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CHAPTER II.

at various times and partly in the course of events over which they
had no control In some parts of India, a stronger power had made a
clean sweep of upstarts and even of ancient petty dynasties before the
British advanced. There was no general inquiry into titles, no]' was
pause given for the consolidation of the States by the will of the
strongest. Existing acquisitions were recognized once for all, and the
political situation, ruffled as it was by the storms of war and
aggression, was in a moment petrified. On the other hand, in parts
of India which were at the time regarded as beyond the British sphere,
the process of natural consolidation went on.”*
The great majority of the States are of modern origin, though
their beginnings or duration are no longer questions of vital interest
either to them or to the suzerain power. The chiefs are descended from
many different wees, Mahratta, Rajput, flat. Pathan, Turk, and even
Shan and Tibetan. They obtained their power by very various means.
Many claimed the formal recognition of their rights by the Delhi
Emperors, or had rebelled and ousted by their greater might the more
lawfid claimants. In Cutch, the nobles were powerful when the chief
was practically reduced to a mere name. Elsewhere, as in parts of
Central India, civil war had reduced the whole of society to one low
level of helpless poverty, before the British arrived on the scene. As
in Mysore, where a resolute adventurer sprang into power, or in
Rajputana, where the proud Rahtors and Sesodias, claiming descent
from the sun and the moon, lay helpless and crushed between the
Mahratta® and the Mahomedans, there were heterogeneous elements
out of which the suzerain power could not evolve any uniformity nor
establish immutable principles of organization and government.
Thus frequent changes of policy were pressed upon the attention of
successive (^vernors-General; and the great variety and diversity in
area and situation, wealth and culture of the States have always
precluded the possibility of the British committing themselves to a
body of rules and formulae in their relations with the Chiefs. In size
the States vary from the giant stature of Hyderabad with its 83,000
* Imperial Gazetteer of India, (1907), Vol. 1A , pp. 6'2 and 63,
 
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