Page:Mádhava Ráo Sindhia and the Hindu Reconquest of India.djvu/11



the following pages an attempt has been made to interest the reader in a remote and, at first sight, unattractive subject. The excuse is hinted on the title-page. The man of whom we treat was an Indian ruler of exceptional capacity in times of exceptional difficulty. Born before the sack of Delhi by Nádir Sháh he lived to within ten years of Lord Lake’s occupation of the same imperial city. His life, therefore, exactly corresponds to the hour between the darkness of anarchy and the dawn of order, while his labours helped to make it pass. Himself a lover of order, he did what in him lay to clear away the worst havoc of war and rapine, and the consequent demoralisation: and to prepare the shattered fabric of society for restoration and reform. Hindustán, by which we are to understand the Northern Provinces of the Mughal Empire, had for a time been civilised and prosperous. Tavernier, writing about 1669, speaks of Sháh Jahán, then lately dead, as ‘that great king during whose reign there was such a strictness in the civil government, and particularly for the security of the