GAZETTEER.
agreed that Gunupur should be attached and that the revenues thereof should be devoted to paying off the Rája's debts and liquidating the arrears of peshkash. The Rája appears to have lost all self-control at this point, and to have sunk into the deepest abasement. He did not return to his capital, but allowed his son to proceed thither and administer all his affairs. He himself remained on at Náráyanapatnam, deserted by his servants, given up to the most besotted sensuality, and subsisting on the charity of the villagers, 'who were heartily tired of his residence among them.'
In 1855 Jeypore affairs again attracted attention, the existence in the zamindari of the practice of sati being brought to notice. Mr. Smollett reported that cases were frequent; that moreover, owing to Vikrama Deo's incapacity, the country was in a state of complete anarchy; that the Rája's younger son had seized Gunupur; and that the only means of ensuring security to life and property was to post a European officer to Jeypore. Vikrama Deo was sounded regarding this suggestion and in reply wrote a long letter promising to stop all crime in the country, asserting his competence to rule, and earnestly deprecating the interference of Government. Meanwhile, however, the retainers of his two sons had come to blows over the seizure of Gunupur and a severe fight had occurred. In July 1855 Government authorized the Agent to assume 'the control, both police and revenue, of the tracts above the ghats, the taluks below being managed by the agency direct.' Lord Dalhousie, however, was then at Ootacamund and objected, considering that the step was likely to 'involve the British Government in a protracted jungle and hill war, such as that of Gúmsur.' Mr. Smollett protested that the two cases were in no way parallel, but no further action was taken until Vikrama Deo's death in 1860.
The Agent, Mr. Fane, then revived Mr. Smollett's proposal; this was ultimately sanctioned; and in January 1863 Lieutenant Smith was located at Jeypore as Assistant Agent and Captain Galbraith as Assistant Superintendent of Police. Some hostility was evinced at first to the arrangement, and it was necessary to deport, under agency warrants, two leading malcontents, both ex-díwáns of the estate. Nor was this astonishing. 'Truth to say,' as Mr. Carmichael, then Agent, wrote in 1864, 'we are working out in Jeypore an experiment which has never been tried before. Eighty years of independent native misrule have been succeeded at once, without compromise and without any exhibition of military or semi-military force, by an administration
269
