t
day the traditions of Hindu chivalry. In the south of India, the rulers
of Mysore and Cochin and Iravancore, who also claim Rajput blood, still
personify the subjection of the older Dravidian races to the Aryan
invaders from the north. Mahratta chiefs like Scindia and the Gaekwar
date from the great uplifting of the Mahratta power in the eighteenth
century, whilst the Maharajah of Kolhapur is a descendant of Shivaji,
the first Mahratta chieftain to stem the tide of Mahomedan conquest more
than a century earlier. The great majority of the ruling princes and
chiefs are Hindus, but besides the Nizam, the most powerful of all,
there are not a few Mahomedan rulers who have survived the downfall of
Moslem supremacy, just as the Sikh chiefs of Patiala, Nabha, and
Kapurthala, in the Punjab, still recall the great days of Ranjit Singh
and the Sikh confederacy. In some of the Native States the ruling
families are neither of the same race nor of the same creed as the
majority of their subjects. The Nizam is a Sunni Mahomedan, but most of
his subjects are Hindus, and of the Mahomedans some of the most
influential are Shias. The Maharajah of Kashmir, a Hindu Rajput, rules
over many Mongolian Buddhists, whilst there are but few Mahrattas in
Gwalior or Indore, though both Holkar and Scindia are, Mahratta
Princes.

In all the Native States the system of government is more or less of the
old patriarchal or personal type which has always obtained in the East,
but in its application it exhibits many variations which reflect
sometimes the idiosyncrasies of the ruler and sometimes the dominant
forces of inherited social traditions. In Cochin and Travancore, for
instance, the ancient ascendency of the Northern Brahmans over the
Dravidian subject races survives in some of its most archaic forms.
Udaipur and Jaipur have perhaps preserved more than any other States of
Rajputana the aristocratic conservatism of olden days, whilst some of
the younger Rajput chiefs have moved more freely with the times and with
their own Western education. The Gaekwar has gone further than any other
ruling chief in introducing into his State of Baroda the outward forms
of what we call Western progress, though his will is probably in all
essentials as absolute as that of Scindia, another Mahratta chief, whose
interest in every form of Western activity is displayed almost as much
in his physical energy as in his intellectual alertness. Some no doubt
abandon the c