Page:Mádhava Ráo Sindhia and the Hindu Reconquest of India.djvu/13

Rh is, in fact, the protagonist. In the drama before us the protagonist is almost identified with the scenes in which he moved and the events in which he bore an influential part. He belongs at once to the faded Court of the Mughals and to the busy camp of the Maráthás: and the whole of his career is visible in the light of such relations. A man like Sindhia has no private life; and to understand what he was we must be shown what he did.

We must therefore endeavour to realise what was the Empire at whose agony our hero assisted and to whose estate he, for a time, administered; and we must seek some samples of the anarchy from which he delivered Hindustán. At the same time, we shall have to remember that Sindhia was not, originally, a native of Hindustán; and we must study, however briefly, the nature of that strange community in Southern India which, taking up the lapsed greatness of the old kingdom of Karnáta, almost succeeded in uniting the entire Indian peninsula in a universal Hindu Empire.

To do all this requires that we should be prepared to find copious and variegated materials digested into a result which may be found undesirably narrow. A small book may be found hard to read—as it, proverbially, is to write.

Our foundations have gone wide if not deep. Among the authorities to which those desirous of further information, or extended treatment, may profitably refer, may be named the undermentioned:—