Koles, will be described in a following section. Besides all
these there are mixed tribes called Paiks, who are the
native militia of the province. The Utkala Brahmans are
one of the ten original divisions a>f the sacred class';.' ■
The Uriyas as a nation are justly described by Abul-Fazll,
as very effeminate and deficient in manly spirit ; their
figures are slight and delicate; they are ignorant and
stupid. Orissa might be termed the Boeotia of India.
They are not ferocious, but cunning, intriguing, : and
dissolute.
The language of the Qr or Odra natives is a tolerably
pure bhasha or dialect of the Sanskrit resembling closely
the Bengali, but far remote from any affinity with the
Telinga, Most of the titles of which the .natives are sj&
fond are pure Sanskrit.- More than three-fourths ;of the
nouns and verbs may be derived from Sanskrit roots, and
its simple inflections are founded on the rules -bf 'the
Vyakaran. The basis of the alphabet is the pure Hindi
or Nagari character. To the westward the Gond and
Uriya languages pass into each other: the raj ah of i/Soitepur
informed Mr. Stirling that one half of his^people .spoke
Gond and the other half Uriya. On the south we find
traces of the Telinga about Gan jam. The- people there
call themselves Oodiahs and Wodiahs instead of Uriyas.*
Paragraph 3.*—Languages and Nations of the Southern
Family.
T. K a r n a t a s .—All the high fable-land in the south of
India above the Ghauts is designated by Indian geographers
as Karnata, the country of a particular race who spoke the
Karnataka language, one of the original dialects of the Dekhan,
underived from the Sanskrit. The names of Karnata
and Karnataka, corrupted info Canara and Carnatic, have
been transferred from the real Karnata to a province conquered
by the sovereigns of that country situated below the
Ghauts. The Canara and the Carnatic of modern times are
* Stirling’s Description of Orissa.—Asiatic Researches.
beyond the limits of the ancient kingdom of Karnata. In
remote periods Karnataka was a powerful empire and comprehended
a great part of the Dekhan. In the eighth century
of the Christian era it was governed by the Bell ala Rayas.
Balagami, in Mysore, was its capital, and the heretical sect
of Jainas, so termed by the Brahmans, was its predominant
religious party. The Karnataka language and alphabet are
used by the natives of all the countries from Coimbatore
northward as far as Beider, and from the line of the
Eastern to that of the Western Ghauts. The whole of this
table-land, which may be .considered as inhabited by one
race, comprehends the modem provinces of Mysore, Sera,
Upper Bednore, Soonda, Goa, Adoni, Rachoor, Kumoul,
the Doab of the Krishna and Toombudra, and a considerable
part of the modern provinces of Bejapoor and
Beider, as far-as-the source qf the Krishna. The Haiga
Brahmans in Canara, that is in the country on the western
coast below the Ghauts, between Tulava and Kankana or
Concan, consider the Karnataka as their proper tongue.
The junction of these languages, the Telinga, the Mah-
ratfa and the Karnataka, is found near the city of Beider, in
the Dekhan. Inscriptions found in this country, whether
in the Karnataka language or in Sanskrit, are written in the
Karnataka character, which is nearly the same as the
Andhra or old Telinga.*
2. O f t h e T e l in g a N a t io n .—The Telinga language is
the Andhra of Sanskrit authors, and the word Telinga is at
once the name of a language and a nation. The language
was frequently termed Kalinga; it is now often named
Telugii. The Telinga language, as well as the race of
people who speak it, extends to the eastward of the Mah-
rattafrom near Ganjam, its northern limit on the eastern
coast of the Peninsula, to within a few miles of Pulicat,
which is its southern point. A strip of wild country
intervenes between the Telinga and Mahratta regions in
the interior, where the barbarous language of the Gonds
prevails. The.whole region thus marked out was divided
Hamilton’s Geographical Description of India.