Page:History of the French in India.djvu/256

 234 FRENCH INDIA AT ITS ZENITH. CI vi P ' P asse d fr° m the family of Dost AH, to which he was » . Y — ' related, to a stranger, he was kept rigorously a prisoner. 1749. Not indeed that the Marathas had any state object in view in thus keeping him from his native province; it was simply a question of ransom. Chanda Sahib was comparatively poor. Allied only by marriage with the house ot Dost Ali, he had not exercised independent authority for a sufficiently long time to amass any very considerable wealth. The jewels which constituted the greater part of it were with his wife and family in Pondichery. The remainder had been taken when he lost Trichinapalli. For a long time, however, the Marathas insisted upon the payment of a kingly ran- som, as an essential condition of his release, and all this time Chanda Sahib, unable to pay it, saw opportu- nities vanish, kingdoms pass into other hands, and he felt too that every year added to that forge tfulness of himself, which is the unvarying consequence of the absence of a leader from the scene of action. At last, however, fortune seemed to unbend. In the month of April, 1748, Muhammad Shah, King of Delhi, died.* His only son, Ahmad Shah, succeeded him, but the first months of his accession were too much engaged in preparations to maintain himself against his namesake, the Abdali, and other enemies, to allow him to turn his attention to the events that were occurring in the remote Dakhan. It was, however, just at this moment that the attention of the feudal lord of the empire was particularly required in those parts. A few months after the death of Muhammad Shah (June, 1748) Nizam-ul-Mulk, Viceroy of the Dakhan, followed him to the grave at the ripe age of seventy-seven years. f The succession had become, through the weakness of the central authority, by custom rather than by consent, 15. He had reigned thirty years and writers indicate 101 years as his age twenty-seven days. See Elliott's at the period of his death. History of India t Yo.ii., pp. 111-12,
 * His death occurred on April the t So says Elphinstone : but other