Page:Madras District Gazetteers - Anantapur.pdf/22

The district is made up of the eight taluks of Anantapur, Dharmavaram, Gooty, Hindupur, Kalyandrug, Madakasira, Penu- konda and Tadpatri. The Kalyandrug taluk was constituted in December 1893! out of portions of Dharmavaram and of the Rayadrug taluk of Bellary, the old Dharmavaram taluk being found to be unwieldy. Statistics regarding the area, population, etc., of the existing taluks will be found in the separate Appendix to this volume, Their head-quarters are at the towns from which each is named. Besides these eight places the only towns of any importance are Pamidi and Uravakonda in Gooty, and Yadiki in Tadpatri, taluk,

The Collector's head-quarters is at Anantapur, the town which gives its name to the district. The traditional derivation of the word is referred to in the account of the place in Chapter XV below.

The taluks of the district may be said to roughly arrange themselves into three natural divisions, namely Gooty and Tadpatri in the north, which contain large areas of black cotton-soil; Anantapur, Kalyandrug, Dharmavaram and Penukonda in the centre, which are mainly made up of arid, treeless expanses of poor red soils ; and Madakasira and Hindupur in the south, which connect with the Mysore plateau and stand at a higher elevation than the rest of the district and in which the soil, though still red, is a loam of a kind superior to that found in the central taluks.

The cotton-soil areas are fertile and in parts of Hindupur and Madakasira (the latter of whichis sometimes somewhat grandiloquently called ‘the yarden of the district’) there is plenty of cultivation and vegetation. But most of the rest of Anantapur is made up of barren undulating wastes clothed with a miserably thin grass and dotted with scattered stunted trees. Much of the soil is so poor that it will not stand continuous cropping and is consequently more often fallow than under cultivation, which gives the country a poverty-stricken appearance. The wide plains are broken up by ridges, lines and clusters of rocky hills which, like the ground around them, are covered with poor grass and a few small trees. In the moister valleys are occasional topes, but on the uplands and the hills—even those which are forest reserves—the tree-growth is never large or dense. An artist, however, might find compensation for the inhospitable appearance of this central portion of the district in the wonderful’ colouring of its hills, which changes from hour to hour in sympathy with every alteration in the atmospheric conditions of the day.

None of these hills are of any great size. The highest points in the district are Mallappakonda (3,092 feet), four miles north of

1 G. O, 1078 Rev, dated 19th December 1893,