THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
85 
CHAPTER IX. 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
The period embraced in the present chapter includes two series 
_ , , , , of events of capital importance in the history 
Introductory note. J 
of India,—the decline and fall of the Mughal 
empire and the supremacy and fall of the Maratha power. Bahadur 
Shah succeeded to the throne of Aurayg’zeb in 1707, and Shah ‘A/am 
was rescued from the hands of the Marathas by Lord Lake in 1803. 
He died in 1806, his son Ah’bar II succeeding only to the nominal 
dignity of emperor. On the other hand Balajl Vishwanath, the first 
peshiva, rose to power with the accession of Sahu to the Maratha 
throne in 1707, and the last peshiva was overthrown in the second 
Maratha war in 1803-4. 
Such times were favourable neither to the founding of new religions 
nor to the cultivation of the arts. A few religious reformers, it is 
true, sprung up, but their efforts, though crowned with a certain 
temporary success, have had none of the abiding effect on Hindustan 
which was left by Rdmcinand and Ballabhachdr’j. Raj’putana, the 
home of the bards, was no longer a nation united against the Mughals, 
but was torn by intestine strife. As one of these bards himself 
exclaimed at a feast given by the two princes, ‘ Jodh’pur and Amber 
can dethrone the enthroned; but the latter slew his son, and the 
former murdered his father.’ In the scramble for the curie no relation¬ 
ship, no tie of friendship, was allowed to interfere. The same haste 
to seize upon the plunder of the decaying empire attacked the 
greatest and best of the kings of Rajasthan. Even Jai S/ygh, of 
Jaipur the royal historian and astronomer, one of the most learned 
scientific men that India has ever produced, did not disdain to wrest 
the sovereignty of Bund / from his own sister’s husband. Such actions 
the bards could not approve, and so they remained silent. Only two 
bardic chronicles appear to have been written in the eighteenth century, 
and of these, one, the Bijai Bi/as, records the fratricidal warfare 
between Bijai and Ram Siygh of Jodh’pur. 
In other branches of literature no name of the first class appears. 
Some of the great writers on the ars poetica of the seventeenth century 
f 3 
