Dandhu Panth, the
adopted son of the Peshwa, had come back from Oxford, and the English
believed he had been changed into an Englishman, Nana Sahib.
Outwardly he was a sporting, well-dressed gentleman, such as Oxford
turns out; but in his heart was lust of power, and hatred of the white
race that he felt would make his inheritance, the Peshwaship, but a
vassalage. His dreams of ruling India would fade, and he would sit a
pensioner of the British. The Mahrattas had been stigmatised by a
captious Mogul ruler, "mountain rats." As Hindus there was a sharp
cleavage of character; the Brahmins, fanatical, high up in the caste
scale, and all the rest of the breed inferior, vicious, blood-thirsty,
a horde of pirates. Even the man who first made them a power, Sivaji,
had been of questionable lineage, a plebeian; and so the body corporate
was of inflammable material--little restraint of breeding.
And for all Nana Sahib's veneer of English class, mental development,
beneath the English shirt he wore the _junwa_, the three-strand sacred
thread, insignia of the twice-born,--the Brahmin.
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