Excerpt from Ballads of the Marathas: Rendered Into English Verse From the Marathi Originals In presenting to my readers this humble attempt to popularise some of the ballads of the Marathas, it may not be out of place to submit a slight sketch of the early history and the poetic literature of the people whose national energies they commemorate. The Maratha race has been for centuries, and is still, among the most important of those which inhabit the Indian Peninsula. The three most powerful of the Hindu princes who acknowledge allegiance to the Imperial Crown of Britain, viz. Sindia, Holkar, and the Gaikwar, are Marathas, and their court language is Marathi, though this is not the language of the countries over which they rule. But every one of these three princes has his ancestral home in the Maratha Deccan and bears a Marathi name. The same is the case with the princely house of Tanjore. The Maratha ditch at Calcutta testifies to exploits at a scene even more distant from Maharashtra, and on the fatal day of Paniput the Maratha armies upheld the cause of India against the Afghan invader fifty miles to the northward of Delhi, the capital of the Great Mogul. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.