LETTER CCCCXXX.
To BUDRÛZ ZUMÂN KHÂN; same Date. (28th January.)

HAVING read, we transmit for your perusal [two] letters, brought to us by a pair of camel couriers, from Râo Râsta and Holkar. We have likewise sent to you the two camel couriers [in question]. You must, after looking at these letters, proceed thither [i. e. to the Mahrattah camp] with the couriers above-mentioned.

A cornelian seal, with your name engraved upon it, has arrived from Putn: but as it was not set for a ring, we have ordered it to be properly mounted as such, and when ready it shall be dispatched to you.

OBSERVATIONS.

It would appear by the foregoing letter, and is confirmed by the Sultan’s Memoirs, that Budrûz Zumân Khân was chosen to conduct the negociations now pending with the Mahrattahs. It may even be inferred, from the terms of this dispatch, that if he was not named in the letters of Râsta and Holkar, as the most eligible person that could be employed by the Sultan on this occasion, he was, very probably, mentioned as the individual who would be most agreeable to the Mah­rattah chiefs. Similar suggestions often proceed in India from a hostile power: but when this is the case, it generally denotes either an actual, or an assumed superiority in the latter. If Tippoo tacitly yielded, in the present instance, to such a pretension, it is not unlikely that he was led to do so, as much by his impatience to prepare for a fresh contest with the English as by any other conside­ration. Except with some motive of this nature, he would hardly have consented to a measure so liable to be construed into an act of submission, as the deputation of a person of Budrûz Zumân’s rank to the Mahrattah camp would be.*