The Rajas of The Punjab

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The title of the present work may perhaps be open to objection as too comprehensive, seeing that there are many Chiefs in the territories administered by the Punjab Government, bearing the title of Raja, whose histories have not been here included. But my object has not been to record the biographies of reigning families so much as to give a connected account of the political relations of the British Government with the Independent States of the Punjab from the commencement of the present century.

With Kashmir and Bahawalpur, now its greatest feudatories in North India, the Government had nothing whatever to do until the first Sikh war. The history of the former province in full of interest and will richly repay the most patient and laborious enquiry; but it was not till the defeats on the Satlej had shaken to its fall the corrupt monarchy of Lahore that Kashmir was known to English Statesmen as more than the name of a distant valley which romance and poetry had delighted to paint with their most brilliant colours. Bahawalpur was even less known than Kashmir, till the campaign of 1848 brought its Chief as an ally to the side of the British; and, even after the annexation of the Punjab, its internal political were the subject of no interference on the part of the Government, until anarchy and civil war threatened to reduce the country to its original desert, when the Paramount Power was compelled to interpose in the interests of the people whom tyranny had driven into rebellion and crime.

Among the hills from which the Satlej and the Ravi flow are Chiefs who bear the name of Raja, mostly of Rajput descent and whose pedigrees stretch back in unbroken succession for several thousand years. But their history has little more than an antiquarian interest. At the time when the Gurkhas attempted the conquest of the Punjab hills, these petty Chiefs appear for a moment in the light of history, but, the wave of invasion having been beaten back, they again disappear and are no more seen. Dynasty after dynasty has ruled in Hindostan and has passed away. Two creeds, strong to conquer and foreign to the land, have been predominant from the Bay of Bengal to the Passes of the Khaibar. But before Muhanmad, God-intoxicated, shattered the idols of Arabia; be- fore the founder of the Christian faith gathered his few disciples by the Lako of Galilee, the little Rajput principalities were existing in their quiet valleys; and when the day arrives that the name of England shall be no longer a power in Hindostan, but only a vague memory, one leaf of her long and wondrous story, the Rajputs will still be ruling their ancient valleys and tracing back their ancestry to the Sun.

**Contents and Sample Pages**