t the same
period. Another witness put the amount at one to two rupees a day,
remarking, 'We are great persons for eating and drinking, and we keep
several wives according to our means.' Of some of them Colonel Sleeman
had a high opinion, and he mentions the case of one man, Ajit Singh,
who was drafted into the native army and rose to be commander of a
company. "I have seldom seen a man," he wrote, [56] "whom I would
rather have with me in scenes of peril and difficulty." An attempt of
the King of Oudh's, however, to form a regiment of Badhaks had ended
in failure, as after a short time they mutinied, beat their commandant
and other officers and turned them out of the regiment, giving as
their reason that the officers had refused to perform the same duties
as the men. And they visited with the same treatment all the other
officers sent to them, until they were disbanded by the British on
the province of Allahabad being made over to the Company. Colonel
Sleeman notes that they were never known to offer any other violence
or insult to females than to make them give up any gold ornaments that
they might have about their persons. "In all my inquiries into the
character, habits and conduct of these gangs, I have never found an
instance of a female having been otherwise disgraced or insulted by
them. They are all Hindus, and this reverence for the sex pervades
all Hindu society." [57] According to their own account also they
never committed murder; if people opposed them they struck and killed
like soldiers, but this was considered to be in fair fight. It may
be noted, nevertheless, that they had little idea of clan loyalty,
and informed very freely against their fellows when this course was
to their advantage. They also stated that they could not settle in
towns; they had always been accustomed to live in the jungles and
commit dacoities upon the people of the towns as a kind of _shikar_
(sport); they delighted in it, and they felt living in towns or among
other men as a kind of prison, and got quite confused (_ghabraye_),
and their women even more than the men.

8. Caste rules and admission of outsiders.

The Badhaks had a regular caste organisation, and members of the
different clans married with each other like the Rajputs after
whom they were named. They admitted freely into the community
members of any respectable Hindu caste, but not the impure castes
or Muhammadans. But at least one instance of the admission o