Note 1 — A

Bachgoti.—A sept of Râjputs. Their story is thus told:—“After the defeat of Prithivi Râj by Shahâbuddîn Ghori, some Chauhâns, under Baryâr Sinh and Kâns Râê, descendants of Chahir Deo, brother of Prithivi Râj, fled from Sambhalgarh, and wandering eastward, about 1248 A.D., settled at Jamwâwan, in the Sultânpur District. Even here, however, they felt themselves unsafe while they continued to bear the name of their proscribed race, so they deemed it prudent to adopt another, to which they were equally entitled, and which they might own with equal pride. If they belonged to the stock of their four-handed predecessor, they also belonged to the gotra of their creative saint. They accordingly adopted the device of concealing their lineal beneath their spiritual descent.” There has been some dispute as to whether they took their new name from Vatsa, who was the author of one of the hymns of the Rig Veda, and who was perhaps the same as the sage Vatsa, who, according to Manu,1 “when attacked, as the son of a servile mother, by the fire which pervades the world, burned not a hair by reason of his perfect veracity,” or from the more celebrated Vasistha, who is the centre of a large cycle of Vedic and post-Vedic legend. The first theory is, however, the more probable of the two. A second version of this story is that Râna Sangat Deo, great-grandson of Chahir Deo, had twenty-one sons. Of these the youngest succeeded his father, when he married a bride of the Tomar sept, and of the house of Jila Patan. The other sons sought their fortunes in other parts. Baryâr Sinh and Kâns Râê went to Mainpuri, and there joined the army of Ala-ud-dîn Ghori then starting from that place on an expedition against the Bhars, and thus found their way into Oudh. Both these accounts concur in attributing the advent of the Bachgotis into Oudh to Muhammadan influence; but the one declares that they were driven before the invaders, and the other that they were led by them. It is in favour of the first that it leaves a space of fifty-five years between Prithivi Râja and Baryâr Sinh, and thus accords with the common belief that the latter was a descendant of a brother of the former; it also affords a possible explanation of the assumption of the name Bachgoti.