he third
battle of Panipat completed the catastrophe, the anarchy was almost
universal. Authority was to the strongest. The Sallustian motto,
'Alieni appetens sui profusus,' was the rule of almost every noble;
the agriculturists had everywhere abundant reason to realize 'that
the buffalo was to the man who held the bludgeon.'[1]

[Footnote 1: The late Lord Lawrence used to tell me that when he was
Acting Magistrate and Collector of Panipat in 1836, the natives were
in the habit of describing the lawlessness of the period which ceased
in 1818 by using the expressive phrase I have quoted.]

{17}The disorder had extended to the part of India south of the
Vindhyan range which was then known under the comprehensive term of
the Deccan. When Aurangzeb had conquered many Subahs, or provinces,
of Southern India, he had placed them under one officer, to be
nominated by the Court of Delhi, and to be called Subahdar, or chief
of the province. As disorder spread after his death the Subahdars and
inferior chiefs generally began to secure themselves in the provinces
they administered. The invasion of Nadir Shah made the task generally
easy. In the Deccan especially, Chin Kilich Khan, the chief of a
family which had served with consideration under Akbar and his
successors, whose father had been a favourite of Aurangzeb, who had
himself served under that sovereign, and who had obtained from the
successors of Aurangzeb the titles of Nizam-ul-Mulk and Asaf Jah,
took steps to make the Subahdarship of Southern India hereditary in
his family. The territories comprehended under the term 'Deccan' did
not, it must be understood, include the whole of Southern India.
Mysore, Travancore, Cochin were independent. But they comprehended
the whole of the territories known now as appertaining to the Nizam,
with some additions; the country known as the 'Northern Circars'; and
the Karnatik.

But the Karnatik was not immediately under the government of the
Subahdar. It was a subordinate territory, entrusted to a Nawab,
bounded to the north by the river Gundlakamma; on the west by the
chain {18}of mountains which separate it from Mysore; to the south by
the possessions of the same kingdom (as it then was) and by Tanjore;
to the east by the sea. I have not mentioned the kingdom of
Trichinopoli to the south, for the Nawabs of the Karnatik claimed
that as their own, and, as we shall see, had occupied the fortress of
that name during the period, prior to 1