Western Ghats

“ In 1901 the population was 4178. The Bhor Ghat, on the northern border of the state, has always been the main pass over the Western Ghats, or means of communication between the sea-coast and the Deccan. ”

“ The whole character of the country is luxuriantly tropical, and though the lowlands are not more fertile than the matchless delta of the Ganges, the more varied prodigality of nature shows itself alike in the waving forests of cocoanut, which are common all along the coast, in the rich tobacco-fields of Madura and Coimbatore, in the plantations of cinchona, pepper, cardamoms, and other spices on the slopes of the Nilgiri highlands, and in the splendid growths of teak, ebony, and sandalwood that clothe the Western Ghats. ”

“ The upper slopes of the Western Ghats are abundantly clothed with magnificent forests, and wild animals abound. Among the mineral products are kaolin, felspar and quartz. The soil of the valleys is a rich red alluvial loam. The area is 2547 sq. m. Population (1901) , 568,919, showing an increase of 11% in the decade. The district contains some of the most remarkable archaeological monuments in India, such as the colossal Jain image at Sravana Belgola (a monolith 57 ft. high on the summit of a hill) and the great temple at Halebid. Coffee cultivation has been on the increase of late years. ”

“ The streams which, rising in the Sahyadri range, or Western Ghats, flow westward into the Arabian Sea, are of little importance. During the rains they are formidable torrents, but with the return of the fair weather they dwindle away, and during the hot season, with a few exceptions, they almost dry up. ”

“ There is good reason to believe from the names of places and from local tradition that the Munda tribes were once spread over Bihār and parts of the Ganges Valley; and if the Kolis are an offshoot of the Kols, as is supposed, they also penetrated across Central India to the sea in Gujarāt and the hills of the western Ghāts. ”

“ Numerous groves of coco-nut palms extend along the coast, and green rice-fields are seen in every valley. The Western Ghats, rising to a height of 3000 to 6000 ft., fringe the eastern boundary. Forest land of great extent and value exists, but most of it is private property. Jungle products (besides timber) consist of bamboo, cardamoms, wild arrowroot, gall-nuts, gamboge, catechu, fibrous bark, cinnamon, gums, resin, dyes, honey and beeswax. The forests formerly abounded in game, which, however, is rapidly decreasing under incessant shooting. The staple crop is rice. ”

“ The eastern Ghats differ from the western in being much lower, in rising at a much greater distance from the coast of the Bay of Bengal, and with a gentle slope, giving access by wide openings to the interior. Their average height is about fifteen hundred feet, the highest point, near Madras, only about three thousand feet above the sea. The Deccan plateau between these supporting buttresses has thus a gradual eastward slope, and is characterized by undulating treeless plains, ridges and isolated flat-topped hills capped with basalt. ”

“ Gujarat, except on its northern Plains. parts, consists of rich, highly cultivated alluvial plains, watered by the Tapti and Nerbudda, but not much subject to inundation. The Konkan lies between the Western Ghats and the sea. It is a rugged and difficult country, intersected by creeks, and abounding in isolated peaks and detached ranges of hills. The plains of the Deccan and Khandesh are watered by large rivers, but as the rainfall is uncertain, they are generally, during the greater part of the year, bleak and devoid of vegetation. ”

“ Or an excited crowd, all wearing the little white Gandhi cap, rend the air with shouts of Mahatma Gandhi-ki jai! in honour of some travelling apostle of "Non-co-operation." And all over India the swarm of humbler travellers, who lend their own note of varied colour even to the smallest way-side stations, seems to increase every year, whether one crosses the vast drab plains of Upper India or climbs the steep face of the Western Ghats on to the sun-scorched plateau of the Deccan, or is unmercifully jolted through the gentler and more verdant landscapes of Southern India. ”

