are slow to die and least of all in an ancient and conservative country
like India, and there was one sept of Brahmans, at any rate, who were
determined not to let them die.

The Chitpavan Brahmans are undoubtedly the most powerful and the most
able of all the Brahmans of the Deccan. A curious legend ascribes their
origin to the miraculous intervention of Parashurama, the sixth Avatar
of the god Vishnu, who finding no Brahmans to release him by the
accustomed ritual from the defilement of his earthly labours, dragged on
to shore the bodies of fourteen barbarians that he had found washed up
from the ocean, burnt them on a funeral pyre and then breathed life and
Brahmanhood into their ashes. On these new made Brahmans he conferred
the name Chitpavan, which means "purified by fire," and all the land of
the Konkan from which, by a bolt from his arrow, he caused the sea for
ever to recede. Every Chitpavan to-day claims descent from one or other
of the fourteen divinely Brahmanized barbarians, whom some believe to
have been hardy Norsemen driven in their long ships on to the sandy
shores of what is now the Bombay Presidency. At any rate, as has been
well said of them, Western daring and Eastern craft look out alike from
the alert features and clear parchment skin and through the strange
stone-grey eyes of the Chitpavan. It was not, however, till about two
centuries ago that the Chitpavan Brahmans began to play a conspicuous
part in Indian history, when one of this sept, Balaji Vishvanath Rao,
worked his way up at the Court of the Mahratta King Shahu to the
position of Peshwa, or Prime Minister, which he succeeded even in
bequeathing to his son, the great Bajirao Balaji, who led the Mahratta
armies right up to the walls of Delhi. Bajirao's son not only succeeded
as Balaji II., but on the death of King Shahu disposed of his Royal
master's family by a bold Palace conspiracy and openly assumed sovereign
powers. The crushing defeat of Panipat brought him to his grave, and