192 THE SITUATION IN BENGAL

fight, open to all comers. But as any such contest, if it lasts, will usually merge into a battle between dis- tinct factions under recognized leaders, so the rapidly increasing power of the Marathas, who came swarming up from the southwest, and the repeated invasions from the northwest of Ahmad Shah Abdali with his Afghan bands, drew together to one or the other of these two camps all the self-made princes and marauding adven- turers who were parcelling out the country among themselves. When Ahmad Shah brought an Afghan army to Delhi in 1757, he caused the office of prime minister to be conferred by the emperor on Najib-ad- daulah, one of the few able and politic nobles still attached to the Moghul government, who took a very leading part in subsequent events. At Lahore he ap- pointed a viceroy to govern in his name the very impor- tant districts of the Panjab and to keep open his com- munications. Having made these arrangements for maintaining his grasp on north India, the Afghan king had returned through the mountain passes to his own country. The Marathas took advantage of his absence with charac- teristic audacity. They were now overflowing all India with a flood-tide of conquest and pillage; and the supreme control of their confederacy was in the hands of Balaji Baji Rao, the ablest of those hereditary Pesh- was, or prime ministers, who long kept their royal family in a state prison. While this powerful and politic ruler was extending Maratha dominion in the centre of India, his brother Raghunath Rao led north-