Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajput States of India v2.c28.127

v2.c28.127

Death of Rāo Jodha, A.D. 1488.—Jodha outlived the foundation of his new capital thirty years, and beheld his [22] sons and grandsons rapidly peopling and subjugating the regions of Maru. In S. 1545, aged sixty-one, he departed this life, and his ashes were housed with those of his fathers, in the ancestral abode of Mandor. This prince, the second founder of his race in these regions, was mainly indebted to the adversities of early life for the prosperity his later years enjoyed; they led him to the discovery of worth in the more ancient, but neglected, allodial proprietors displaced by his ancestors, and driven into the least accessible regions of the desert. It was by their aid he was enabled to redeem Mandor, when expelled by the Guhilots, and he nobly preserved the remembrance thereof in the day of his prosperity. The warriors whose forms are sculptured from the living rock at Mandor owe the perpetuity of their fame to the gratitude of Jodha; through them he not only recovered, but enlarged his dominions.² In less than three centuries after their migration from Kanauj, the Rathors, the issue of Siahji, spread over a surface of four degrees of longitude and the same extent of latitude, or nearly 80,000 miles square, and they amount at this day, in spite of the havoc occasioned, by perpetual wars and famine, to 500,000 souls.³ While we thus contemplate the renovation of the Rathor race, from a single scion of that magnificent tree, whose branches once overshadowed the plains of Ganga, let us withdraw from oblivion some of the many noble names they displaced, which now live only in the poet's page. Well may the Rajput repeat the ever-recurring simile, " All is unstable ;