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GOND

[Bibliography.—The most important account of the Gond tribe is that contained in the Rev. Stephen Hislop's Papers on the Aboriginal Tribes of the Central Provinces, published after his death by Sir R. Temple in 1866. Mr. Hislop recorded the legend of Lingo, of which an abstract has been reproduced. Other notices of the Gonds are contained in the ninth volume of General Cunningham's Archaeological Survey Reports, Sir C. Grant's Central Provinces Gazetteer of 1871 (Introduction), Colonel Ward's Mandla Settlement Report (1868), Colonel Lucie Smith's Chanda Settlement Report (1870), and Mr. C. W. Montgomerie's Chhindwara Settlement Report (1900). An excellent monograph on the Bastar Gonds was contributed by Rai Bahadur Panda Baijnāth, Superintendent of the State, and other monographs by Mr. A. E. Nelson, C.S., Mandla; Mr. Ganga Prasad Khatri, Forest Divisional Officer, Betul; Mr. J. Langhorne, Manager, Ahiri zamindāri, Chānda; Mr. R. S. Thākur, tahsildar, Bālāghāt; and Mr. Din Dayal, Deputy Inspector of Schools, Nandgaon State. Papers were also furnished by the Rev. A. Wood of Chanda; the Rev. H. J. Molony, Mandla; and Major W. D. Sutherland, I.M.S., Saugor. Notes were also collected by the writer in Mandla. Owing to the inclusion of many small details from the different papers it has not been possible to acknowledge them separately.]

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(g) APPEARANCE AND CHARACTER AND SOCIAL RULES AND CUSTOMS

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II

NUMBERS AND DISTRIBUTION

41

(a) ORIGIN AND HISTORY

bers and

Gond. The principal tribe of the Dravidian family, and 1. Numperhaps the most important of the non-Aryan or forest tribes distribuin India. In 1911 the Gonds were three million strong, tion. and they are increasing rapidly. The Kolis of western India count half a million persons more than the Gonds, and if the four related tribes Kol, Munda, Ho, and Santal were taken together, they would be stronger by about the same amount. But if historical importance be considered as well as numbers, the first place should be awarded to the Gonds. Of the whole caste the Central Provinces contain 2,300,000 persons, Central India, and Bihār and Orissa about 235,000 persons each, and they are returned in small numbers from Assam, Madras and Hyderābād. The 50,000 Gonds in Assam are no doubt immigrant labourers on the tea-gardens.

wāna.

In the Central Provinces the Gonds occupy two main 2. Gondtracts. The first is the wide belt of broken hill and forest country in the centre of the Province, which forms the Satpūra plateau, and is mainly comprised in the Chhindwārā, Betul, Seoni and Mandla Districts, with portions of several others adjoining them. And the second is the still wider and more inaccessible mass of hill ranges extending south of the Chhattisgarh plain, and south-west down to the Godavari, which includes portions of the three Chhattisgarh Districts, the Bastar and Kanker States, and a great part of Chanda. In Mandla the Gonds form nearly half the population, and in Bastar about two-thirds. There is, however, no District or State of the Province which does not contain some Gonds, and it is both on account of their numbers and the fact that Gond dynasties possessed a great part of its area that the territory of the Central Provinces was formerly known as Gondwana, or the country of the Gonds.1 The existing importance of the Central Provinces dates from recent years, for so late as 1853 it was stated before the Royal Asiatic Society that "at present the Gondwana high

1 The country of Gondwāna properly included the Satpūra plateau and a section of the Nagpur plain and

Nerbudda valley to the south and

west.

3. Derivation of

name and

origin of the Gonds.

lands and jungles comprise such a large tract of unexplored country that they form quite an oasis in our maps." So much of this lately unexplored country as is British territory is now fairly well served by railways, traversed almost throughout by good roads, and provided with village schools at distances of five to ten miles apart, even in the wilder tracts.

The derivation of the word Gond is uncertain. It is the name given to the tribe by the Hindus or Muhammadans, as their own name for themselves is Koitūr or Koi. General Cunningham considered that the name Gond probably came from Gauda, the classical term for part of the United Provinces and Bengal. A Benāres inscription relating to one of the Chedi kings of Tripura or Tewar (near Jubbulpore) states that he was of the Haihaya tribe, who lived on the borders of the Nerbudda in the district of the Western Gauda in the Province of Malwa. Three or four other inscriptions also refer to the kings of Gauda in the same locality. Gauda, however, was properly and commonly used as the name of part of Bengal. There is no evidence beyond a few doubtful inscriptions of its having ever been applied to any part of the Central Provinces. The principal passage in which General Cunningham identifies Gauda with the Central Provinces is that in which the king of Gauda came to the assistance of the ruler of Malwa against the king of Kanauj, elder brother of the great Harsha Vardhana, and slew the latter king in A.D. 605. But Mr. V. A. Smith holds that Gauda in this passage refers to Bengal and not to the Central Provinces ; and General Cunningham's argument on the locality of Gauda is thus rendered extremely dubious, and with it his derivation of the name Gond. In fact it seems highly improbable that the name of a large tribe should have been taken from a term so little used and known in this special application. Though in the Imperial Gazetteer the present writer reproduced General Cunningham's derivation of the term Gond, it was there characterised as speculative, and in the light of the above remarks now seems highly improbable. Mr. Hislop considered that the name Gond was a form of Kond, as he spelt the name of 1 Early History of India, 3rd ed. p. 337.

2

2 Art. Gondwana.

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