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 KUR 293 Muhammad, son of Shekh Mustafa, Abbási or Kaiqubadi Shekh of Kursi, who held the office of chaudhri of the pargana. Shekh Muhammad had no other child, and the Sayyad secured the office of chaudhri, and the royal farmán, which had been issued by the Emperor Akbar in name of Shekh Mustafa, was made over to him, and is still held by his descendants. Sayyad Bhikha, of the same line, got another farmán from Muhammad Shah in 1138 A.H. (A.D. 1726), but shortly after this the decay of the Sayyads began, and they gave place to an energetic family of Rajputs of the Khenchi tribe, who, it is said, began life by taking service with the Sayyads, but in the end succeeded in ousting them from their villages. They had previously also lost the chaudhriship which had again reverted to the Shekhs of Kursi, There is a mystery hanging over this last-named family. They do not seem to belong to the original Kaiqubádi colonists, and some say they are converted Hindus; but another more probable account is that they are illegitimately descended from the daughters of a Bais family of Boloiya in Sitapur, for whom they had stood security, and who, failing to meet their engagements, were attacked by the Sayyads, who harried and burned their villages, and carried off one of the daughters of their house, from whom the present family is descended. It is currently believed now that there are occasions on which they present offerings to a Hindu god in Boloiya. To Muhammad Mustafa, already mentioned, is given this place in their history, and from that time their kinsmen, the Kaiqubádis, would have nothing to do with them. They flourished potwithstanding. They held Ghugtír, the old headquarters of Parihárs and other villages, and Nindura, which belonged to the Janwárs of Daráwán, another branch of the Saindúr Janwárs, and they built a village called Din- panáh, “the defence of the faith." Another branch of the family, at present represented by Chaudhri Abd-ur-Razzáq, held Chilgaon, the nucleus of forty villages. And Chaudhri Musahib Ali and Abd-ur-Rahim, Taluqdars of Dinpanáh, are their direct descendants. The Musalmans have altogether proved strong in this pargana. Another Musalman colony of note, that of Mausar, came into the par-. gana at probably the beginning of the fourteenth century, and on the south of the pargana are various scattered Musalman communities, who date their history from the time of Sayyad Masaúd's invasion of A.D. 1030. It is not probable that they are of so early a date, though not unlikely that they were thrown out at different times from Satrikh, which for a long time seems to have sent out colonies to various places in the neighbourhood. The cause for the unusual predominance of the Musalman element has thus been shown. They hold forty out of the ninety-one villages of the pargana ; the rest are held chiefly by Rajputs. The only two taluqdars are Musahib Ali and Abd-ur-Rahím of Din- panáh, who hold jointly an estate of some six villages. When or why Kursi was first constituted as a pargana is unknown. It is mentioned in the Ain-i-Akbari, and the town of Kursi is said to have a brick fort. In the Nawabi it formed part of a chakla consisting of Kursi, Dewa, Jahángirabad, Satrikh, and Nawabganj. 38