This page has been validated.
CHAPTER VII.
SARDAR RANJIT SINGH.
Ranjit Singh's family history is much the same as that of other sardars who rose in the eighteenth century from the ranks of the Jats. His ancestors with their village occupations alternated freebooting, which the oppressed peasantry had to practise to supplement the precarious subsistence they got from the soil, the long-continued exactions of the Mahomedan conquerors having reduced all to a dead level of poverty. The saying among them was that nothing was left for them except what was actually in their mouths. About the middle of the seventeenth century one of his forefathers, a quiet industrious man, took to preaching the religion of Nanak in his village and
