defeated in a pitched battle, or rather a series of battles, near the Betwa river, by Prithiraj Chauhan, king of Kanauj, in the year 1182.  A few years later, the victor was himself vanquished and slain by the advancing Muhammadans.  Mahoba and the surrounding territories then passed through many vicissitudes, imperfectly recorded in the pages of history, and were ruled from time to time by Musalmans, Bhars, Khangars, and others.  The Bundelas, an offshoot of the Gaharwar clan, did not come into notice before the middle of the fourteenth century, and first became a power in India under the leadership of Champat Rai, the contemporary of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, in the first half of the seventeenth century.  The line of Chandel kings was continued in the persons of obscure local chiefs, whose very names are, for the most part, forgotten.  The story of Durgavati, briefly told in the text, casts a momentary flash of light on their obscurity.  The principal nobleman of the Chandel race now occupying a dignified position is the Raja of Gidhaur in the Mungir (Monghyr) district of Bengal, whose ancestor emigrated from Mahoba.

The war between the Chandels and Chauhans is the subject of a long section or canto of the Hindi epic, the Chand-Raisa, written by Chand Bardai, the court poet of Prithiraj, of which the original MS. in 5,000 verses still exists.  It was subsequently expanded to 125,000 verses (E.H.I., 3rd ed., 1914, p. 387 note).  The war is also the theme of the songs of many popular rhapsodists.  The story is, of course, encrusted with a thick deposit of miraculous legend, and none of the details can be relied on.  But the fact and the date of the war are fully proved by incontestable evidence.

37.  The marriage of Durgavati is no proof that her father, the Chandel Raja, was powerful in Mahoba in the time of Akbar.  It is rather an indication that he was poor and weak.  If he had been rich and strong, he would probably have refused his daughter to a Gond, even though complaisant bards might invent a Rajput genealogy for the bridegroom.  The story about the army of fifty thousand men cannot be readily accepted as sober fact.  It looks like a courtly invention to explain a mesalliance.  The inducement really offered to the proud but poor Chandel was, in all likelihood, a large sum of money, according to the usual practice in such cases.  Several indications exist of close relations between the Gonds and Chandels in earlier times.

Early in Akbar’s reign, in the year 1564, Asaf Khan, the imperial viceroy of Karra Manikpur, obtained permission to invade the Gond territory.  The young Raja of Garha Mandla, Bir Narayan, was then a minor, and the defence of the kingdom devolved on Durgavati, the dowager queen.  She first took up her position at the great fortress of Singaurgarh, north-west of Jabalpur, and, being there defeated, retired through Garha, to the south-east, towards Mandla.  After an obstinately contested fight the invaders were again