Bahadur must have been appalled at the horrid sight on viewing his conquest;[[29]] the mangled bodies of the slain, with hundreds in the last agonies from the poniard or poison, awaiting death as less dreadful than dishonour and captivity.[[30]] To use the emphatic words of the annalist, “the last day of Chitor had arrived.” Every clan lost its chief, and the choicest of their retainers; during the siege and in the storm thirty-two thousand Rajputs were slain. This is the second sakha of Chitor.
Bahadur had remained but a fortnight, when the tardy advance of Humayun with his succours warned him to retire.[[31]] According to the annals, he left Bengal at the solicitation of the queen Karnavati; but instead of following up the spoil-encumbered foe, he commenced a pedantic war of words with Bahadur, punning on the word ‘Chitor.’ Had Humayun not been so distant, this catastrophe would have been averted, for he was bound by the laws of chivalry, the claims of which he had acknowledged, to defend the queen’s cause, whose knight he had become. The relation of the peculiarity of a custom analogous to the taste of the chivalrous age of Europe may amuse. When her Amazonian sister the Rathor queen was slain, the mother of the infant prince took a surer method to shield him in demanding the fulfilment of the pledge given by Humayun when she sent the Rakhi to that monarch.
The Rākhi.
The Muhammadan historians, strangers to their customs, or the secret motives which caused the emperor to abandon Bengal, ascribe it to the Rana’s solicitation; but we may credit the annals, which are in unison with the chivalrous notions of the Rajputs, into which succeeding monarchs, the great Akbar, his son [314] Jahangir, and Shah Jahan, entered with delight; and even Aurangzeb, two of whose original letters to the queen-mother of Udaipur are now in the author’s possession, and are remarkable for their elegance and purity of diction, and couched in terms perfectly accordant with Rajput delicacy.[[34]]
Restoration of Bikramajīt.
Though the Rajput looks up to his sovereign as to a divinity, and is enjoined implicit obedience by his religion, which rewards him accordingly hereafter, yet this doctrine has its limits, and precedents are abundant for deposal, when the acts of the prince may endanger the realm. But there is a bond of love as well as of awe which restrains them, and softens its severity in the paternity of sway; for these princes are at once the father and king of their people: not in fiction, but reality—for he is the representative of the common ancestor of the aristocracy—the sole lawgiver of Rajasthan.
Death of Rāna Bikramajīt.
[1]. [The dates given in the margin are based on recently found inscriptions (Har Bilas Sarda, Maharana Kumbha: Sovereign, Soldier, Scholar, Ajmer, 1917, p. 2).[p. 2).]]
[2]. The Raj Ratana, by Ranchhor Bhat, says: “The Mandor Rao was pardhan, or premier to Mokal, and conquered Nawa and Didwana for Mewar.”