THE TAMING OF THE JUNGLE
BY DR. C. W. DOYLE
PHILADELPHIA & LONDON
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1899
Copyright, 1899
by J. B. Lippincott Company
Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, U. S. A.
Preface
For a better understanding of this story, it will be necessary to say a few words concerning the people of the Terai,—the great tract of jungle that skirts the foothills of the Himalayas, in the Province of Kumaon. They are a simple, primitive folk, and migratory in their ways: inhabiting the interior valleys of the hills in the hot weather and the monsoon, and the foothills and the Terai during the winter.
In official reports they are described as "low-caste Hindoos;" but they are as far removed from the low-caste Hindoos of the plains, on the one hand, as they are from the high-caste Rajpoots, who are the gentry of Kumaon, on the other. The monstrous Pantheism of the Brahmin is unknown to them, and the ritual and severe limitations of caste that shackle the former in all the relations of life have no influence on the Padhans of Kumaon. Tending their flocks and their herds, and cultivating their terraced fields in the summer and their patches of rye and corn in the winter, they pass lives of Arcadian simplicity among scenes that surpass Ida and Olympus in beauty, and which vie with the glades of Eden, as Milton and Tennyson described them.