The Highlands of Central India: Notes on their Forests and Wild Tribes, Natural History and Sports (Revised, newly composed text edition) | with a Map of the Central Indian Highlands

People commonly talk of the ‘hills’ and the ‘plains’ of India, meaning by the former the great Himalayan range, and by the latter all the rest of the country. Much of this has really been owing to the unexplored and undescribed condition of such regions, but something also to the overwhelming prominence of the great northern range, which rivets the attention of teachers of geography and their pupils, and also, from the exigencies of the art of cartography, renders it almost impossible to delineate on ordinary maps of India the features of inferior ranges. In the very centre of India there exists a considerable region to which the term Highlands, which the author has adopted for the title, is strictly applicable; and in which are numerous peaks and ranges, for which the term “mountain” would, in any other country, be used. Several of the great rivers of India have their first sources in this elevated region, and pour their waters into the sea on either side of the peninsula— to the north the Són commingling with the Ganges, to the east the Mahánadi, flowing independently to the Bay of Bengal, to the south some of the principal feeders of the Godávari, and to the west the Narbadá and the Tápti, taking parallel courses to the Arabian Gulf. It forms the central and culminating section of a ridge of elevated country which stretches across the peninsula, from near Calcutta to near Bombay, and separates Northern India, or Hindostan proper, from the Deccan, or country of the south. The traveller by the new Great Indian Peninsular Railway from Bombay to Calcutta, after some 275 miles of his journey, will come to a point where the line branches into two. The northern branch leads him up the Narbadá valley, and so, by Alahabád and the Gangetic valley, to the City of Palaces. If he takes the southern branch instead, he will be landed at Nágpúr, a city in the very heart of India, and its present terminal station.