After his death she ruled her state of Sirdhâna, not very far from Delhi, until she died in 1838, a very old woman, who possibly, despite her conversion to Roman Catholicism, looked back on her youth as a dancing-girl in Delhi with a vague regret.
Then there was George Thomas, an Irishman, whilom favourite of the aforesaid Begum, who cherished the hope--so he says--"of attempting the conquest of the Punjaub, and aspired to the honour of placing the British Standard on the Attock." He only succeeded in establishing for himself an independent principality near Hânsi, which he yielded to Lord Lake in 1803.
But all over India, in almost every town of import, Englishmen were to be found in positions of trust under native rulers. Briefly, they had come to stay; and no amount of legislation by Parliament, no prohibition of diplomacy, no exhortation to refrain from treaties or from meddling in native politics, could now avail to prevent England from becoming first factor in India.
It may be worth while to glance round that India and gain, as it were, a pictorial view of it at the time when England and the English Parliament first assumed political responsibility in regard to it by the establishment of a Board-of-Control appointed by the Crown.
In the far north, Kandahâr and Kâbul were, as ever, engaged in petty warfare, the sons and grandsons of Ahmed-Shâh Durrâni each striving for the mastery. The Punjâb was held by the Sikhs so far as the Sutlej. What are now called the Cis Sutlej States including the great battlefield of Pânipat, being under Mahratta influence. This influence had also made itself felt at Delhi, where the Great Moghul, Star-of-the-Universe and Defender-of-the-Faith, Shâh-Âlam by name, led the life of a pensioner, a prisoner, his authority gone save as a watchword to rouse strife. Oude was in the hands of the British debauchee Asaf-daula. Thence passing through Benares lay the English-held Bengal, Behar, Orissa. Westward was Poona, Guzerât, almost all Râjputana, Agra, and a great part of Central India; these were strongholds of the Mahrattas. Mysore, headquarters of the man-monster Tippoo-Sultân, murderer-in-chief after his father Hyder-Ali's death, marched with Central India the Dekkan fief of that half-hearted ally the Nizâm. Below that, again, came the Carnatic, held by that most troublesome and expensive of potentates the Nawâb of Arcot, tame bear (and bore) to the Madras Presidency, which must have wished its protégé at the bottom of the sea many and many a time.
And under all these broad classifications, such a welter of proud, poor principalities and grasping, vicious courts as surely this world's history shows nowhere else. The horrid outcome of unlimited, unbridled power in the past.
And below this again?
Below this, again, the dreaming heart of India, unchanged, unchangeable.