BAH
124
which covered the Charda pargana. His success was complete, and from that day to this the forest has been driven back steadily- to the edge of the high bank of the Bhakla. In Nanpara Sali Madar Bakhsh
of
Khan
succeeded Mustafa Khan, and in 1790 A. D. left the estate to Madar Bakhsh, who in sixteen years so extended the cultivation that the revenue rose from
On
the death of Madar Bakhsh in 1807 A. D. his son Munawwar Ali Khan was a child of only a year old, and the estate The progress m mnj^^j^j j^j^.^^ ^^^-j jg^g j)^ ^j^^^^ Munawwar Ali Khan's mother filed her engagement for Rs. 1,10,000, a clear proof of the extension of cultivation and of the increasing prosperity of the ilaqa.
^^
^
When, however, Munawwar Ali Khan in 1827 A. D. took the management into his own hands, he succeeded in resisting the Munawar Ah Khan, demands of the chakladar so far as only to pay from This taluqdar was a man of energy and great Rs. 50,000 to 60,000. courage, but his contentions with Raja Darshan Singh must have thrown back the estate considerably. Raghubar Dayal, however, the scourge of the Fakhrpur and Bahraich parganas, did not venture to interfere with him.
In 1847 A. D., in an iU-starred moment, he married one of the fashionHe marries the ^^1® ladies of the Lucknow Court, the daughter of daughter of Mehndi one Mehndi Quli Khan, brother of a Kumedan of a QuhKhan. Najib corps. From that day to this the estate has been cursed.
The Raja returned '^^'"
reu'oftheS
to Nanpara with his bride and died* a few days after. The elder Rani succeeded to the management in the ^^me of her infant son Jang Bahadur, and for two
years ruled peaceably, but the younger wife contrived to obtain the support of the queen mother in Lucknow, and for five years an unceasing warfare raged throughout the ilaqa between the partisans This disastrous contention found a prominent place of the two women. in the report submitted by the Resident on the state of Oudh in 1855, and may be said to have been one of the chief instances of the misrule which then prevailed, which ultimately induced the Court of Directors to issue
its fiat for
annexation.
James Outram then wrote " Nanp£ra, one of the richest districts in Oudh, with magnificent fertile plains intersected in all "" ^ ' directions by rivers and streams, and yielding MunawaccLit war Ali Khan, the late Raja, upwards of three lakhs of Sir .
,
rupees yearly, since the Raja's death is reduced to such a state that it does not now yield the king anything at all, though upwards of 1,20,000 rupees have been spent every year on the troops stationed there. The whole of
- He was shot through the body by the accidental discharge of a gun, one barrel of which
he was loading in a hauda, his only companion in which was, it ia said, a dancing girl, who tried in vain to staunch the blood.'
