Page:Ranjit Singh (Griffin).djvu/30

24 which it was a misfortune to the country that they had ever possessed.

There is no gradual development such as this to be traced in the history of the Sikh chiefs of the Mánjha. Scarcely more than a hundred years ago the majority of them were cultivators of the soil, enjoying none of the consideration which the Cis-Sutlej chiefs had, for long, received from the Court of Delhi. With the last invasions of Ahmad Sháh and the Afgháns, they rose to sudden power, and every man who had energy and courage gathered a band of marauders about him and plundered the country, seizing and holding whatever lands he could. Many of these Sikhs crossed the Sutlej and ravaged the country to the very gates of Delhi, while some of them seized large tracts of land Cis-Sutlej, which they continued to hold against all comers by the sword alone, a tenure altogether different from that of their Málwá neighbours, and more resembling that of a Norman baron settled in the Welsh marches seven hundred years ago.

The ascendency of the Sikhs in the Punjab Trans-Sutlej was but brief. Mahárájá Ranjít Singh subdued them one by one; Rámgarhias, Bhangis, Kanheyas; all the great houses fell in turn, and so completely that the chiefships became merely nominal, dependent on the will of the sovereign of Lahore.

The districts which contain the largest Sikh population — Ambála, Ludhiána, Jálandhar, Hoshiárpur, Amritsar, Lahore, Gurdáspur, Gujránwála, Siálkot,