“ Cooly, in its application to a carrier of burdens, or performer of inferior labour, is another example. The most probable origin of this is from a nomen gentile, that of the Kolīs, a hill-people of Guzerat and the Western Ghats (compare the origin of slave) . But the matter is perplexed by other facts which it is difficult to connect with this. Thus, in S. India, there is a Tamil word kūli, in common use, signifying 'daily hire or wages,' which H. H. Wilson regards as the true origin of the word which we call cooly. ”

“ The Marathi chronicles, Sabh. 38-46, Chit. 101-107, and Dig. 236-241, contain later and partly legendary accounts, but are our only authority for the doings of the Marathas. force so as to cause distraction to the enemy or deal a concentrated blow at a vital point.
In view of his two enemies, Jai Singh very wisely decided to take up a position between both, i.e., in the eastern part of Shivas dominion, whence he could also easily threaten Bijapur, Instead of pushing the war into the Western Ghats or the Konkan plaint further west. ”

“ A ghat is a long flight of steps, of stone or brick, leading to a river for the purpose of bathing, drawing water, embarking or disembarking. It is a high object of ambition in India, among the wealthier classes of natives, to construct these ghats, and this species of useful ostentation has produced some magnificent structures of the kind on the rivers Ganges, and Jumna, which are of great public utility. ”

“ The Mahratta country extends from Bombay in the north to Goa in the south, and from the Indian Ocean in the west to the Central Provinces and the Nizam's Dominions in the east. The tract is divided into two well-defined portions by the Ghats, a chain of hills running parallel with the coast. ”

“ I think the Ghats are the most nauseating place in the world; there, is Idolatry, in capital letters—the most terrible vision that a mind diseased could picture in horrible nightmare! for you see thousands of inferior specimens of men and women dabbling in the water's edge, doing all and every particular of the toilet in the same place almost touching each other, and right amongst them are dead people in pink or white winding sheets being burned, and the ashes and half-burned limbs being shoved into the water—and I forgot—there's a main sewer comes into the middle of this. ”

“ The want of money never stayed an Afghan raid—on the contrary it is more apt to instigate it. From Shikarpur 364 he bent his steps towards the Punjab. No modern traveller, racing down the Indus valley by a north-western train, can well appreciate the amount of human interest and activity which lies hidden beyond the wide flat plains of tamarisk jungle that stretch between him and the frontier hills. This same Indus valley was Arabic India for centuries, and there were Greek settlements centuries earlier than the Arabs ”

“ Boats lie in readiness to convey us along the sacred shore of the Ganges, for but one bank is consecrated; the opposite shore seems a dreary waste. For miles homes and sacred structures are reared; here and there massive ruins attest the powers of the Ganges' floods on solid masonry. From a distance it is picturesque, but on close inspection has a most dilapidated appearance. The well-built stone steps, or Ghats, are crowded at this [Pg 75] early hour with pilgrims and devotees wrapped in their white robes. ”

“ In the Arab suburb a considerable number of free Negroes, the offspring of liberated slaves, are settled. This class of population has been mistaken for emigration from the interior, by some writers; but Negroes never emigrate from the south to the north over The Desert, however, some may wander, like the Mandingoes, in the countries of Western Africa, as itinerant traders, tinkers, and pedlars. The city of Ghadames presents therefore a most mixed and coloured population, there being but very few of pure Arab blood, and fewer still of fair complexions. ”

“ The table-land of the Dekhan to the west of the Ghats has been inhabited for numberless generations by cultivators, shepherds, and herdsmen, and it was not until the Mahomedan persecutions had driven these peasants into rebellion that they developed any warlike instincts, and became aware of their own capacity for conquest. ”

“ Ghat is the most interesting of all the cities of the desert, but the decline of caravan trade has brought ruin to its people and war among the tribes, which no longer have the material incentive of trade to refrain from fighting. ”

“ They contain four divisions and do not number more than 400 fighting men of good quality. About two-thirds of the original Utmanzai territory is now occupied by the Gaduns, who in old days were invited to cross the Indus as mercenaries, and were given in requital the lands they now hold on the western and southern slopes of the Mahaban Mountain. ”

