Durgo desām kādhiyo
Golām Gāmgāni!
Durga was exiled, and Gamgani given to a slave.[[64]]
Gamgani, on the north bank of the Luni, was the chief town of the Karanot fief, of which clan Durga was the head. It is now attached to the Khalisa, or fisc, but whether recently, or ever since Durga, we know not. The Karanots still pay the last rites to their dead at Gamgani, where they have their cenotaphs (chhatris). Whether that of the noble Durga stands there to serve as a memorial of princely ingratitude, the writer cannot say; a portrait of the hero, in the autumn of his days, was given to him by the last lineal descendant of Ajit, as the reader is already aware.[[65]] Well may we repeat, that the system of feudality is the parent of the most brilliant virtues and the darkest crimes. Here, a long life of uninterrupted fidelity could not preserve Durga from the envenomed breath of slander, or the serpent-tooth [97] of ingratitude: and whilst the mind revolts at the crime which left a blank leaf in the chronicle, it is involuntarily carried back to an act less atrocious, indeed, than one which violates the laws of nature, but which in diminishing none of our horror for Abhai Singh, yet lessens our sympathy for the persecutor of Durgadas.[Durgadas.]
[1]. [Now known as Sirmūr, a Hill State in the Panjāb, on the W. bank of the Jumna, and E. of Simla (IGI, xxiii. 3).]
[2]. [Kutbu-d-dīn Shāh ‘Alam, Bahādur Shah I., died at Lahore, February 17, 1712.]
[3]. [Azīmu-sh-shān was drowned in the river Rāvi, after the battle between Jahāndār Shāh and his other brothers, in February 1712.]
[4]. [Muizzu-d-dīn Jahāndār Shāh, crowned Emperor at Lahore, April 10, 1712, was murdered in 1713, and was buried at Humāyūn’s tomb, Delhi.]
[5]. The “seventeen thousand” towns of Gujarat.