ Each head of a house rolled his shred of flesh in leaves, and buried it in his favourite field, placing it in the earth behind his back without looking. In some places each man carried his portion of flesh to the stream which watered his fields, and there hung it on a pole. For three days thereafter no house was swept;and, in one district, strict silence was observed, no fire might be given out, no wood cut, and no strangers received. The remains of the human victim (namely, the head, bowels, and bones) were watched by strong parties the night after the sacrifice ”

“ In the dry season it is possible to scramble to the edge of the abyss and look straight down through the spray into the great pool beneath, while from beneath the scene is the most impressive in all the district. ”

“ From Pottangi to Koraput the road undulates gently over red soil plains dotted with numerous small hills, and the country gets barer of vegetation every mile until at Koraput there is scarcely a forest tree to be seen in any direction. ”

“ The assailants admired, for no Europeans had ever seen such excess of courage in the natives of Indostan, and continually offered quarter, which was always answered by the menace and intention of death: not a man had gained the rampart at two o'clock in the afternoon, when another cessation of the attack ensued; on which Ranga Rao assembled the principal men, told them that there was no hopes of maintaining the fort, and that it was immediately necessary to preserve their wives and children from the violation of Europeans, and the more ignominious authority of Viziaráma Rázu. ”

“ Inland, the basins of the streams are occupied by almost continuous stretches of rice-fields, and much of the same grain is grown under the numerous tanks fed by torrents from the hills; so that in the cultivation season the country has an air of exceeding prosperity. The higher, red land there is occupied by dry fields, each usually separated from its neighbour by rows of palmyra palms; and these same palms stand in groups in every hollow and, though on the west their supremacy is challenged by the date, they are the prevailing tree in this part of the district. ”

“ It is only when the hills are approached that the flora becomes interesting to the scientific botanist, and it is just here that we are confronted with an unexplored country. The Eastern Gháts are typically developed in this district and the survey of their untracked fastnesses will certainly repay a careful examination. Here we meet with the outliers of the flora of the great central plateau of India and the tops of the highest peaks show small collections of plants which have strayed, no one knows how, from the plains of Bengal or even the far-off Himalayas. ”

“ The tops of the higher hills are usually bare, their sides and the lower hills carrying most of the forest, while the more level country is often covered with large stretches of grass land dotted with scattered trees gnarled and twisted by the annual jungle fires. The outer southern slopes are clothed with good forest which is seldom burnt, and at the foot of them, especially round Kondasanta, are masses of splendid bamboos.
The principal ghát is from Koudasanta to Lammasingi, nine miles, part of which is just practicable for carts. ”

“ The month is spent in feasting, deep potations, night-long dancing and singing parties (in which the young men and maidens take opposite sides and wind up with extempore verses of a personal flavour designed to provoke equally personal repartees) and in expeditions into the jungles to gather the mohwa-blossom during which, it is said, free love is the rule among the unmarried. But the great event of the month ix the beat for game. In this all the able-bodied men take part, and they stay out, often for days together, until some male animal has been shot. ”

“ The early system in Jeypore was particularly simple: the estate was rented as a farm, the Rája bought it, and he then collected the revenue by imposing what amounted to a poll-tax on all the inhabitants — whether they sold or drank liquor or not — graduated according to their supposed means. In 1868 Government got to know of this, and indignantly took the farm under their own management. Improvements in the system were not so easy to effect, however, as at first sight appeared; for the hill people know of several forms of strong drink all of which can easily be made at home ”

“ The Konda Doras, and to a less extent the Bagatas, are the cultivators. Ragi is their favourite crop. Their methods are very casual. The soil is undoubtedly rich (the luxuriance of the grasses proves it) but the people go in for pódu cultivation (mainly on the southern side of the plateau, less further inland, and not at all on the southern slopes) or till the ground carelessly, making scant use of the irrigation possible from the numerous hill streams. Rather than toil at cultivation, they prefer to live by the sale of the natural products of the hills. ”

“ The twelve years of anarchy which followed Bussy's departure had enabled the Rája of Vizianagram to make himself more powerful than ever, and he was by far the most prominent person in the new territory. The Rája, Ananda Rázu, who had accompanied Forde's expedition died of small-pox at Rajahmundry shortly afterwards. He had no son, and the widow of his predecessor Viziaráma Rázu adopted Venkatapati Rázu, a boy of twelve and the second son of her husband's cousin Rámabhadra Rázu, and caused him to assume the name of Viziaráma Rázu by which he was afterwards so well known. ”

