Abstract
MR. BRADLEY-BIRT'S book dealing with the Santal Parganas merits the success achieved by his former volume on Chota Nagpore. This time, he lays his scene in the mountainous, forest-clad outlier of the Vindhyan range, which stands like an island in the midst of the great Gangetic plain. Dominating the great waterway which leads from the borders of the Punjab to the Bay of Bengal, it has for centuries been the stronghold of the aboriginal tribe who sought refuge in it from the Aryan flood descending from the north-west on the fertile plains of Bengal. From his almost inaccessible stronghold, the Paharia looked down upon the coming and going of the Hindu, the Pa than, and the Moghul. Empires rose and fell before his very eyes whilst he, hating the foreigner of every race and creed, remained wrapped in his primitive barbarism, a hunter living on the produce of the surrounding forest, not to be starved into submission, because he had no need of the produce of the plains. His only dealings with successive invaders were when he swooped on the villages below, killing and robbing their inhabitants, or cutting off travellers and the camp followers of passing armies.” Neither Hindu nor Mahomedan could subdue him by main force without extravagant loss.
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Aboriginal India 1 . Nature 72, 105–106 (1905). https://doi.org/10.1038/072105a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/072105a0