Note 1720 — SECTION III. HINDŪSTĀN

“Strange as this custom may seem, a similar one prevailed down to a very late period in Malabar. There was a jubilee every 12 years in the Samorin’s country, and any-one who succeeded in forcing his way through the Samorin’s guards and slew him, reigned in his stead. ‘A jubilee is proclaimed throughout his dominions at the end of 12 years, and a tent is pitched for him in a spacious plain, and a great feast is celebrated for 10 or 12 days with mirth and jollity, guns firing night and day, so, at the end of the feast, any four of the guests that have a mind to gain a throne by a desperate action in fighting their way through 30 or 40,000 of his guards, and kill the Samorin in his tent, he that kills him, succeeds him in his empire.’ See Hamilton’s New Account of the East Indies vol. i. p. 309. The attempt was made in 1695, and again a very few years ago, but without success” (Erskine p. 311).

The custom Bābur writes of—it is one dealt with at length in Frazer’s Golden Bough—would appear from Blochmann’s Geography and History of Bengal (JASB 1873 p. 286) to have been practised by the Habshī rulers of Bengal of whom he quotes Faria y Souza as saying, “They observe no rule of inheritance from father to son, but even slaves sometimes obtain it by killing their master, and whoever holds it three days, they look upon as established by divine providence. Thus it fell out that in 40 years space they had 13 kings successively.”