“In that Contree,” says Sir John Maundevile, “ben folk, that han but o foot and thei gon so fast that it is marvaylle: and the foot is so large that it schadeweth alle the Body azen the Sonne, when thei wole lye and rest hem.” So Pliny, Natural History, lib. vii. c. 2: speaks of “Hominumn gens … singulis cruribus, miræ pernicitatis ad saltum; eosdemque Sciopodas vocari, quod in majori æstu, humi jacentes resupini, umbrâ se pedum protegant.”
These epithets are, as Professor Wilson remarks, “exaggerations of national ugliness, or allusions to peculiar customs, which were not literally intended, although they may have furnished the Mandevilles of ancient and modern times.”
Vishṇu Puráṇa, Vol. II. p. 162.
“Pulinda is applied to any wild or barbarous tribe. Those here named are some of the people of the deserts along the Indus; but Pulindas are met with in many other positions, especially in the mountains and forests across Central India, the haunts of the Bheels and Gonds. So Ptolemy places the Pulindas along the banks of the Narmadá, to the frontiers of Larice, the Látá or Lár of the Hindus,—Khandesh and part of Gujerat.” Wilson's Vishṇu Puráṇa, Vol. II. 159, Note.
Dr. Hall observes that “in the Bengal recension of the Rámáyaṇa the Pulindas appear both in the south and in the north. The real Rámáyaṇa K.-k., XLIII., speaks of the northern Pulindas.”