So, after a brief holiday in Kashmir--that happy hunting-ground of all the Moghul kings, who seem to have inherited the love of beautiful scenery from their great ancestor, Babar--he came back to face the greatest foe to the Moghul power which had arisen since the combined Râjput resistance was finally broken by Mahomed-Shahâb-ud-din-Ghori.
This foe was the Mahratta race, which had been gradually growing to power in the Western Ghâts, that natural stronghold of mountains which rises in many places like a wall between the Western Sea and the high table-land of Central India. No more fitting birthplace for warlike tribes could be imagined. Towards the sea, breaks of rich rice-fields, tongued by spurred rocks and outlying strips of almost impenetrable forest. Then the bare, broken ridges, 3,000 or 4,000 feet high, ending often in a scarp of sheer precipice, and giving on wide, thicket-set woods, through which, after a while, ravines break into valleys to the eastward. A land of rain--clouds from the south-west monsoon, of roaring torrents and drifting mists; full of wild beasts fleeing fearfully from the small, sturdy huntsmen of the hills. These were the Mahrattas. Not a very interesting race when all was said and done. Brave, dogged, determined, but, by reason, doubtless, of their Sudra extraction, lacking the nobility of the Râjput and the Râjput nicety in honour.
It was in the time of Malik-Ambêr, the Abyssinian slave who in the reign of Jahângir gave new life to the dying dynasty in the Dekkan, that the Mahrattas first made their mark. Before this, history does not even recognise them.
Amongst the Mahratta officers of Malik-Ambêr was one Mâlo-ji, who had a five-year-old son called Shâh-ji. To a Hindu festival at the house of a Râjput this boy was taken, and by chance was lifted to one knee of the host, whose little daughter of three occupied the other.
"They are a fine couple," laughed the host and father. "They should be man and wife!"
This was enough for Mâlo-ji's ambition. He started up, and called the company to witness that the girl was affianced to his son.
Naturally enough, the claim roused indignation; but in the end, Mâlo-ji's fortunes improving, Shâh-ji gained his high-caste bride, and from the marriage sprang Siva-ji, the national hero of the Mahrattas, who was destined to wreck the power of the Moghuls in the south.
Siva-ji, by the time he was sixteen, was already notorious. His love of adventure, his knowledge of the popular ballads of the people, his complicity in the great gang-robberies which formed an ever-recurring excitement to life in the Ghâts, his intimate acquaintance with every footpath and defile in that wild country, his horsemanship, his sportsmanship, were on the tongues of all; and when, still in his teens, he fortified one of the neglected hill-citadels and set up a chieftainship of his own, there were not wanting those who laughed at the impertinence as a high-spirited, boyish freak.
But within a few years the boyish freak was found to be open rebellion, and Siva-ji was practically king of the wild western country. What is more, he had become an ardent Hindu, and laid claims to Divine dreams.
The court at Bîjapur attempted remonstrance, imprisoned poor Shâh-ji, his father, and threatened to wall him up unless Siva-ji repented of his errors: whereupon, with the cunning which distinguished him in all things, the latter made overtures to, and was taken into the service of, Shâhjahân, then engaged in the Dekkan. So for a few years affairs remained at a deadlock; Siva-ji, apprehensive for his father, Bîjapur of the Moghuls.