Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/424

374 spared Maratha districts while they harried British lands and the Nizam's country, and who probably remembered that the Pindaris might prove very serviceable auxiliaries in any future attempt to make head against British domination.

The war that broke out with Nepal in 1814 had inspired the Marathas with some hope of finding their opportunity in England's difficulty. About 1768 a chief of the Gurkhalis or Gurkhas, a race springing from the intermixture of Hindus with the hill tribes, had subdued all the highlands and valleys on the southern slopes of the Himalayas overlooking Bengal. His successors had carried their arms northwestwards along the mountain ranges above Oudh, Rohilkhand, and the provinces watered by the Ganges and the Jumna, up to the confines of the Panjab. This difficult tract of hill and forest, into which the Moghuls had never cared to penetrate, had previously been possessed by a number of petty Hindu rajas, who subsisted to a large extent by making occasional forays into the plain country below.

The Gurkha chief, taking his lesson from what was going on in Bengal, had set up a disciplined force with which he easily exterminated the local rajas, and his dynasty ruled, with the usual contests upon each succession, until his grandson was assassinated by conspirators in 1805. After that date the kingdom was no longer governed by a single ruler; it fell into the hands of a group of high military officers belonging to the dominant clan, who kept the hereditary king in sub-