exercised in his name supreme sway from the Ganges to the Gulf of
Camboy, and from Candeish to the Sutlej. In 1790 he entered the Dekkan,
and was with difficulty prevented by Nana Furnavees, the able minister
of the youthful Peshwah, Madhoo Rao, from usurping the guardianship of
that prince, which would have given him the same ascendancy in the
Dekkan as he already held in Hindostan. But though thus at the summit of
power and prosperity, he constantly affected the humility befitting the
lowly origin of his house; and when at the court of Poonah in 1791,
placed himself below the hereditary nobles of the Mahratta empire, with
a bundle of slippers in his hand, saying, "This is my place, and my
duty, as it was my father's." In the words of Sir John Malcolm,
(_Central India_, i. 122,) "he was the nominal slave, but the rigid
master, of the unfortunate Shah Alim; the pretended friend, but the
designing rival, of the house of Holkar; the professed inferior in
matters of form, the real superior and oppressor, of the Rajpoot princes
of Central India; and the proclaimed soldier, but actual plunderer, of
the family of the Peshwah."

Mahdajee Sindiah died at Poonah in 1794, in the fifty-second year of his
age; and, leaving no issue, bequeathed his extensive dominions to his
nephew and adopted son, Dowlut Rao Sindiah. The prince at his accession
found himself master of an army of seventy-five disciplined battalions,
mostly commanded by French officers, and forming an effective force of
45,000 men, with 300 well-equipped guns, and a vast host of irregular
cavalry, armed and appointed in the native fashion; and his territories
included the so-deemed impregnable fortress of Gwalior, as well as
Ahmednuggur, Aurungabad, Broach, and other strong places of minor note.
His influence was paramount at the court of Poonah; and while by the
possession of Cuttack, on the shores of the Bay of Bengal, he
interrupted the communication by land between Calcutta and Madras, his
frontier on the Nerbudda pressed, on the north, the then narrow limits
of the Bombay presidency, which as surrounded on all other sides by the
states of his Mahratta confederates. A prince holding this commanding
position seemed qualified to become the arbiter of India; but Dowlut
Rao, though deficient neither in military capacity nor talent for
government, was only fourteen at the death of his predecessor; and his
inexperience made him a tool in the hands of an unprincipled mi