In Oudh such contests generally begin with the harvests.  During the season of tillage all is quiet; but, when the crops begin to ripen, the governor begins to rise in his demands for revenue, and the Rajput landholders and cultivators to sharpen their swords and burnish their spears.  One hundred of them always consider themselves a match for one thousand of the king’s troops in a fair field, because they have all one heart and soul, while the king’s troops have many.[8]

While the Pawars were ravaging the Jhansi state with their bhumiawat, a merchant of Sagar had a large convoy of valuable cloths, to the amount, I think, of forty thousand rupees,[9] intercepted by them on its way from Mirzapur[10] to Rajputana.  I was then at Sagar, and wrote off to the insurgents to say that they had mistaken one of our subjects for one of the Jhansi chiefs, and must release the convoy.  They did so, and not a piece of the cloth was lost.  This bhumiawat is supposed to have cost the Jhansi chief above twenty lakhs of rupees,[11] and his subjects double that sum.

Gopal Singh, a Bundela, who had been in the service of the chief of Panna,[12] took to bhumiawat in 1809, and kept a large British force employed in pursuit through Bundelkhand and the Sagar territories for three years, till he was invited back by our Government in the year 1812, by the gift of a fine estate on the banks of the Dasan river, yielding twenty thousand rupees[13] a year, which his son now enjoys, and which is to descend to his posterity, many of whom will, no doubt, animated by their fortunate ancestor’s example, take to the same trade.  He had been a man of no note till he took to this trade, but by his predatory exploits he soon became celebrated throughout India; and, when I came to the country, no other man’s chivalry was so much talked of.

A Bundela, or other landholder of the Hindoo military class, does not think himself, nor is he indeed thought by others, in the slightest degree less respectable for having waged this indiscriminate war upon the innocent and unoffending, provided he has any cause of dissatisfaction with his liege lord; that is, provided he cannot get his land or his appointment in his service upon his own terms, because all others of the same class and clan feel more or less interested in his success.

They feel that their tenure of land, or of office, is improved by the mischief he does; because every peasant he murders, and every field he throws out of tillage, affects their liege lord in his most tender point, his treasury; and indisposes him to interfere with their salaries, their privileges, or their rents.  He who wages this war goes on marrying his sisters or his daughters to the other barons or landholders of the same clan, and receiving theirs in marriage during the whole of his bhumiawat,[14] as if nothing at all extraordinary had happened, and thereby strengthening his hand at the game he is playing.