Page:Anandamath, The Abbey of Bliss - Chatterjee.djvu/235



A set of lawless banditti, wrote the Council in 1773, known under the name of Sanyasis or Fakirs, have long infested these countries, and under pretence of religious pilgrimage, have been accustomed to traverse the chief part of Bengal, begging stealing and plundering whereever they go, and as it best suits their convenience to practise. In the years subsequent to the famine, their ranks were swollen by a crowd of starving peasants, who had neither seed nor implements to recommence cultivation with, and the cold weather of 1772 brought them down upon the harvest-fields of Lower Bengal, burning, plundering, ravaging in bodies of fifty to thousand men. The Collectors called on the military; but after a temporary success, our Sepoys were at length totally defeated and Captain Thomas their leader with almost the whole party cut off. It was not till the close of the winter that the Council could report to the Court of Directors, that a battalion under an experienced commander had acted successfully against them,and a month later we find that even this tardy intima ion had been premature. On the 31 March, 1774. Warren Hastings plainly acknowledges that, the commander who had succeeded Captain Thomas unhappily underwent the same fate; that four battalions of the army were then actively engaged against the banditti, but that in spite of the militia levies called from the landholders, their combined operations nan been fruitless. The revenue could not be collected, the inhabitants made common cause with