A good deal of the lands of the Muhammadan sovereign of Oudh are, in the same manner, held by barons of the Rajput tribe; and some of them are almost always in the field engaged in the same kind of warfare against their sovereign.  The baron who pursues it with vigour is almost sure to be invited back upon his own terms very soon.  If his lands are worth a hundred thousand a year, he will get them for ten; and have this remitted for the next five years, until he is ready for another bhumiawat, on the ground of the injuries sustained during the last, from which his estate has to recover.  The baron who is peaceable and obedient soon gets rack-rented out of his estate, and reduced to beggary.[4]

In 1818, some companies of my regiment were for several months employed in Oudh, after a young ‘bhumiawati’ of this kind, Sheo Ratan Singh.  He was the nephew and heir of the Raja of Partabgarh,[5] who wished to exclude him from his inheritance by the adoption of a brother of his young bride.  Sheo Ratan had a small village for his maintenance, and said nothing to his old uncle till the governor of the province, Ghulam Husani[6], accepted an invitation to be present at the ceremony of adoption.  He knew that, if he acquiesced any longer, he would lose his inheritance, and cried, ’To your tents, 0 Israel!’ He got a small band of three hundred Rajputs, with nothing but their swords, shields, and spears, to follow him, all of the same clan and true men.  They were bivouacked in a jungle not more than seven miles from our cantonments at Partabgarh, when Ghulam Husain marched to attack them with three regiments of infantry, one of cavalry, and two nine-pounders.  He thought he should surprise them, and contrived so that he should come upon them about daybreak.  Sheo Ratan knew all his plans.  He placed one hundred and fifty of his men in ambuscade at the entrance to the jungle, and kept the other hundred and fifty by him in the centre.  When they had got well in, the party in ambush rushed upon the rear, while he attacked them in front.  After a short resistance, Ghulam Husain’s force took to flight, leaving five hundred men dead on the field, and their guns behind them.  Ghulam Husain was so ashamed of the drubbing he got that he bribed all the news-writers[7] within twenty miles of the place to say nothing about it in their reports to court, and he never made any report of it himself.  A detachment of my regiment passed over the dead bodies in the course of the day, on their return to cantonments from detached command, or we should have known nothing about it.  It is true, we heard the firing, but that we heard every day; and I have seen from my bungalow half a dozen villages in flames, at the same time, from this species of contest between the Rajput landholders and the government authorities.  Our cantonments were generally full of the women and children who had been burnt out of house and home.