Ujameda, by his wife, Nila, had five sons, who spread their branches on both sides of the Indus. Regarding three the Puranas are silent, which implie… - James Tod

To the drying up of the Hakra, or Gliaggar, many centuries ago, in conjunction with moral evils, is ascribed the existing desolation. According to tradition, this stream took a westerly direction, by Phidra, where it is yet to be traced, and fell into the Indus below Uchh. The couplet recording its absorption by the sands of Ner has already been given, in the time of Rao Hamir, prince of Dhat. If the next European traveller who may pass through the Indian desert will seek out the representative of the ancient Sodha princes at Chor, near Umarkot, he may learn from their bard (if they retain such an appendage) the date of this prince, and that of so important an event in the physical and political history of their regions. The vestiges of large towns, now buried in the sands, confirm the truth of this tradition, and several of them claim a high antiquity ; such as the Rangmahall, already mentioned, west of Bhatner, having subterranean apartments still ill good preservation. An aged native of Daudusar (twenty- five miles south of Bhatner) replied, to my inquiry as to the recollections attached to this place, that “ it belonged to a Panwar prince who ruled once all these regions, when Sikandar Riimi attacked them.”

If we consider the political changes and convulsions which have happened in Hindustan since Mahmud’s invasion, and the intolerant bigotry of many of his successors, we shall be able to account for the paucity of its national works on history, without being driven to the improbable conclusion, that the Hindus were ignorant of an art which has been cultivated in other countries from almost the earliest ages. Is it to be imagined that a nation so highly civilized as the Hindus, amongst whom the exact sciences flourished in perfection, by whom the fine arts [ix], architecture, sculpture, poetry, music, were not only cultivated, but taught and defined by the nicest and most elaborate rules, were totally unacquainted with the simple art of recording the events of their history, the characters of their princes, and the acts of their reigns? Where such traces of mind exist, we can hardly believe that there was a want of competent recorders of events, which synchronical authorities tell us were worthy of commemoration. The cities of Hastinapur and Indraprastha, of Anhilwara and Somanatha, the triumphal columns of Delhi and Chitor, the shrines of Abu and Girnar, the cave-temples of Elephanta and Ellora, are so many attestations of the same fact; nor can we imagine that the age in which these works were erected was without an historian. Yet from the Mahabharata or Great War, to Alexander’s invasion, and from that grand event to the era of Mahmud of Ghazni, scarcely a paragraph of pure native Hindu history (except as before stated) has hitherto been revealed to the curiosity of Western scholars. In the heroic history of Prithiraj, the last of the Hindu sovereigns of Delhi, written by his bard Chand, we find notices which authorize the inference that works similar to his own were then extant, relating to the period between Mahmud and Shihabu-d-din (A.D. 1000-1193); but these have disappeared.

While the camp-baskets were unlocking, I could not resist taking a peep at the fire-fount and the shrine of Achil-eswar, one of the most renowned in the fabulous annals of the Hindus. The Man-agni-coonda is about nine hundred feet long by two hundred and forty in breadth, excavated in the solid rock, and lined with solid masonry of immensely large bricks. An insulated mass of rock has been left in the center of the coond, on which are the ruins of a shrine to Mata, the universal mother. On the crest of the northern face of the coond is a group of small temples dedicated to the Pandu brothers, but, like the former, a mass of ruins.