In the north-west, since Many thousand years, the l'anjab has been a hattle.tleld of the races contending for empire ; and within historic times, Greek and Scythian. Hindu and Ihuldhiat. Turk and Moghul, Arab, Persian, Afghan, and British have been there. At the close of the 18th century, Ranjit Singh, an able ruler of the Sikh faith. established his sway over all the parts of it west of the Sutlej, and he conquered alto Kashmir. But anarchy followed his death (1839); and the latest contest for dominion was by the East India Company, who fought for safety at Moodket. Firozahali, Aliwal, and Sobraon in 1845, and at Gujerat in 1849, on which maharaja Dhulip Singh transferred his sovereignty to the Bridal'. A few years later on (1856), the king of Otslh, hereditary wazir of the Moghul empire, was set aside for utter misrule. The following year the titular Moghul dynasty of Dehli threw in their lot with mutineers, and were swept away. And the Mahomedan states of Hyderabad, Bhopal, and Banaganapilly, with the Hindu kingdoms at Bhart pur, Dholpur, Baroda, Cochin, Mysore, Jodhpur, Jeypore, Oodeypur, and Travancore in Hindustan, in Rajputana and in the Dekhan, remain the oldest dynasties among the princes of India,—the most ancient, perhaps, in the world, being the Rajput houses of Oodeypur and Jodhpur.
Within historic times, except for brief intervals and in very small principalities, the ancient people of India have never had rulers of their own races. Periodical literature not infrequently alludes to British domination as a foreign rule. But the imperial dynasties ruling from Dehli had merely a military occupation ; the cultivators of the Rajput states, and of the Gaekwar, of Holkar, and of Sindia, are largely of the Kurmi, Kunbi, Kach'hi, and Mali races, and of the aboriginal Gond, Koli, Meena, Mhair, Bhil, and others. Hyderabad, in the Dekhan, is a very compact Mahomedan state, with eleven millions of popu lation, but its people are almost all Teling, Canar ese, Mahratta, and Gond, in nearly equal numbers. The population of Mysore is of a most varied character ; and the Hindu kingdom of Travancore, another compact state, has rulers of the Nair race, and the bulk of their subjects professing some form of Hinduism, has only 440,932 Nair in a population of 2,311,379.
Cities.—With such continuous revolutions, the people have never had time to collect into large town populations. Tradition tells of Ajodhya as a great city, covering an area of ninety-six milers but there are now, perhaps, more large towns than India has ever before known, and even yet only 139 of them have more, than 20,000 inhabit ants. The former unsettled state of the country, and the craving of the people for protection in their peaceful labours, are well illustrated by the historic* of the strictly British towns of Calcutta, Madras; and Bombay. At these three cities, for
tresses were erected by the British, and the people have gathered around them. The great capital of British India, which now contains a population of 794,643 souls, was, at the close of the 17th century, a cluster of three small mud hamlets. The only previous notice of Kalikata' is a brief entry of it as a rent-paying village in the emperor Akbar's great statistical survey of 1596. But in 1686 the English merchants at Hoogly, being compelled to quit their factory in consequence of a rupture with the Moghul authorities, retreated, under their president, Job Charnock, to Sutanati, a village on the east bank of the river, now a northern quarter of Calcutta. In 1696 they built the original Fort William, and a few years later purchased the three villages of Sutanati, Kalikata, and Govindpur from Prince Azim, son of the emperor Aurangzeb. But with the security given by its fortress and its bordering river, the popula tion is now approaching a million of souls.
Madras, as it is called by the British, is still only known to the people as a collection of several hamlets, Chinapatan, Mutialpet, Vepery, Nangam bSkam, and others. In March 1639, Francis Day, chief of the commercial settlement at Arma gun, obtained from the representative of the Vijayanagar dynasty a grant of the site on which Madras now stands, and a factory with some slight fortifications was at once constructed. It may be doubted if there were a thousand people in all the hamlets. But the natives settled around the factory, a better fort was built, and at the census of 1881 the population numbered 406,117.
Bombay Island formed part of the dower of Catharine, queen of Charles it. of England, who in 1688 transferred it to the East India Company for an annual payment of £10. The population was estimated at 10,000 souls. The Company strengthened the fortifications ; in 1673 the in habitants numbered 60,000 ; piracy was put down; its island position further protected it, and in 1881 its population had increased to 773,196.
Similar increments are going on in and around all the sites taken up by the British as canton ments and military stations. Secunderabad, for instance, had no existence until the British Sub sidiary force, during the reign of Secuuder Jah (1803), encamped on its present site ; but its in habitants in 1868 numbered 32,000 in 7938 houses.
In the war with Burma of 1852-53, Rangoon, on a branch of the Irawadi, was taken by the British, and its population was estimated at 25,000; in 1872 it had 89,897 (99,745) inhabitants, but in 1881 its population reached 134,176 souls.