If, at the period preceding Mahmud, the traveller had journeyed through the courts of Europe, and taken the line of route, in subsequent ages pursued by Timur, by Byzantium, through Ghazni (adorned with the spoils of India), to Delhi, Kanauj, and Anhilwara, how superior in all that constitutes civilization would the Rajput princes have appeared to him!—in arts immeasurably so; in arms by no means inferior. At that epoch, in the west, as in the east, every State was governed on feudal principles. Happily for Europe, the democratical principle gained admittance, and imparted a new character to her institutions; while the third estate of India, indeed of Asia, remained permanently excluded from all share in the government which was supported by its labour, every pursuit but that of arms being deemed ignoble. To this cause, and the endless wars which feudality engendered, Rajput nationality fell a victim when attacked by the means at command of the despotic kings of the north.
The Invasion of Shihābu-d-dīn.
This event happened in S. 1249 (A.D. 1193), from which period the overgrown, gorgeous Kanauj ceased to be a Hindu city, when the “thirty-six races” of vassal princes, from the Himalaya to the Vindhya, who served under the banners of Bardai Sena,[[34]] retired to their patrimonial estates. But though the Rathor name ceased to exist on the shores of the Ganges, destiny decreed that a scion should be preserved, to produce in a less favoured land a long line of kings; that in thirty-one generations his descendant, Raja Man, “Raj, Rajeswara,” ‘the king, the lord of kings,’ should be as vainglorious of the sceptre of Maru as either Jaichand when he commanded divine honours, or his still more remote ancestor Nain Pal fourteen [11] centuries before, when he erected his throne in Kanauj. The Rathor may well boast of his pedigree, when he can trace it through a period of 1360 years, in lineal descent from male to male; and contented with this, may leave to the mystic page of the bard, or the interpolated pages of the Puranas, the period preceding Nain Pal.
[2]. An ancient town in Marwar [about 80 miles S.E. of Jodhpur city].
[3]. [A folk etymology, the name being derived from Rāshtrakūta, which may mean the chief, as opposed to the rank and file of the Ratta dynasty; but it has also been connected with Reddi, a Dravidian caste in S. India (BG, i. Part i. 119, Part ii. 22 note, 178, 383 ff.).]
[4]. One of the four tribes which overturned the Greek kingdom of Bactria. The ancient Hindu cosmographers claim the Aswa as a grand branch of their early family, and doubtless the Indo-Scythic people, from the Oxus to the Ganges, were one race.
[5]. From kubja (the spine) of the virgin (kanya) [referring to the legend of the hundred daughters of Kusanābha rendered crooked by Vāyu].
[6]. Kama-dhwaja, ‘the banner of Cupid.’