,
GON
538
CHAPTER
V-
HISTORY.
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the sadr town, and history Tragic end of Rae Amar Singh Murder of Kam Datt Pande Settlement of the land revenue by Colonel Boileau Colonel Boileau killed by Fazl Ali Death of the murderer The events of the mutiny Raja Debi Bakhsh and other chiefs of the district The Gurkhas cross the eastern frontier from Basti PrinTotal cultivated area of the district Note to Gonda ciple of assessment in the Nawabi
Origin of the
name
of
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district article.
The name
of the sadr town, the pargana, and the district is accounted fo^ ^J ^'^^ story that, when Raja Man Singh, Bisen, made Gonda the head-quarters of his raj, he found nothing there but a cattle-shed (gaunra) surrounded by forest. General Cunningham claims for it a higher antiquity, identifying it with the Gonda which formed the southern province of Lava's kingdom of Uttara-Kosala, and the old pargana name Ramgarh Gaunra He further conjectures that the Gaur Brahmans and Gaur for Balrampur. Tagas must be derived from here. Origin of the name of the sadr town, and history.
I venture to go a step further, and say that it preserves the tradition of the earliest inhabitants ^the Gonds whose descendants in the Central Provinces still cherish a hope of recovering their long-lost northern homes. That the family name of the Gaur Brahmaas and Rajputs is not derived from Bengal is, I should say, absolutely certain. The name Gaunra was not applied to that province till the beginning of the ninth century A.D., and the Brahmans who colonised it from Kanauj left relations of the same denomiaation there at the end of the seventh century.
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Lassen mentions this as a perplexing circumstance but if a considerable portion of northern Hindustan had at one time been peopled by Gonds, it is extremely probable that the Hindus settled among them should have adopted their name to distinguish themselves and it is not unlikely that the powerful Brahmans had the name they brought with them attached to the new capital. The occurrence of an Ajodhya, and namesakes of other famous cities of Central Hindustan in Burma, affords a complete analogy.
The history will be found in the articles on Sahet-Mahet, Debi P^tan, and the more important parganas. Only the merest summary will be attempted here. What is most striking in it is its wonderful completeness in one only of the great phases of Indian history, that reaching from the foundation of the Vaishya empire of the Guptas, at the end of the second century, to the extinction of Buddhism, and rise of the smaller kingdoms of the modern Chhattris in the eighth, does this district find no In the days of the Mah£bhdrath, we find a race of Tangana bringplace. ing presents of gold and horses to the king of Hastinapur from these parts; and when Ptolemy wrote his geography under the Antonines, the Tanganoi were still the people who gave their name to the district. Who they were, whence they came, and when they passed away, there is no record of any
