The Baigas, however, are not without some conceit of themselves,
as the following legend will show. In the beginning, they say, God
created Nanga Baiga and Nangi Baigin, the first of the human race,
and asked them by what calling they would choose to live. They at once
said that they would make their living by felling trees in the jungle,
and permission being accorded, have done so ever since. They had two
sons, one of whom remained a Baiga, while the other became a Gond
and a tiller of the soil. The sons married their own two sisters who
were afterwards born, and while the elder couple are the ancestors
of the Baigas, from the younger are descended the Gonds and all the
remainder of the human race. In another version of the story the
first Baiga cut down two thousand old _sal_ [88] trees in one day,
and God told him to sprinkle a few grains of kutki on the ashes, and
then to retire and sleep for some months, when on his return he would
be able to reap a rich harvest for his children. In this manner the
habit of shifting cultivation is accorded divine sanction. According
to Binjhwar tradition Nanga Baiga and Nangi Baigin dwelt on the
_kajli ban pahar_, which being interpreted is the hill of elephants,
and may well refer to the ranges of Mandla and Bilaspur. It is
stated in the _Ain-i-Akbari_ [89] that the country of Garha-Mandla
abounded in wild elephants, and that the people paid their tribute
in these and gold mohurs. In Mandla the Baigas sometimes hang out
from their houses a bamboo mat fastened to a long pole to represent
a flag which they say once flew from the palace of a Baiga king. It
seems likely that the original home of the tribe may have been the
Chhattisgarh plain and the hill-ranges surrounding it. A number of
estates in these hills are held by landowners of tribes which are
offshoots of the Baigas, as the Bhainas and Binjhwars. The point is
further discussed in the article on Bhuiya. Most of the Baigas speak
a corrupt form of the Chhattisgarhi dialect. When they first came
under the detailed observation of English officers in the middle of
the nineteenth century, the tribe were even more solitary and retired
than at present. Their villages, it is said, were only to be found
in places far removed from all cleared and cultivated country. No
roads or well-defined paths connected them with ordinary lines of
traffic and more thickly inhabited tracts, but perched away in snug
corners in the hills, and hidden by convenient projecting spurs and
dense forests from the country round, they could not be seen except
when nearly approached, and were seldom visited unless by occasional
enterprising Banias and vendors of country liquor. Indeed, without a
Baiga for a guide many of the villages could hardly be discovered,
for nothing but occasional notches on the trees distinguished the
tracks to them from those of the sambhar and other wild animals.