Such is the Rajput, when the point of honour is at stake! Not a man of his clan would have surrendered while their chief lived to claim their lives; and those who retreated only preserved them for the support of the young lord of the Udawats [709]!
[1]. Meru is ‘a [fabulous] mountain’ in Sanskrit; Merawat and Merot, ‘of or belonging to the mountain.’ I have before remarked that the name of the Albanian mountaineer, Mainote, has the same signification. I know not the etymology of Mina, of which the Mer is a branch. [Needless to say, whatever the meaning of the title Mer may be, it has no connexion with Mt. Meru. The traditions of the Mers point to Mīna ancestry. For the Mīna tribe see Rose, Glossary, iii. 102 ff.; Watson, Rajputāna Gazetteer, i. A. 29 ff.]
[2]. I had hoped to have embodied these subjects with, and thereby greatly to have increased the interest, of my work; but just as Lord Hastings had granted my request, that an individual eminently qualified for those pursuits should join me, a Higher Power deemed it fit to deny what had been long near my heart.
The individual, John Tod, was a cousin of my own, and possessed an intellect of the highest order. He was only twenty-two years of age when he died, and had only been six months in India. He was an excellent classical scholar, well versed in modern languages and every branch of natural history. His manners, deportment, and appearance were all in unison with these talents. Had it pleased the Almighty to have spared him, this work would have been more worthy of the public notice. [An officer named Tod was murdered at Nāhar Magra, near Udaipur, in May 1804 (Malcolm, Memoir Central India, 2nd ed. i. 237).]
[3]. [The Mers are supposed to be a foreign tribe, like the Gurjaras and Mālavas, which passed into Kāthiāwār through the Panjāb, Sind, and N. Gujarāt (BG, i. Part i. 136 ff.; Elliot-Dowson i. 519 ff.).]
[4]. I cannot discover by what part of the range the invasion of Mandor was attempted; it might have been the pass we are now in, for it is evident it was not from the frontier of Ajmer.
[5]. Laj is properly ‘shame,’ which word is always used in lieu of honour: laj rakho, ‘preserve my shame,’ i.e. my honour from shame.
[6]. Parbat Vira.
[7]. The Parihar prince bestowed this epithet merely in compliment.