the rapid advance of this popular pretender, marched out of Delhi, and displayed the standard of the empire. Leaving his son, Sultan Mauzum, to preside in the capital, he proceeded, at the head of an immense army, to the Indus, which he crossed towards the end of the year 1674. The vanguard of this mighty host, which first passed the river, unable to withstand the impetuous attack of the Patans, were defeated; and the victors, with their characteristic inhumanity, put to death their prisoners." But after the main army under Aurungzebe had passed, the Patans confined their resistance to skirmishes, the defence of posts, and night assaults on the camp; which protracted the war for fifteen months. Num. bers at length prevailed; for the Mogul army was sufficient to people the country they had attacked. After all the more habitable valleys were reduced, the Patans retired into the more inaccessible mountains, in which Aurungzebe did not think it worth the prize to expose his troops, nor his own presence fur

murdered, with his family and followers, by a Rajah, on the confines of Arracan. The particulars are given by Dow, (vol. iii. pp. 297-302,) from which he would appear to have been drowned. But, as his head had never been produced, nor the fact vouched for by any persons who knew him before his flight, some credit was given to other reports that he had escaped. This" is believed," Mr. Orme says, " as we are informed, in the island of Sooloo, far from Arracan and Bengal, where his tomb is shewn at this day. This uncertainty of his fate, furnished credulity and intrigue with pretensions to assert that he continued alive in Indostan, concealed now here, now there, but ready to appear on any favourable opportunity of asserting his right to the throne. Aurungzebe was convinced of his death, but was very attentive to the use which might be made of the reports of his being alive."Orme, p. 50. Whether the one who now made his appearance was the real Sujah, or a pretender, may still be deemed an historical question.

ther necessary; but establishing a chain of posts, and leaving a sufficient force to defend the conquered country, under the command of a general specially selected, returned himself to Delhi (in July 1676), whence he had been absent twenty-seven months. Nevertheless, the work was not yet finished to his mind; and he continued at Delhi, waiting the completion he had prepared.

"The former governors of Peishawir and Caubul had always kept the Patans under severe restrictions, and their chiefs at an imperious distance. But Cossim Khan, whom Aurungzebe appointed on his return to Delhi, assumed a different conduct. He remitted the arrears, and lowered the rates of their tributes, treated their chiefs with equality, and even visited them with slender attendance and negligent familiarities, which left him at their mercy; submitting to incur their contempt in order to gain their confidence; but no condescension could induce them, as he hoped, to deliver up the pretended sultan. He, however, diverted them from any sinister suspicions of himself; and got all who especially supported the pretender, to come to a festival at Peishawir; at which he made them intoxicated, when bands, concealed for the purpose, came in and massacred them all, while others overpowered their retinues. The impostor, on the destruction of his protectors, escaped over the mountains into Persia, and was never afterwards heard of. This execrable deed, Aurungzebe himself was obliged, by the public detestation, to reprobate; and recalling Cossim Khan, he degraded him to the lowest rank of omrahs, but privately assured him of favour. To soothe or obviate the vengeance of the Patans, he sent first his son Akbar, and then Sultan Mauzum to

Peishawir. But the Patans were too much disconcerted by the loss of their chiefs, to recur to arms."*

In the mean time, the Deccan had been the theatre of important events; and it will now be necessary to go back a few years, in order to give an account of the origin of a power which had acquired strength sufficient to resist the armies of Aurungzebe, and which, after various vicissitudes, was able to retaliate, on his successors, the injuries inflicted by his

sword.

At the time that Aurungzebe left his government in the Deccan, in order to secure the throne of Delhi, he had broken the force of the kingdom of Golconda, but Viziapore (Bejapore) still remained formidable.+ Unable to prosecute his conquests, and anxious to leave that power in check, he entered into an alliance with an enterprising chieftain, who, at the head of a formidable banditti, had made himself master of great part of the Concan, and had even extended his predatory incursions to Gujerat. This was Seva-jee, the founder of the Mahratta empire; which, commencing when that of the Moguls was at its zenith, rose to greatness as that power declined, and has only within our own times been reduced to political insignificance. The name of Maharashtra, from which Mahratta is

*Orme, pp. 67, 8.

