Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajput States of India v3.c42.s1.t2.53

v3.c42.s1.t2.53

Rāo Surthān, *c.* A.D. 1534.—Surthan succeeded in S. 1591 (A.D. 1535), and married the daughter of the celebrated Sakta, founder of the Saktawats of Mewar. He became an ardent votary of the bloodstained divinity of war, Kal-Bhairava, and like almost all those ferocious Rajputs who resign themselves to his horrid rites, grew cruel and at length deranged. Human victims are the chief offerings to this brutalized personification of war, though Surthan was satisfied with the eyes of his subjects, which he placed upon the altar of ‘the mother of war.’ It was then time to question the divine right by which he ruled. The assembled nobles deposed and banished him from Bundi, assigning a small village on the Chambal for his residence, to which he gave the name Surthanpur, which survives to bear testimony to one of many instances of the deposition of their princes by the Rajputs, when they offend custom or morality. Having no offspring, the nobles elected the son of Nirbudh, son of Rao Banda, who had been brought up in his patrimonial village of Matunda.