GON
564r
Pande's army ; while it was absolutely essential to tlie maintenance of the taluqa to keep on good terms with the lower orders of tenants, and protect them from oppression. If the sums paid appear small, it must be remembered that the revenue, exacted from aU but exceptionally powerful r£jas, amounted to little less than the gross rental, and the burden of defence entailed by a capricious and ever-changing government, or titles frequently contested and doubtful, made landed property of very little real value. Men were often glad to exchange a nominal independence for a recognised and defined status and the protection of a powerful master. At any rate, there was nothing so infamous as the nominal sales, extorted in hquidation of nominal arrears of a revenue which had been raised, by their own authority, to a pitch beyond the possibility of payment, during the nizamats of Rdja Darshan Singh and his sons.
Guman Singh was at first kept under restraint by the nazim but a marriage was finally arranged between him and the daughter of the great Mahant Jagjiwan D^s of Kotwa, whose disciples, the Sattn^mis, are at present the most numerous sectaries in the province, and who enrolled among the number Tikait Eile, and his relation the nfcim of Bahraich. When the raja went to fetch away his bride, nothing but vegetable food was put before his train, and the unsatisfied Rajputs loudly demanded meat. In vain the saint represented that it was to him a deadly sin even to look
on
flesh,
and he eventually yielded to their importunities.
By an exercise of miraculous power he converted some egg fruit into an excellent goat curry, which left the guests at his wedding feast nothing to complain of; but he relieved his grief by assuring his son-in-law that in return for the sacrilege done in his house, the marriage should be unblessed with children, and the raj become extinct in the second generation. The bride Jived to see both prophecies fulfilled, and died a few years ago in extreme old age. On his return to Gonda, the raja was allowed, for the support of his dignity, the revenue of twenty-six villages, and an annual cash allowance of Rs. 12,500. He very rapidly put together a taluqa, in the usual fashion, out of the villages of his parganas, but never regained the engagement for his whole raj, which, from 1799 to 1816 A.D., formed a part of the appanage of the celebrated Bahti Begam, and on her death was entrusted to Nawab Saif-ud-daula, who finally incorporated it in the nizamat of Gonda-Bahraich. Guman Singh was a man of some capacity, and surrounded himself with a splendour becoming his position as first of the trans-Gogra lords, He retained the power of granting villages in birt, and issued sanads remitting revenue, couched in the style used by the Delhi emperors. His death in 1838 A.D., was followed by a short interregnum, the Pandes favouring the claim of Bhayya Sanuman Singh of Mahnon, a grandson of Pahlwan Singh, and first cousin of the deceased rdja but eventually the support of the widow of Saif-ud-daula, who then held the nizamat, placed Debi Bakhsh Singh, Guman Singh's nephew, on the gaddi. Like his uncle, the new raja was a prudent and able man, but with no passion for war and he employed himself in managing from his fort at Jigna his magnificent estate of Bishambharpur. He allowed no interference between himself and the cultivators of his land, and crushed
~
