months' expenditure; the Mahárájá having hit on the clever financial device of rewarding his creatures by 'orders on the harvest!'
Some of the items of his . expenditure will repay notice. Over £4000 a year were assigned to 'men whose sole duty it is to make saláms to the Chief'; over £5000 to singers and dancing girls; and £1900 to wrestlers. 'The Mahárájá manifests the utmost contempt of decency, drinking publicly with low Muhammadans, and getting drunk nearly every day.' The revenues formerly spent on the administration of justice and police had 'been devoted to the Chiefs private pleasures. Indeed, the Chief himself is on terms of intimacy with two dakáit leaders,' i. e. heads of robber gangs. He had confiscated the public lands assigned for the support of his troops, and for the maintenance of religion, or for the relief of the poor — one of the latter grants being 270 years old.
The result was to completely alienate the Rájá of Alwár from his Rájput nobility and subjects. The nobility consisted of a powerful body of Hindu Thákúrs, or barons. In vain they pleaded with him to observe some measure in his excesses. His practical answer to them was the disbandment of fifteen out of the eighteen Rájput troops of cavalry, whose fathers had won the State for his ancestor, and the enrollment of Muhammadan mercenaries in their stead. In March, 1870, the news reached the Government of India that the people of Alwár had risen, and that 2000 men were in the field against the Hindu Prince.
