PREFACE. I HAVE been asked by Mr. Henry George Keene, with whom I have an almost lifelong friendship, to write a brief preface to this work of his. The title of the book is "The Great Anarchy," and the narrative depicts the situation of India just before the British acquired power. The words" Darkness before Dawn" have been applied to heathenism before the rise of Christianity. They may also have a political significance, and in that sense they possess a wondrous applicability to the condition of India during the course of the eighteenth century before the Imperial control introduced by the British soon after its close. Never in the chequered history of all the ages had India known such an anarchy as that which then prevailed. When I landed in India about the middle of the nineteenth century, no witnesses survived to attest the horrors and miseries of that time, but the children or at least the grandchildren of the sufferers were still present to recount the testimony handed down to them by their parents. Thus an immense volume of tradition remained in the fullest force. Mr. Keene himself resided and exercised authority for many years in the tracts and regions most severely affected by the calamities and visitations. I also had a similar experience and perhaps had even wider opportunities for measuring the enormous dimensions of this widespread destruction. The Mogul invasion of Central Asia in the middle ages has been likened to a shipwreck of the nations. A similar catastrophe overtook some of the noblest nationalities of India 150 years * * The writer of the following chapters twice conversed with actual survivors; a jemadar of Geo. Thomas's service and a man who had been in the 'Gosain' brigade of Himmat Bahadur in 1785.-H. G. K. ago. Nothing but the strong arm of British power could have raised them from this 'slough of despond.' The area thus submerged by this inundation of misfortune comprised the Northern, the Central, and the Western parts of India. It was not much less than a million of square miles, and must have contained over one hundred millions of people all unhappy and troubled in a greater or lesser degree. With the whole of this area I have been in one way or another officially connected and have met the immediate descendants of those who were concerned in the affairs of that troublous era. Thus having personal knowledge of these regions and their several nationalities, I ain qualified to explain the merits of Mr. Keene's present work. He is himself extraordinarily capable of unravelling the skeins of this complex subject in which personalities and nationalities, diversities and contrarieties are combined and confused. Yet out of all this confusion he evolves a narrative, Jucid and succinct, so that the reader who may desire to follow the romantic fortunes of any individual, or family, or political party, can do so with ease. Indeed when undertaking to deal with this subject he approached it with a mass of preparatory and collateral information gathered through many years of study—a study, too, conducted often on the very scenes of the events. His first considerable work was entitled "The Fall of the Mogul Empire," a theme demanding the powers of an epic poet, had such a one arisen in Asia. This event, vitally affecting what was then next after China the finest part of Asia, began to come about in the days when the crown of England descended from King William to Queen Anne and when the star of Marlborough was in the ascendant. The descent once set in motion proceeded with the rapidity with which a mass of rock rolls down a precipice to the abyss beneath. So the story of this series of events, tending under the direction of Providence to one and the same fatal result, was graphically told by Mr. Keene in his first book. This was followed by his other work entitled "A Sketch of the History of Hindustan" relating to a region which formed an important section in the vast theatre of disturbance, though it did not comprise the whole. Then came his monograph on Sindhia, the only one of the Mahratta rulers who tried to educe order out of the chaos of anarchy. Thus armed with learning and with something more than that, namely, the knowledge gained by residence on the spot, or by contact with the descendants of the very actors in the historic tragedies, Mr. Keene essays his task in a manner that no other living writer could display. Such a narrative will naturally embrace the movements of Native Indian princes, rulers, rebels, upstarts and brigands whenever their brigandage was on a scale large enough to require mention, which it but too often was. But in the narrative there is another element, and that a most peculiar one, which will perhaps have more interest for the English reader than the purely Native Indian parts of the story; and the element is in this wise. An English reader, who though possessing general culture might not have followed the details of Asiatic warfare and disturbance, would probably be surprised to hear that, in the anarchy which followed the downfall of "The Great Moghul" and prepared the way for British rule, European adventurers outside the control of any European government, British or other, were among the main factors. These Europeans, more of continental than of British stock, were like stormy petrels hovering over the sea of trouble, or like mariners in their barques riding on the crests of the waves, often nearing the breakers yet rarely striking on them and but seldom engulfed. Often they directed the political storms and sometimes they even guided the whirlwinds. Their origin was as various as their employments; Italians, Savoyards, French, Flemish, Dutch, and occasionally even British; some were of gentle almost noble birth, some were soldiers from the ranks, some were from the forecastle, some were deserters, some were mere swashbucklers, some were gentlemen and administrators, some were honourable though rough soldiers, some were mere money makers, and some were adventurers of the meanest type. Many, perhaps most, of them were French. Before the French Revolution, say 1790, they were of good birth; after that they were of a very inferior class. Asiatic rulers have always been glad to obtain the services of Europeans so long as these continued to be servants, and it is only when such a servant begins to be masterful that jealousy arises, either on the part of the ruler or his Asiatic servants. Besides this general motive, there was a special motive for employing Europeans when political existence was always a struggle for life and death on the part of all Native Indians who had to keep their heads above the seething surface of political whirlpools. Then it was that they must have at any cost men who could drill troops in camp and lead them in the field. Doubtless when such men rose to high commands, having organised their Asiatic battalions for victory, and then were entrusted with high civil authority, then no doubt their Asiatic fellow-servants must have been jealous, and such jealousy must have been dangerous, involving among other risks the chances of assassination. Still in the main they were so useful as to be quite the necessary men to their employers under the stress of emergency. But there was yet another reason for their employment. The infant Colossus of British power was already showing itself in several quarters. Its growth was precarious; still growth there always was, often depressed but never stamped out, ever springing forward again after temporary retrocession. There was about it a vitality, a spring, a verve, a motive force, a steadiness and stability, which simply struck terror into the minds and hearts of every Asiatic, high and low. Its qualities were so alien to anything known in Oriental experience, that all India lay under the dread, like that of a nightmare, that the British if so minded might attain to universal mastery. Of this masterful ambition and of this persevering temper the signs were everywhere apparent. It immediately occurred to every Indian who cut his path to power, or waded through blood to the seat of temporary authority, that his best chance of saving himself from the advancing British, was to employ |