Papers Read Before the Society

VIII. Secret Correspondence of the Court of the Peshwa, Madhu Rao, from the Year 1761 to 1772

On the last occasion on which we met, I was permitted by your indulgence to read a piece of autobiography of Nana Farnevís, one of the most eminent persons who have become familiarly known to us since our first connexion with India. I stated that a vast number of the private and confidential papers of that extraordinary personage had fallen into my hands previously to my quitting India; and that a small, but interesting portion of them, had been translated by me and brought to this country. These translations have been submitted to two or three of the most distinguished members of our Society; and they have been pleased to express a wish that some of them might bebrought to the notice of the Society, and explained by a narrative of the circumstances that led to their being written. The letters commence with the public life of Nana Farnevís in 1761, and end with the fall of his power as minister to the Peshwa in 1796. They form valuable materials to elucidate his conduct during his long and arduous official career; but they are the more remarkable for the insight they afford us into the secret springs which seem to have regulated the behaviour of his illustrious master and sovereign Madhu Rao the Great, who, as I have before mentioned, asended the throne in his sixteenth, and died in his twenty-eighth year.