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I shall therefore remain here till Wednesday morning, and read Indian politics in quiet. I am already deep in Zemindars, Ryots, Polygars, Courts of Phoujdary, and Courts of Nizamut Adawlut. I can tell you which of the native Powers are subsidiary, and which independent, and read you lectures of an hour on our diplomatic transactions at the courts of Lucknow, Nagpore, Hydrabad, and Poonah.
They also pay, in common with other and less atrocious robbers, a portion of their gains to the Polygars, or native authorities of the districts in which they reside, to secure protection. The friends and relatives of the victims, perhaps a thousand miles off, never surmise their fate till a period has elapsed when all inquiry would be fruitless, or, at least, extremely difficult.
Tinnevelly, Madura, and Ramnadaporum, though little infested with Hyder's troops, became a prey to the incursions of the Polygars, who stripped them of the greatest part of the revenues. Ongole, Nellore, and Palnaud, the only remaining districts, had suffered, but in a small degree. The misfortunes of war, however, were not the only evils which the Carnatic experienced.
The Polygars and the northern Zemindars, and other great chiefs, might well class with the rest of the princes, dukes, counts, marquises, and bishops, in the empire; all of whom I mention to honour, and surely without disparagement to any or all of those most respectable princes and grandees.
In his Report of December, 1804, the Acting Resident of Mysore, Colonel Mark Wilks, observed that "the territories composing the present dominion of His Highness the Rajah of Mysore had, from the remotest periods of tradition, been held by a number of polygars and petty Rajahs, whose possessions were incessantly enlarged, diminished, or alienated, by a series of revolutions which it would perhaps be impossible to trace, and unprofitable to describe," and it is interesting to note how little, at that time, seems to have been known about the history of the kingdoms we conquered.
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