n-i-Akbari [386]
a thousand men of the sept guarded the environs of the palace of
Akbar, and Abul Fazl says of them: "The caste to which they belong
was notorious for highway robbery, and former rulers were not able to
keep them in check. The effective orders of His Majesty have led them
to honesty; they are now famous for their trustworthiness. They were
formerly called _Mawis_. Their chief has received the title of Khidmat
Rao. Being near the person of His Majesty he lives in affluence. His
men are called Khidmatias." Thus another body of Panwars went north
and sold their swords to the Mughal Emperor, who formed them into a
bodyguard. Their case is exactly analogous to that of the Scotch and
Swiss Guards of the French kings. In both cases the monarch preferred
to entrust the care of his person to foreigners, on whose fidelity he
could the better rely, as their only means of support and advancement
lay in his personal favour, and they had no local sympathies which
could be used as a lever to undermine their loyalty. Buchanan states
that a Panwar dynasty ruled for a considerable period over the
territory of Shahabad in Bengal. And Jagdeo Panwar was the trusted
minister of Sidhraj, the great Solanki Raja of Gujarat. The story
of the adventures of Jagdeo and his wife when they set out together
to seek their fortune is an interesting episode in the Rasmala. In
the Punjab the Panwars are found settled up the whole course of the
Sutlej and along the lower Indus, and have also spread up the Bias
into Jalandhar and Gurdaspur. [387]

5. The Nagpur Panwars

While the above extracts have been given to show how the Panwars
migrated from Dhar to different parts of India in search of fortune,
this article is mainly concerned with a branch of the clan who
came to Nagpur, and subsequently settled in the rice country of the
Wainganga Valley. At the end of the eleventh century Nagpur appears
to have been held by a Panwar ruler as an appanage of the kingdom of
Malwa. [388] It has already been seen how the kings of Malwa penetrated
to Berar and the Godavari, and Nagpur may well also have fallen to
them. Mr. Muhammad Yusuf quotes an inscription as existing at Bhandak
in Chanda of the year A.D. 1326, in which it is mentioned that the
Panwar of Dhar repaired a statue of Jag Narayan in that place. [389]
Nothing more is heard of them in Nagpur, and their rule probably came
to an end with the subversion of the kingdom of Malwa in the th