— GON
539
to show and the only trace of them left is the name Tangan for the small pony of the lower hills, and perhaps the curious word Tangara wearing an axe which is also found in some of the Gond dialects of CenThey were almost certainly aborigines, and they may have tral India. been a tribe of the gTeat Gond nation to whom the district owes its present
kind
—
name.
Legends of the heroes of the Mahabharath yet linger round Debi Patan andGuwarich, but Sahet-Mahetis still famous as the centre of the kingdom After a period represented in the Vishnu Parana of Lava, son of Ram. fifty generations of kings, who ruled either at Sravasti or the not distant Kapilavastu (Gorakhpur), the historical age commences with Parasenajit, the contemporary of Buddha, who ruled not the least important of the six
by
kingdoms of middle
India.
For the next eight centuries the kingdom of Srdvasti assumes an almost world-wide importance as a centre point of that wonderful religion, whose peaceful missionaries sowed the seeds of a new culture from the Caspian Sea to Mexico, and which, through its monasticism, has affected so vitally our own ecclesiastical polity.
The culminating point of the power of Sravasti was reached in the days of Vikramaditya, who, in the middle of the second century, was the most powerful king in India. He was a bigoted adherent of the old religion, and it was perhaps through civil wars arising from this cause that his kingdom so quickly collapsed. Within certainly thirty years of his death the sceptre had passed to the Gupta dynasty, and then, strange to say, the thickly populated seat of one of the most ancient kingdoms in India rapidly became a desert. The high-road between the two capitals Sravasti and Kapilavastu ^was, in the time of the Chinese pilgrim, a dense forest
—
—
infested with wild elephants.
When it next emerges into history, the district was the seat of a Jain kingdom, which in the hands of Sohildeo was powerful enough to exterminate the victorious forces of the nephew of the Sultan of Ghazni. It was not long before this dynasty shared the fate of its predecessors, and at the time of the second Muhammadan conquest, a Dom raja ruled Gonda from Domangarh on the Rapti, in the present district of Gorakhpur. The most famous ruler of this race was Raja TJgrasen, who had a fort at Dumhriadih, in the Mahadewa pargana. The estabhshment of many villages in the south from Guwarich to Babhnip^ir is traced to grants of land, generally in favour of Tharus, Doms, Bhars, and Basis, made by this r^ja. As no similar tradition exists to the north of the Kuwana, it may be conjectured that that part of the district was then mainly covered with forest. The name Dom is preserved in many village names, such as Dumhriadih, Dumaipur and Dumoli. This low-caste kingdom was subverted in the beginning of the fourteenth century by the modern Chhattri clans, and from that time till_ annexation the district has been apportioned into a number of small chieftainships, •under the successive hegemonies of the Kalhanses, the Janwars, and the Bisens.
