When, toward the close of the last century, the British were pushing their conquests inland, the most formidable enemy they met were the Mahrattas; and, perhaps, the most renowned battle, next to Plassey, ever fought by Europeans against natives, was Assaye, where Wellesley defeated Sindhia in 1803. These Mahrattas were tribes of Hindoo farmers, who inhabited the mountainous country about one hundred miles to the east of Bombay; a territory of which Poona has always been considered the capital. Mounted on their hill ponies, these bold and hardy spearmen were always ready to follow their chiefs to battle, and, in the eighteenth century, became the terror not only of the Mohammedans of the Deccan, but of the Mogul himself, at Delhi. Even the English respected and feared them, and only subdued them in 1818 after desperate fighting. Then they were disarmed and subjected to the combined action of peace and English law. Soon after this conquest an inflow of Marwaris began. As early as 1854, in Dalhousie’s administration, Captain Anderson stated that “two-thirds of the ryots [were] in the hands of the Marwaris, and that the average debt of each individual [was] not less than Rs. 100.”[373] Competition continued unchecked as time flowed on, and in 1875 disturbances broke out in certain villages near Poona, serious enough to cause the government to appoint a commission of inquiry. After full investigation this commission reported that up to 1872 or 1873 the peasantry had seemed relatively prosperous, but that afterward “prices fell quickly,” and that this fall had been accompanied by a rise in taxation of somewhat more than fifty per cent.[374] Under this double pressure the peasantry had rapidly sunk into insolvency, and the whole real estate of the Deccan was passing into the hands of usurers, while the farmers had become serfs toiling on the soil they had once owned, to satisfy an inextinguishable debt. Precisely like the _colonus_, the delinquent was not evicted, but remained, “recorded as occupier of his holding, and responsible for the payment of revenue assessed on it, but virtually reduced by pressure of debt to a tenant-at-will, ... sweated by his Marwari creditor. It is in that creditor’s power to eject him any day; ... and if allowed to hold on, it is only on condition of paying over to his creditor all the produce of his land not absolutely necessary for next year’s seed grain or for the support of life. He is indebted on an average to the extent of sixteen or seventeen years’ payment of the government revenue. He has nothing to hope for, but lives in daily fear of the final catastrophe.”[375]