“ I was at Benares eight years ago (in November, 1836) ; the river since that time has undermined the ghāts, and has done so much damage, that, in another ten years, if the Ganges encroach at an equal rate, but little will remain of the glory of the most holy of the Hindū cities. The force of the stream now sets full upon the most beautiful cluster of the temples on its banks; some have been engulphed, some are falling, and all will fall ere long; and of the Bāiza Bā’ī’s ghāt, which was so beautiful [440] when last I visited the place, nothing now remains but the ruins! ”

“ Houses in Ghat have but a wretched appearance, and are as wretched within as without. They are not white-washed, or clean and bright and shining as Moorish houses of the coast, and though the city is surrounded with stones, and lime is procurable, they are nearly all constructed of sun-dried bricks and mud. A few days of incessant rain would wash many of them down. The wood of construction is, of course, that of the palm. The Desert furnishes no other available building wood. Only one mosque tower deserves the name of minaret. ”

“ Escaping from the dirty, unwholesome, and confined streets, it is a luxury for him to sit upon the open steps and taste the fresh air of the river; so that on the ghats are concentrated the pastimes of the idler, the duties of the devout, and much of the necessary intercourse of business.’ Artists in India have delighted to portray the beauty and animation of this scene ”

“ In the north of the Mountains. presidency on the right bank of the Indus, the Hala mountains, a continuation of the great Suleiman range, separate British India from the dominions of the khan of Kalat. Leaving Sind, and passing by the ridges of low sandhills,—the leading feature of the desert east of the Indus,—and the isolated hills of Cutch and Kathiawar, which form geologically the western extremity of the Aravalli range, the first extensive mountain range is that separating Gujarat from the states of central India. ”

“ After receiving the Wadi Zabara, Wadi Ghadir continues its course south-east past Gebel Ghadir, from the slopes of which numerous small feeders enter the main channel. Almost due south of Gebel Ghadir, in the southern one of two branches into which the wadi splits as it passes round a low island-like mass of hills, is Bir Ghadir, a well sunk in the alluvium of the wadi floor. When I visited it early in 1906 this well was filled by downwash, and the Arabs of the district deferred digging it out until the rock basins were empty; it is an important water source and is said to yield good supplies. ”

“ It is probable, in this way, every male child of Ghat, as in Ghadames, is taught to read and write. The pride of the Ghadamseeah is, that all their children read and write. The whole population can read and write the Koran. This Saharan fact of the barbarians of The Desert suggests painful reflections to honest-minded Englishmen. We may boast of our liberties, our Magna Charta, our independence of character, our commerce, our wealth, the extent of the world which Providence (too good to us) has committed to our care. But after all we cannot boast of what the barbarians of The Desert boast. ”

“ There were various holy people about the road leading to the ghat—"Sadhus" and "Nagas" with naked bodies whitened with ashes.
A friendly Brahmin took me into the inner sanctum of the temple at At Khamba Mundi near the ghat and there, under a mauve silk coverlet, decorated with gold thread-work, rested the Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs. It was rather like a body upon a wooden bed. Above, hung a canopy with a deep border of gold and silver fringe. The place was covered inside and out with paintings of the stories of the gods. ”

“ From the ghats, or long flights of steps, that descend to the muddy waters of a narrow creek which claims a more or less remote connection with the sacred Ganges, crowds of pious Hindus go through their ablutions in accordance with a long and complicated ritual, whilst high-caste ladies perform them in mid-stream out of covered boats and behind curtains deftly drawn to protect their purdah. ”

“ The sand of the Wady Sirhan, like that of all the hollows both of the Hamád and of northern Nejd, is nearly white, and has little to distinguish it from the ordinary sand of the sea shore, or of the Isthmus of Suez. It is far less fertile than the red sand of the Nefûd, and is more easily affected by the wind. The ghada is found growing wherever the sand is pure, and I noticed it as far north as Kâf. In some parts of the Wady which appear to hold water in rainy seasons, there is much saltpetre on the surface, and there the vegetation is rank, but of little value as pasture. ”