† After the dissolution of the Bhamenee dynasty of the Deccan, Abou ul Muzuffer Adil Shah founded the Adil Shahy sovereignty of Bejapoor, A.D. 1489, comprehending all the country from the river Beemah to Bejapoor. At the time of Sevajee's revolt, the reigning monarch was Mahommed Adil Shah, the seventh of the dynasty. He died in 1660, and was succeeded by Ali Adil Shah II., who, after a turbulent reign of twelve years, during which he enjoyed little more of royalty than the name, left his throne to Secunder Adil Shah, the last of his race. The monarch of Golconda, contemporary with Mahommed Adil Shah, was Abdullah Kuttub Shah.

corrupted, is given by the Hindoo geographers to the mountainous regions extending from the borders of Gujerat to Canara, including the provinces of Khandeish, Baglana, and part of Berar. The Mahratta language is now much more widely spread, but it does not prevail as the vernacular dialect, much beyond the ancient boundaries of their country.* Mharat, a district of Baglana (in Aurungabad), may perhaps, as Capt. Jonathan Scott supposes, have given name to the country of which it seems to have formed the nucleus.+ The Mahrattas were divided into several tribes, which derived their respective names from their distinguishing occupations, as cultivators, shepherds, and cowherds; and their claim to a Rajpoot descent is disproved as well by this circumstance as by

* From Beder, Col. Wilks says, the Mahratta language is spread over the whole country north-westward of Canara, and of a line which, passing considerably to the eastward of Dowletabad, forms an irregular sweep until it touches the Tapti, and follows the course of that river to the Western Sea (Wilks, p. 6). In Bejapoor, approaching the Krishna from the southward, the Mahratta comes more and more into use, while, beyond it, the Canara dialect begins to decline; although the latter is spoken more to the north of that river, than the Mahratta is to the south. Eastward of the Mahratta country, the Telinga prevails from near Cicacole, in the Northern Circars, to Pullicut, in the Carnatic.

+ Scott's Deccan, Intr., p. x. i. 32. Nizam ul deen, a native historian in the reign of Akbar, relates, that one of the kings of Delhi (Allah I.) made an excursion from Deoghur into the neighbouring province of Marhat.-Rennell, p. lxxx. Ferishta, in like manner, states, that Cafoor "subdued the country of the Mahrattors, which he divided among his omrahs." Baglana is the district apparently referred to. See p. 208. The same historian mentions Narsingh, a prince of the Maharattas in A.D. 1321. Mr. Wilford assigns the Mahrattas a Persian origin; but he confounds them with the Rajpoots, and his remarks are wholly inapplicable to the Mahratta race, whose language is a derivative of the Sanscrit. It is strange, that Mr. Orme should speak of Sevajee as "the founder of the present nation of Morattoes."

*

their diminutive size and distinct physical character. Sevajee, however, claimed, on his father's side, to be descended from a Rana of Oudipoor, the head of all the Rajpoot princes. He was the son of Shahjee, whose father Malojee was the son of Bauga Bonsla, a son of the Rana by a woman of inferior caste. The degradation of Bauga Bonsla from the baseness of his birth, drove him to seek among strangers that respect which he was denied at home. He served, during part of his life, a rajah possessing a zemindaree (jurisdiction) in Khandeish; and afterwards purchased for himself a zemindaree in the neighbourhood of Poonah, where he resided till his death. His son, Malojee, entered the service of a Mahratta chief, in which he acquired so much distinction as to obtain the daughter of his master in marriage for his son, Shahjee; and Sevajee was the fruit of this marriage. Shahjee, having quarrelled with his father-in-law, repaired to the court of Ibrahim Adil Shah, King of Bejapore, who conferred on him a jagheer in the Carnatic, with a command of 10,000 horse. Here, he joined the Polygar of Mudkul (or Madura) in a war upon the Rajah of Tanjore ; and having defeated the Rajah, the victors quarrelled about the division of the territory. Shahjee then defeated the Polygar, and took possession of both Mudkul and Tanjore. He was succeeded in his dominions by Angojee or Ekoojee, his son by a second marriage, whose descendants were rajahs of

* See authorities in Mill's History, ii. 359. Major Rennell says, that the mother of Malojee was "an obscure person of a tribe named Bonsola, (sometimes written Bouncello and Boonsla,) which name was assumed by her son, and continued to be the family name of his descendants, the Rajahs of Sattarah and Berar."-Mem., p. lxxx.