INTRODUCTORY
In the ensuing pages it will be the writer's aim to tell the story of the country known as Maharashtra. It lies on the western shore of middle India and is in shape a triangle Its base is the sea from Daman to Karwar. The perpendicular side is formed by a line running from Daman beyond Nagpur. The hypotenuse is formed by an irregular line from beyond Nagpur to Karwar, The area of this tract is over 100,000 square miles and its population exceeds thirty millions. The race that inhabits it varies just as Frenchmen of different provinces vary. But it has distinct characteristics, which differentiate it from other Indian races. The people of Maharashtra as a rule lack the regular features of the Northern Indian. Their tempers, too, are usually less under control than those of the dwellers in the Gangetic plain. But their courage is at least as high as that of any other Indian nation, while their exquisitely keen sense of humour, the lofty intelligence of their educated classes, their blimt speech and frank bearing rarely fail to win the love and admiration of those Englishmen whose lot it is to serve among them the Indian Government.
Maharashtra has three distinct divisions. Of these, the seaboard below the Sahyadri Mountains is known as the Konkan ; the tract occupied by the Sahyadris is known as the Mawal; while the wide, rolling plains to the east are known as the Desh. Maharashtra receives from the monsoon a rainfall that varies
Ranade, Rise of the Maratha Power, p. 20.
greatly. In many parts of the Konkan 100 inches in a single year are not unusual. In the Sahyadris as many as 400 inches have been recorded. In the eastern parts of the Desh a fall of 20 inches is welcomed with the utmost gratitude. The Konkan is, owing to its low level, hotter than the other two divisions. It is, however, in parts extremely fertile. The Mawal is cool and eminently healthy for Europeans, but, except for its rice-fields, of httle value for cultivation. The Desh is barren to the west, but grows richer to the east, where the deep black soil needs only rain to produce crops in abundance. The climate of the Desh, while hotter than that of the Mawal, is still pleasant and salubrious.
In the earliest period of Indian History on which light has yet been thrown, we find the Aryan people established only in eastern Afghanistan and the western Punjab. To this tract they were long confined either by the forests that grew along the Ganges Eiver or by the valour of the tribes that dwelt close to their borders. In course of time, however, they subdued the forests and the tribes that blocked their path, and by the 8th century B.C. were in complete control of the vast territory between the Himalayas and the Vindhyas. This immense tract, watered by the Ganges, the Indus, the Jamna, and a host of minor rivers and visited by the yearly monsoon rains, should, it might have seemed, have sufficed for the needs of the conquering race. But the 7th century B.C. saw a great activity among the nations along the Mediterranean seaboard. The Eternal City had been founded on the banks of the Tiber, and the ' Wolves of Italy' had begun to peep from their Roman stronghold at the world, which in the course of eight centuries they were to subdue from the highlands of Britain to the fastnesses of Judea. In Greece the old civilization of Homer had been followed by another, far more daring and not less picturesque. Dorians and lonians had planted their colonies from the Gulf of Tarentum to the south of Sicily. Their triremes and penteconters fought battles for the trade of the Adriatic Their mercenary soldiers helped Gyges and Ardys of Lydia to check,
See Bury's Greece.
and then to drive back, the Cimmerian hosts to the Crimea. In-return they learnt the art of coinage from the Lydians, and letters from the Phoenicians. But it was in the valley of the Nile that civilization made her greatest advance. The conquest of Egypt in 672 B.C. by ...
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