“ In the Naurangpur taluk it flows in a deep silent stream which, at the point where it is crossed by the main road northwards from Jeypore, is in flood time 465 feet wide and 24 feet deep. Though a ferry is maintained here, the river (which is never dry) is at present a most formidable obstacle to all traffic passing north and south. In Bastar the current is also quiet up to the Chittrakota falls, but thereafter the bed is full of rocks and a succession of rapids, and navigation and timber-floating are alike almost impossible. ”

“ In the south of the plain country the usual house of the lower classes is a circular, one-roomed, windowless, palmyra-thatched erection of mud plastered on to a rough framework of branches,the walls of which are smeared with the local red mud and decorated with neat devices in dots done in white chunam with the forefinger, or, sometimes, more elaborate patterns and drawings of the deities. ”

“ Terrifying the villagers into staying quiet in their huts, they force their way into the house of some wealthy person (for choice the local Sondi, liquor-seller and so wear — usually the only man worth looting in an agency village and a shark who gets little pity from his neighbours when forced to disgorge) , tie up the men, rape the women and go off with everything of value. ”

“ Immediately west of the town is a great tank a mile long and half a mile wide, which never dries up and is kept as a sanctuary for wildfowl, large Hocks of which swim fearlessly about it. West of this again are extensive groves of ancient mangoes and from the circular road through these is obtained the fairest view of Jeypore -in the foreground the tank, reflecting every tint of the sky above it ”

“ Round about Naurangpur, headmen of big villages are sometimes called báranaiks, which literally means head of twelve villages.
The land revenue is administered on methods which are without a parallel in other Madras districts and are interesting from the survival of the ancient feudal spirit which they exhibit. No survey or settlement has ever been carried out; and though in the lower division a good deal of the land is held on ryotwari tenure most of that above the Gháts is administered under a village-rent system called mustájari. ”

“ Owing to all these causes, the zamindars, for many years after the introduction of the permanent settlement, were in a chronic state of discontent and disaffection. Too often internal and domestic troubles accentuated their restlessness. Those of them who had been restored to their ancient patrimonies on the death of the Rája of Vizianagram in 1794 returned to them, of course, without capital or credit; and in several instances an illegitimate brother or a cousin disputed their title, got together a band of paiks, and seizing upon a portion of the estate contrived to hold it by force. ”

“ The hill-felling will continue until every acre within the village bounds has been exhaubted, and it is not till then that the ryot will begin to manure his low-lying lands. Nor will the hill-side be ever suffered to regain its lost function of supplying water for the country round about it; for, when its wood is nearly large enough to become of use in this way, some poor or lazy ryot will be attracted by the prospect of an easily raised crop, and will destroy the young jungle again. ”

“ The worst enemy of the forests of the district has always been the system of cultivation practised by the hill people and called kondapudu or podu. This consists in felling a piece of jungle, burning the felled trees and undergrowth, sowing dry grain broadcast in the ashes (without any kind of tilling) for two years in succession, and then abandoning the plot for another elsewhere. ”

“ The slaughter of the conflict being completed, another much more dreadful, presented itself in the area below: the transport of victory lost all its joy: all gazed on one another with silent astonishment and remorse, and the fiercest could not refuse a tear to the deplorable destruction spread before them. ”

“ In Golgonda the evil was increased by the current superstition that any one who killed a tiger would come out all over stripes. One officer tried to persuade the people that an infallible safeguard against the latter disaster was to stroke one's nose slowly with the dead tiger's tail, and in 1884 a number of old police carbines were distributed among the hill men to enable them to meet the foe on more equal terms. ”

“ The plains flora possesses little of interest, as it is practically the same for the greater part of the Madras coast. In it we can separate the sea-side flora, the salt-marsh plants and the dry scrub-jungle. Wherever cultivation exists, on the other hand, we have an assemblage of weeds, shrubs and climbers which may be met with from Tuticorin to Bengal, including a number of exotic plants introduced from various parts of the tropics. ”

“ A thriving trading village of 3,317 inhabitants lying three miles east by north of Srungavarapukóta. In its hamlet Sanyásipálem is a shrine to a sanyási which is known all over the low country and resorted to by people of all castes. This ascetic, say the legends, came to the village centuries ago at a time when the local goddess, Paiditalli, insisted on having a meal of human flesh every day. ”

