About this time we begin, for the first time, to find mention of the threatening attitude of the Afghans, which was destined to exercise on the affairs of Hindustan an influence so important, yet so different from what the invaders themselves could have anticipated. Timur Shah, the kinsman to whom Shah Alam alludes in his poem, had died in June, 1793; and after a certain amount of domestic disturbance, one of his sons had succeeded under the title of Zaman Shah. The Calcutta Gazette of 28th May, 1795, thus notices the new ruler:— "Letters from Dehli mention that Zaman Shah, the ruler of the Abdalees, meditated an incursion into Hindustan, but had been prevented, for the present, by the hostility of his brothers. . . . . We are glad to hear the Sikhs have made no irruption into the Doab this season." This Zaman Shah is the same who died, many years later, a blind pensioner of the English at Ludiana; and for the restoration of whose dynasty, among other objects, the British expedition to Kabul in 1839 took place. To this period also belongs the unsuccessful attempt to revive Musalman power in the South of India, in which the Nizam of the Deccan engaged with the aid of his French General, the famous Raymond. The battle fought at Kardla, near Ahmadnagar, on the 12th March, 1795, is remarkable for the number of Europeans and their trained followers who took part on either side. On the Nizam's side, besides a vast force of horse and foot of the ordinary Asiatic kind, there were no less than 17,000 infantry under Raymond, backed by a large force of regular cavalry and artillery. The Mahrattas had 10,000 regulars under Perron, 5,000 under Filose, 3,000 under Hessing, 4,500 under du Drenec and Boyd. An animated account of this battle will be found in Colonel Malleson's excellent book, The Final Struggles of the French in India, in which, with admirable research and spirit, the gallant author has done justice to the efforts of the brave Frenchmen by whom British victory was so often checked in its earlier flights. The power of the Musalmans was completely broken by Perron and his associates on this occasion. It is further remarkable as the last general assembly of the chiefs of the Mahratta nation under the authority of their Peshwa (Grant Duff, ii. 284-8). The Moghul power in the Deccan was only preserved by the intervention of the British, and has ever since been dependent on their Government.