Fall of the Mughal Empire v2.c29.s3.7

v2.c29.s3.7

For the Rajput chief or *thākur*, cooped up within his ancestral fort, nothing now remained, but to nurse his ‘pride, poverty, and pedigree a yard long.’ But to the famished Scottish laird salvation came in the course of the expansion of the British empire in this very second half of the 18th century. Many a Scottish estate was freed from encumbrances, more than one barony endowed in that rugged land out of the spoils of Seringapatam and Bharatpur, Lucknow and Delhi, or from the princely remuneration of high office filled in the East under less stormy circumstances. Such a door of relief was, however, closed to the stay-at-home caste-bound Kshatriya lordling of Hindustan. The houses of Jaipur and Bikaner had sprung to first-rate rank in Rajasthan as helpers in the making of the Mughal empire; but this race supplied not one lieutenant in England’s conquest of the East.