“ Devil-drivers, who profess to cure 'possessed' women, are common and employ much the same methods as elsewhere. They seat the woman in a fog of resin-smoke and work upon or beat her until she declares the supposed desire of the devil in the way of sacrifices; and when these have been complied with one of her hairs is put in a bottle, formally shown to the village goddess, and buried in the jungle, while iron nails are driven into the threshold of the woman's house to prevent the devil's return. ”

“ At the census of 1911 a list of all castes returned in each taluk, with the languages returned as spoken by each, should be preserved as a basis for farther detailed and local enquiry. Another great difficulty in the path of the enquirer in the Agency is the extraordinary diversity which occurs in different localities in the customs of the same caste. Geographical isolation has prevented free intercourse between the various sections of a community, and the ways of each have developed upon independent lines. ”

“ The hill people themselves seem to suffer little from malaria. If they ever do contract the disease they take no medicine, but fast and offer sacrifices to the local deity, beginning with fowls and going upwards through pigs to goats and at last to buffaloes, until either the fever leaves them or they realize that it is their fate to have to bear it. ”

“ No trained philologist has ever worked at these less-known tongues or their dialects, and a wide field is awaiting exploration. It would probably be found that Kóya and the dialect of the Bhúmiyas of Naurangpur and Jeypore taluks, which are usually classified as forms of Góndi, are in reality nothing of the kind; that 'Poroja,' which has long been classed as a separate language, resolves itself into a series of dialects of recognized vernaculars; and that Gadaba is not a Kolarian tongue. ”

“ In this sparsely-peopled country the land-owner wants every ryot he can get, and is careful not to provoke any of them into betaking themselves to a rival estate.
The sist is paid either in cash or kind, cash rents being commoner on the 3,000 feet plateau (where the crops are mostly dry) and in the lower division than on the 2,000 feet plateau of Jeypore itself, where so much paddy is raised. The grain received as rent is stored in huge granaries at Jeypore, Kótapád, Naurangpur and other places and held up until prices are high and then sold to traders from the plains. ”

“ Dry land, on the other hand, which in the south is often neglected, is here usually plentifully manured, especially with tank silt, and ragi and cambu (and sometimes cholam) instead of being sown are transplanted in dry fields from seed-beds after rain, the seedlings being put out by hand in a furrow and their roots covered over by ploughing another furrow alongside. Instead, again, of being threshed directly they are harvested, as in the south, the crops are often stacked on the fields for months until the ryot has nothing more emergent to do. ”

“ Here there is cultivation and harvesting of some kind going on almost all the year. With the first good showers in May ploughing of dry lands and sowing of ragi and cambu in seed-beds commences, and in June transplantation of these crops is in full swing. Even earlier than this, if showers have been received, gingelly has been sown. As soon as transplantation of dry crops is over, should the south-west monsoon set in, wet lands are ploughed and paddy seed sown. At the end of July paddy transplantation begins and continues through August. ”

“ Naurangpur is the station of the deputy tahsildar and of an ámin of the Jeypore estate. Population 3,203; height above the sea, 1,918 feet. It consists of one broad street, in which are the public offices and the residence of the ráni referred to below, with a few lanes on either side. The place is a great centre for the export of grain, and is known for the lac toys (see p. 129) which are made in it and for its splendid avenues and topes, one of which consists of a quadruple row of trees two miles long. ”

“ Ibráhím Khán fled in terror at his approach; but Viziaráma Rázu, confident in the proofs of attachment he had given, went to meet him with a body of troops, belonging to himself and others of the local chiefs, which numbered 10,000 men. He was graciously received and employed the favour in which he stood to gratify a long-standing animosity against his bitterest enemy, the chief of Bobbili. He persuaded Bussy that Bobbili was contumacious and must be repressed; and Bussy at length agreed to attack that chief's fort. ”

“ Both judicial and non-judicial stamps are sold on the system usual elsewhere. The Stamp Act is in force in the Agency. Statistics of the receipts will be found in the Appendix, and it will be seen that they are very small. Its revenue from this source has often been held to be an index of the prosperity of a district, since where trade is large and business brisk non-judicial stamps are largely required, while where the people have money in their pockets they are usually fond of spending it on litigation and the sale of judicial stamps accordingly increases. ”

“ Near the top of the north side of it, in a wooded hollow surrounded by a wide circle of higher ground, is the temple to Narasimha, the man-lion incarnation of Vishnu, which gives the hill its name. This is the most famous, richest, and best sculptured shrine in Vizagapatam, and in its honour numbers of the people of the district are named Simháchalam, Simhádri, Narasimha and so on. ”