The Son river, which rises near the source of the Nerbudda on the tableland of Amarkantak, takes a westerly course for some miles, and then turns off suddenly to the east, and is joined by the little stream of the Johila before it descends the great cascade; and hence the poets have created this fiction, which the mass of the population receive as divine revelation.  The statue of little Johila, the barber’s daughter, in stone, stands in the temple of the goddess Nerbudda at Amarkantak, bound in chains.[6] It may here be remarked that the first overtures in India must always be made through the medium of the barber, whether they be from the prince or the peasant.[7] If a sovereign prince sends proposals to a sovereign princess, they must be conveyed through the medium of the barber, or they will never be considered as done in due form, as likely to prove propitious.  The prince will, of course, send some relation or high functionary with him; but in all the credentials the barber must be named as the principal functionary.  Hence it was that Her Majesty was supposed to have sent a barber’s daughter to meet her husband.

The ‘Mahatam’ (greatness or holiness) of the Ganges is said, as I have already stated, to be on the wane, and not likely to endure sixty years longer; while that of the Nerbudda is on the increase, and in sixty years is entirely to supersede the sanctity of her sister.  If the valley of the Nerbudda should continue for sixty years longer under such a government as it has enjoyed since we took possession of it in 1817,[8] it may become infinitely more rich, more populous, and more beautiful than that of the Nile ever was; and, if the Hindoos there continue, as I hope they will, to acquire wealth and honour under a rule to which they are so much attached, the prophecy may be realized in as far as the increase of honour paid to the Nerbudda is concerned.  But I know no ground to expect that the reverence[9] paid to the Ganges will diminish, unless education and the concentration of capital in manufactures should work an important change in the religious feelings and opinions of the people along the course of that river; although this, it must be admitted, is a consummation which may be looked for more speedily on the banks of the Ganges than on those of a stream like the Nerbudda, which is neither navigable at present nor, in my opinion, capable of being rendered so.  Commerce and manufactures, and the concentration of capital in the maintenance of the new communities employed in them, will, I think, be the great media through which this change will be chiefly effected; and they are always more likely to follow the course of rivers that are navigable than that of rivers which are not.[10]

Notes: 

1.  Amarkantak, formerly in the Sohagpur pargana of the Bilaspur District of the Central Provinces, is situated on a high tableland, and is a famous place of pilgrimage.  The temples are described by Beglar in A.S.R., vol. vii, pp. 227-34, pl. xx, xxi.  The hill has been transferred to the Riwa State (Central Provinces Gazetteer (1870), and I.G. (1908), s.v.  Amarkantak).