Indian Antiquary Vol 51

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 127

JUNE, 1922)
NEW LIGHT FROM WESTERN ASIA
119
Neither the date nor the circumstances of the fall of Vallabhipura are clearly known. The most probable account is that preserved by the Portuguese traveller Alberuni, who says. that the Arab chief of Mansûra, in the Indus valley, sent a naval expedition against Vallabhipura. In a night attack the king was killed and his peopie and town were destroyed. Alberuni gives no date to this event ; but it must have occurred between A.D. 750 and 770.22 After the destruction of Vallabhipura, the Mer power seems to have moved inland, probably to avoid another encounter with those terrible raiders, and to have centred in the hilly country West of Chitor, where a large tract of country received the name of Medwår23, the country of the Meds (Mers).
The subsequent history of the Gahlots of Mewâr, as well as that of the main branches of the Chauhans, Panwârs, and the Pariârs is sufficiently well known from the Annals of the Rajputs among whom these tribes are now included. But besides those who by achievement, or Brahman initiation, were cleansed from the dust of their ignorance and obtained a place among the Kshatriyas, a proportion of the Mers held to their ancient faith, and either from choice or from necessity, remained outside the pale.
Among these were the Mers of Sind, of Kathîâwâr and of Merwârâ. In proportion as the fire-born Rajputs grew in reputation, in power, and in pride, their brethren of these tribes sank into oblivion, and finally after a lapse of nearly a thousand years, they emerge into the light of modern history as despised barbarians, stripped of every vestige and even every memory of their former greatness. One can only darkly surmise the causes and circumstances of this strange discrimination of fate.
One curious tradition has been handed down in the tribe from ancient times and survives to this present day. According to this tradition the kings of the Mers in ancient times were white men, and it is decreed that the Mers shall never be ruled or led by any other than a white race. I like to think that the old Mers who did not become Kshatriyas were sturdy independents of the tribe, who held to the legend of the white king and refused to be tempted to bow the knee to the dark-skinned races of Hindustan. With the coming of the British in the early years of the ninteenth century the riddle seemed to be solved. The Mers accepted the white officers as their destined rulers, and have followed them ever since with ungwerving loyalty. It is true that their faith received a shock by the substitution of a Hindu District Officer for the 'Chhota Sahib" a few years ago, but the tradition clings, and the Mers are still inclined to hold themselves as a race apart, to regard the seething politics of India with complete unconcern, and to speak of their district as "a piece of Britain," and themselves as the peouliar servants and soldiers of the British King-Emperor.
NEW LIGHT FROM WESTERN ASIA. (A Lecture delivered to The Royal Asiatic Society, London,
on Tuesday the 8th November 1921.).
BY THE REV. PROF. A. H. SAYCE, M.A., D.LITT. The other day I was looking into a book on Ancient History published less than a century ago. It has itself become ancient history. It is like nothing so much as the maps of central Africa which were current in my childhood and in which there was little else but a blank space. What was not a blank space was for the most part erroneous. So it was 22 Bom. Gazetteer, Vol. I; Part I, pp. 94-95.
28 The modern Mewa Of Udaipur.