Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/48

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INTRODUCTION.

hardly any interaction of mutual

effect.

The most

important political results of their co-existence were the followThe foreign rule took the position of the old paramount eming

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such as dominated from Patna or from Kanauj, It became impossible for any Hindu to attain the position of raja of rajas. The very memory of the corporate, political, and religious life of the whole people was extinguished, and for it were substituted the petty aims and petty interests of States often smaller and more insignificant than the smallest principalities of Germany. On the other hand, the old and compact social system ot the Hindus presented a barrier against which the wildest excesses of barbarian fury expended themselves in vain. Thousands might be slain and tens of thousands led into captivity, but the Brahman "still controlled the family life of the people their Chhattri lord collected them for battle and disposed of their disputes in a court governed by rules which appealed to their sense of justice, and the cultivator continued to till his fields, confident that when the storm was passed he should be allowed to retain them on the payment of The worst tyrants, whose the customary share of the produce. superior energy or intelligence made them formidable to the land, had no further effect than a series of bad harvests. When they were gone, all the old elements of society resumed the exercise of their various functions, and repaired a desolation which could only It is this ancient and stable civilization which last for a time. saved the fertile provinces of India from the fate inflicted by conquerors of kindred race, and not more cruel or barbarous on the When this has been said, equally fertile plains of Central Asia. almost all that is of importance in the political history of Oudh, from the final Muhammadan conquest in the beginning of the thirteenth century to the establishment of a Muhammadan dynasty on the throne of Lucknow, has been exhausted. Throughout five hundred years of foreign domination the story has been the same, the same struggle being carried on with varying conditions of strength on one side or the other, but, except on one occasion, with no attempt at coalescence into a united national polity. The fortunes of the great Muslim lords who ruled from Bahraich or Manikpur belong, where they have any interest at all, to the history of the Muhammadan government of India. The vicissitudes of the petty Hindu states into which the country was parcelled out do not admit of being combined into any general pires,



abstract.

For some time the newly-established Hindu chiefs in the south seem to have been engaged in a desultory contest with the