254 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [N.S., XV, 
the people and gave practically nothing in return.' The Rajput 
rule on the other hand was a natural development from the 
tribal stage, it found a place in the indigenous administrative 
hierarchy for every grade of local society, it allowed for custom, 
and made concessions to the wishes of the people. It contri- 
buted little perhaps to their welfare but at least it did not 
actively interfere in the people’s own arrangements for manag- 
ing their own affairs. Blunt’s description of the ‘‘ abject state 
of dependence ”’ in which the Mahrattas kept their peasantry 
was written only a few years after Bimbajee’s death, and must, 
I think, be taken as a fair indictment of the Mahratta system 
of administration, for, as he explains, this. oppressive attitude 
was assumed as part of a deliberate caliay. The condition of 
the people in the old Haihaibansi days with a king restrained 
by the power of his Zamindars and the Zamindars influenced 
by the Talugqdars and the Taluqdars influenced in turn by their 
village Headmen, and the whole subject to the customary 
authority of a regular system of Panchayats which at any rate 
administered justice according to the convictions and preju- 
dices current at the time among the mass of the people, must 
have been a far happier state and one consistent with far more 
consideration for the general and individual welfare than any 
system of foreign and despotic rule such as that introduced by 
the Mahratta conquerors. 
CHAPTER xX. 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
93. It only remains to emphasize before I finish the main. 
thesis which ave set myself to prove. So far as 1 am 
aware no student of the history of tenures in this part of India 
has accorded recognition to the essential peculiarity of the 
system of administration which we find existing only a century 
and a half ago in Chhattisgarh and the surrounding countries. 
: e found i seq 
rogress their march imprinted ey the hs eon of all ‘the small ie 
** through which they had passed. The Pe gt had fled from the 
**depredations of their — followers and from the oppression epee com- 
uls t be i mpu 
loon cag of superstition these heen have hari nar reflected mar 
the guilt of the oppressor must outweigh the merits of the pilgrim in the 
“* presence of the protector of the world ‘{Sagannath).” 
