Rájputána. Delhi, Agra and Allahábád looked out upon a region where, on an arid soil and beneath a blazing sky, some of the fiercest blood in India throbbed in the veins of a warrior race. Southward from Agra towered the rock-built stronghold of Gwalior, where Sindhia recalled the faded glories of Maráthá rule. To the south, again, was Jhánsí, home of a brave and fierce woman, widow of the last of the Jhánsí Rájás, bitterly brooding over Lord Dalhousie's refusal to allow her to adopt an heir to the title and dignities of her departed lord. Still further to the south — where the Vindhyan Hills look down upon the Valley of the Narbadá — Holkar, another Maráthá potentate, preserved a loyalty which, perhaps, at times derived opportune reinforcement from the neighbourhood of a British cantonment at Mhow. Through this region ran the great high-road from Bombay to Agra and Delhi; and, in case of a disturbance in Upper India, its military significance would be enormous.
The Maráthá Princes had no great reason to love the British. Nowhere had national instincts been more rudely thwarted, or the struggle between anarchy, rapine and oppression, as represented by native rulers, and order and subordination, as enforced by English administrators, been more acute. The antagonism had been long, fierce, inveterate. In the latter half of the seventeenth century Sivaji, founder of the Maráthás, had carved a kingdom for himself out of a dismembered fragment of the Mughal Empire. His successors had
