5.  During the season of 1816-17 the ravages of the Pindharis were exceptionally daring and extensive.  The Governor-General, the Marquis of Hastings, organized an army in several divisions to crush the marauders, and himself joined the central division in October 1817.  The operations were ended by the capture of Asirgarh in March 1819.

6.  The people in the Sagar territories used to show several decayed mango-trees in groves where European troops had encamped during the campaigns of 1816 and 1817, and declared that they had been seen to wither from the day that beef for the use of these troops had been tied to their branches.  The only coincidence was in the decay of the trees, and the encamping of the troops in the groves; that the withering trees were those to which the beef had been tied was of course taken for granted. [W.  H. S.] The Hindoo veneration for the cow amounts to a passion, and its intensity is very inadequately explained by the current utilitarian explanations.  The best analysis of the motives underlying the passionate Hindoo feeling on the subject is to be found in Mr. William Crooke’s article ’The Veneration of the Cow in India’ (Folklore, Sept. 1912, pp. 275- 306).  In modern times an active, though absolutely hopeless, agitation has been kept up, directed against the reasonable liberty of those communities in India who are not members of the Hindoo system.  This agitation for the prohibition of cow-killing has caused some riots, and has evoked much ill-feeling.  The editor had to deal with it in the Muzaffarnagar district in 1890, and had much trouble to keep the peace.  The local leaders of the movement went so far as to send telegrams direct to the Government of India.  Many other magistrates have had similar experiences.  The authorities take every precaution to protect Hindoo susceptibilities from needless wounds, but they are equally bound to defend the lawful liberty of subjects who are not Hindoos.  The Government of the United Provinces on one occasion yielded to the Hindoo demands so far as to prohibit cow-killing in at least one town where the practice was not fully established, but the legality and expediency of such an order are both open to criticism.  The administrative difficulty is much enhanced by the fact that the Indian Muhammadans profess to be under a religious obligation to sacrifice cows at the Idul Bakr festival.  Cholera has been known to exist in India at least since the seventeenth century (Balfour, Cyclopaedia of India, 3rd ed. (1885), s.v.).

7.  The cultus of Hardaul is further discussed post in Chapter 31.  In 1875, the editor, who was then employed in the Hamirpur district of Bundelkhand, published some popular Hindi songs in praise of the hero, with the following abstract of the Legend of Hardaul:  ’Hardaul, a son of the famous Bir Singh Deo Bundela of Orchha, was born at Datiya.  His brother, Jhajhar Singh, suspected him of undue intimacy with his wife, and