History of Orissa from the Earliest Times to the British Period v2.c44.61

v2.c44.61

A very large number of Marathas were still residing in Orissa, especially in Katak, and there is an undetermined link, not to be determined at the present age, between the treaty of the British East India Company for the cession of certain forts dated 13th June 1817 and the pāik rebellion in Orissa. In Orissa the pāiks wanted a leader and their hereditary General Jagabandhu Vidyādhara Mahāpātra Bhramaravara Rāya, the hereditary Bakhshī of the Gajapatis of Khurda, supplied the want. There was no coherence in the great Maratha risings of 1817 and therefore the pāiks of Orissa fought in their early mediaeval way. Jagabandhu was a person of very high rank so long as the State of Khurda existed. Besides extensive landed property, he held in heredity the valuable estate of Qila' Rorang at a very low quit-rent. After the British conquest he was one of the earliest nobles of Orissa to submit to Colonel Harcourt. But though the Qila' of Rorang was settled with him at first, it was taken away from him by a Bengali and in June 1814 the Government of India ordered that no settlement should be made with him till he had established his titles to the property in a court of law. To the ordinary Englishman, firm in his faith in the Grand Jury and Petty Jury of England, there is no apparent injustice in such an order. He forgets that when "Nabobs" like Clive and Hastings ruled India, justice in British courts outside Calcutta was dispensed by Hākims sitting on a Masnad, chewing Pāns and smoking a Huqqā. More usually the Hākim's conscience was in the keeping of a lady who vended pān under a tree near the court and hawked British Justice to the highest bidder before the sitting and after the rising of the court.