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 CHAPTER X

Lawrence in Rájputána — The Adoption Question

Early in 1853, Henry Lawrence left the Punjab for his new charge. Besides the natural wrench in leaving the sphere of work with which he had been so long associated, with which he felt himself to be identified, where he was so much honoured and beloved, and where he was leaving behind all his most valued friends, there was this further official drawback, that he was going to a land where the polity was a clan system wholly different from that of the Sikhs and of the Punjabí Mussulmans, and where there had been a sad degeneracy from the old traditional type of Rájput gallantry and honour. They, the military caste of the Hindus, had been stubborn and bitter foes of the Muhammadans in their invasions of India, and had suffered greatly at the hands of the Mughal dynasty; but with the British they had ever been friendly, and had remained, under their protection on definite treaties with them, a group of eighteen sovereign States, in the territory on the west of the Jumna, known now as Rájputána and formerly as Rájasthan. The race was a race of warriors, and it was divided into clans, under an