Ummeda’s active mind was engrossed with the restoration of the prosperity which the unexampled vicissitudes of the last fifteen years had undermined; but he felt his spirit cramped and his energies contracted by the dominant influence and avarice of the insatiable Mahrattas, through whose means he recovered his capital; still there was as yet no fixed principle of government recognized, and the Rajputs, who [494] witnessed their periodical visitations like flights of locusts over their plains, hoped that this scourge would be equally transitory. Under this great and pernicious error, all the Rajput States continued to mix these interlopers in their national disputes, which none had more cause to repent than the Haras of Bundi. But the hold which the Mahrattas retained upon the lands of ‘Dewa Banga’ would never have acquired such tenacity, had the bold arm and sage mind of Ummeda continued to guide the vessel of the State throughout the lengthened period of his natural existence: his premature political decease adds another example to the truth, that patriarchal, and indeed all governments are imperfect where the laws are not supreme.
Ummed Singh’s Revenge on Indargarh.
In S. 1813 (A.D. 1757), Ummeda went to pay his devotions at the shrine of Bijaiseni Mata (‘the mother of victory’), near Karwar.[[15]] Being in the vicinity of Indargarh, he invited its chief to join the assembled vassals with their families; and though dissuaded, Deo Singh obeyed, accompanied by his son and grandson. All were cut off at one fell swoop, and the line of the traitor was extinct: as if the air of heaven should not be contaminated by the smoke of their ashes, Ummeda commanded that the bodies of the calumnious traitor and his issue should be thrown into the lake. His fief of Indargarh was given to his brother, between whom and the present incumbent four generations have passed away.
Fifteen years elapsed, during which the continual scenes of disorder around him furnished ample occupation for his thoughts. Yet, in the midst of all, would intrude the remembrance of this single act, in which he had usurped the powers of Him to whom alone it belongs to execute vengeance. Though no voice was lifted up against the deed, though he had a moral conviction that a traitor’s death was the due of Deo Singh, his soul, generous as it was brave, revolted at the crime, however sanctified by custom,[[16]] which confounds the innocent with the guilty. To appease his conscience, he determined to abdicate the throne, and pass the rest of his days in penitential rites, and traversing, in the pilgrim’s garb, the vast regions of India, to visit the sacred shrines of his faith.
Abdication of Mahārāo Ummed Singh.
The abdicated Ummeda, with the title of Sriji (by which alone he was henceforth known), retired to that holy spot in the valley sanctified by the miraculous cure of the first ‘lord of the Patar,’[[19]] and which was named after one of the fountains of the Ganges, Kedarnath. To this spot, hallowed by a multitude of associations, the warlike pilgrim brought
The fruit and flower of many a province,
and had the gratification to find these exotics, whether the hardy offspring of the [496] snow-clad Himalaya, or the verge of ocean in the tropic, fructify and flourish amidst the rocks of his native abode. It is curious even to him who is ignorant of the moral vicissitudes which produced it, to see the pine of Tibet, the cane of Malacca, and other exotics, planted by the hand of the princely ascetic, flourishing around his hermitage, in spite of the intense heats of this rock-bound abode.
When Ummeda resigned the sceptre of the Haras, it was from the conviction that a life of meditation alone could yield the consolation, and obtain the forgiveness which he found necessary to his repose. But in assuming the pilgrim’s staff, he did not lay aside any feeling becoming his rank or his birth. There was no pusillanimous prostration of intellect; no puling weakness of bigoted sentiment, but the same lofty mind which redeemed his birthright, accompanied him wherever he bent his steps to seek knowledge in the society of devout and holy men. He had read in the annals of his own and of other States, that “the trappings of royalty were snares to perdition, and that happy was the man who in time threw them aside and made his peace with heaven.” But in obeying, at once, the dictates of conscience and of custom, he felt his mind too much alive to the wonders of creation, to bury himself in the fane of Kanhaiya, or the sacred baths on the Ganges; and he determined to see all those holy places commemorated in the ancient epics of his nation, and the never-ending theme of the wandering devotee. In this determination he was, perhaps, somewhat influenced by that love of adventure in which he had been nurtured, and it was a balm to his mind when he found that arms and religion were not only compatible, but that his pious resolution to force a way through the difficulties which beset the pilgrim’s path, enhanced the merit of his devotion. Accordingly, the royal ascetic went forth on his pilgrimage, not habited in the hermit’s garb, but armed at all points. Even in this there was penance, not ostentation, and he carried or buckled on his person one of every species of offensive or defensive weapon then in use: a load which would oppress any two Rajputs in these degenerate times. He wore a quilted tunic, which would resist a sabre-cut; besides a matchlock, a lance, a sword, a dagger, and their appurtenances of knives, pouches, and priming-horn, he had a battle-axe, a javelin, a tomahawk, a discus, bow and quiver of arrows; and it is affirmed that such was his muscular power, even when threescore and ten years had blanched his beard in wandering to and fro thus accoutred, that he could place the whole of this panoply within his shield, and with one arm not only raise it, but hold it for some seconds extended [497].