Shivaji and His Times c4.s4.1

c4.s4.1

But such a country and climate have their compensating advantages, too. They develop self-reliance, courage, perseverance, a stern simplicity, a rough straightforwardness, a sense of social equality and consequently pride in the dignity of man as man. As early as the 7th century of the Christian era, a learned Chinese traveller thus noted the character of the Maratha people living in the more prosperous Central Deccan: "The inhabitants are proud-spirited and warlike, grateful for favours and revengeful for wrongs, self-sacrificing towards suppliants in distress and sanguinary to death with any who treated them insultingly." (Watters's Yuan Chwang, ii. 239.) "If they are going to seek revenge, they first give their enemy warning." (Beal, ii. 256).