We’ve had a lot of Wales in the past few days. For a change of pace, and to stop people getting bored, let’s look at events in a completely different part of the world. India!
In the 1820s a certain Colonel James Tod, the first British official to visit Rajasthan (a state in northwest India) wrote a history of the region called the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. According to John Keay, Tod wrote a glorious narrative of the rajputs, the local sovereign chiefs and princes, which was fit to rival the Western legends of Camelot.
This went down especially well in Britain, because Tod made the ‘Rajpoot states’ sound very similar to the Anglo-Normans. For instance, they had the same feudal structure, based on a martial system with vassalage and land grants dependent on military service and the supply of fighting men.
However, Tod condemned the rajputs for their complete inability to unite against a common foe. Quote:
“The closest attention to their history proves beyond contradiction that they were never capable of uniting, even for their own preservation: a breath, a scurrilous stanza of a bard, has severed their closest confederacies. No national head exists among them…and each chief being master of his own house and followers, they are individually too weak to cause us [the British] any harm.”
As if to contradict himself, Tod then pointed out that the rajputs had bravely resisted Muslim aggression, and listed a string of patriotic heroes of Rajasthan. The first of these was Pirthi-raj, properly known as Prithviraj III of the Chahamana (Chauhan) dynasty, who ruled an extensive kingdom in northern Rajasthan and the eastern Punjab from 1177. I know nothing whatever of this interesting fellow, so we shall have a closer look at him next.
Note: I also know absolutely bugger-all about the medieval history of India, and am getting all my information from John Keay’s book and online sources. If I get things wrong, which I surely will, blame them.
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