The Bundela clan.
As the old road from Agra to the Deccan leaves Gwalior, it skirts on its left hand side an extensive jungly tract known as Bundel- khand. The Jamuna river and the Kaimur range, meeting in a sharp angle near Mirzapur, enclose this district on the north, east, and south. Its western boundary is the edge of the Malwa plateau. The river Betwa flowing north-eastwards to the Jamuna cuts it into two.
The country took its name from its dominant race, the Bundelas, a clan of Gaharwar Rajputs, whose mythical genealogy stretches up to Rajah Pancham, a sworn devotee of the goddess Vindhya- basini, and even beyond him to Rama, the hero of the Ramayana. The only element of truth that we can extract from this mass of fiction is that a great ancestor of the family migrated from the Benares, through the Mirzapur district, and established his rule over this tract by dispossessing its older rulers, Afghans and aborigines. Urchha, on the Betwa, was their first capital (founded in 1531). Here lived the head of the clan. The Bundelas multiplied fast, and the younger branches established principalities all over the land, each centring round a fort. One of these, Mahoba, sheltered within a network of ravines, rose to prominence in the latter half of the seventeenth century, under, Champat Rao and his son Chhatra Sal, who long troubled the imperial Government. Other scions of the family reigned at Simroha Shahpur, and many another town.*
*Chhatraprakash cantos 1 and 2. Elliot’s Memoirs..of the N. W. P. ed. by Beames, i. 45-46. Imperial Gazetteer (ed. 1906) ix, 68, 70; Masir-ul-umara, ii. 131, 317. Urchha is situated 7 m. south east of Jhansi fort. Mahoba is midway on the railway line between Jhansi and Manikpur.
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