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After its prime minister signed the Maratha Confederacy over to the East India Company, the member states rose up in a body.
In 1796, Baji Rao II became Peshwa (prime Minister) of the Maratha Confederacy. When Holkar, Maharajah of Indore, one of the Confederacy’s four kingdoms, learnt that Baji Rao was behind the murder of a relative, he thrashed him at the Battle of Poona in 1802; but Baji Rao exacted spectacular retribution by signing the whole Maratha territory over to the East India Company. Holkar did not leave it there.
The dazzling throne of the Mughal Emperors has vanished from history, but not before Abdul Hamid Lahori had seen it.
The Peacock Throne in the Hall of Private Audiences in the Red Fort of Delhi was the high throne of Mughal Emperors, built for Shah Jahan, who ascended it for the first time on March 22nd, 1635. The throne was looted and taken to Persia in May 1739 by Nader Shah, but we do have this eyewitness description from Abdul Hamid Lahori, Shah Jahan’s court historian.
John Wood shares the wonder of the Indian cobra’s hood, in science and in myth.
By profession, JG Wood was a clergyman, but he had a gift for making science accessible to ordinary people. From the early 1850s, he was in demand as an author and lecturer on natural history both at home and abroad: he delivered the prestigious Lowell Lectures in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1883-84. In this passage, he takes a look at the hooded cobra, in the light of anatomy and of India’s sacred legends.
Francis Bain’s alternative Adam and Eve story left its own question unanswered.
This ‘Indian fable’ is Indian only in the sense that Francis Bain was a professor of history at Deccan College in Pune when he wrote it. He sprinkled it with evocative images gathered from the Vedas, and claimed he had translated it from an ancient Sanskrit manuscript entrusted to him by a dying Brahman. Whether Bain expected anyone to believe him is unclear, but quite a few people did.
The animals in the jungle agree that amidst the drought, the sport of hunter and hunted has to be suspended.
In Rudyard Kipling’s story The Jungle Book, a prolonged drought has left Mowgli and the animals with no food and little water. The waterhole has sunk so low that the Peace Rock is showing, and Hathi, the elephant, has called the Water Truce so hunter and hunted alike can drink. As dusk falls, the truce is holding — though Bagheera, the black panther, isn’t much help.
Sir Thomas Roe had some difficulty making an impression on Emperor Jehangir.
In 1615, English courtier Sir Thomas Roe was despatched to the court of the Great Mogul, Jehangir, to win his support for the East India Company in the face of Portuguese rivals. Roe presented the Emperor with various presents designed to impress him with the superior cultural advancement of the English, but he might have been better off keeping it simple.
Rudyard Kipling believed that a better appreciation of ancient Greece and Rome could help the English be less insular.
As the twentieth century progressed, more and more people asked why English schools taught Latin and Greek. Rudyard Kipling was one of those who resisted the trend. The value, he said, lay not in ‘intellectual training’, which can be acquired in other ways, but in the development of humility and respect — like playing cricket long enough to realise just how good Ranjitsinhji was.