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The book “Shivaji: India’s Great Warrior King” by Vaibhav Purandare is the only book you need to read about one of India’s greatest heroes.
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Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the legendary seventeenth-century Maratha warrior who audaciously took on the Mughal empire at the height of its powers under Emperor Aurangzeb, and became a beacon of inspiration well after his death for those fighting for Indian independence, is one of the most compelling figures of early modern India.
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This is his definitive biography, relying on a vast variety of Marathi language sources overlooked in standard English works and enriched by author Vaibhav Purandare’s deep knowledge of the rugged terrain and culture of the region. With a wealth of evocative detail, it charts the dizzying story of this self-made military hero who started out as a teenage rebel of great precocity and daring, and ended up crowning himself king of an independent Maratha state after changing the political map of his native Deccan.
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Read an excerpt from the book below.
So what kind of state was Shivaji trying to establish? Was it a secular state, as some have asserted, or was it Hindu, as some others have declared? Or was it simply a Maratha empire? The answer I have arrived at is that Shivaji was not out to establish a secular or non-religious kingdom, nor was he bent on founding a Hindu theocratic state. He was establishing a Hindu polity – one that was broadly inclusive, tolerant and all-encompassing and at the same time drank deep of the fountain of Hindu culture and civilization. His deep sense of his own religion and its spirituality made him regard Hindus and Muslims as equal, and he saw religious discrimination as abhorrent, immoral and unacceptable. Shivaji recruited Muslims in his army, just as he recruited Marathas and other Hindus, and two of his navy admirals, Darya Sarang Ventjee and Daulat Khan, were Muhammadans. One of his bitterest critics, the official Mughal chronicler Khafi Khan, who called him a ‘hell-dog’, put it in writing that Shivaji had strictly instructed his soldiers to treat with the greatest respect the Muslim holy book, the Quran, if they came across it.
The element of Hindu identity, though, is inescapable in Shivaji’s life and courses through his career right from the beginning. Evidently the Islamic conquest of India, and of the Deccan in particular in the late thirteenth century, had ramifications for the lives of the vast majority of the region’s population. Shivaji noticed that despite the rise of the Marathas as accomplished soldiers of rank, the highest military ranks were still denied to them. The Adil Shahi, the dominant power in the western Deccan, had been tolerant, even pluralistic, in the sixteenth century, but things had changed in the seventeenth century. And once Aurangzeb sat on the Mughal throne when Shivaji was in his twenties, the empire turned increasingly hostile towards Hindus. From the 1660s onwards, Aurangzeb began a reign of social and economic repression, making Hindus pay customs duties which Muslims were exempted from paying, and ultimately imposing the discriminatory jaziya tax on ‘unbelievers’, in response to which Shivaji wrote his famous letter to the emperor. Renaming of places in the Deccan by the Islamic powers was also rampant during this period; all seals of the state and its officials were issued in Persian in contrast to the earlier tradition of Hindu rajas, including those from the Deccan, to use either Sanskrit or the local languages.
Shivaji’s actions show he was responding to what he was seeing all around him. His father’s and mother’s own seals were in Persian. But Shivaji, at the age of sixteen itself, chose Sanskrit as the language of his seal, making an unequivocal statement in the Persianate Age. Many Deccani kings who were Hindu – among them Pratapa Rudra and Kapaya Nayaka – had taken, from the time of the Delhi Sultanate’s invasions from the north, the title of Sultan for themselves. Shivaji took the title Chhatrapati after the word ‘chhatra’ of Hindu rajas of the past.
Tagore was thus accurate in saying in an article in the Modern Review in 1911 that Shivaji had ‘in his mind the ideal of setting up a Hindu Empire’, as did Tilak and B.C. Pal. Jawaharlal Nehru too accepted in his Discovery of India that Shivaji ‘was the symbol of a resurgent Hindu nationalism’. But Shivaji’s Hindu state was for Hindus and non-Hindus alike and did not conceive of any difference in treatment between the two.
There are, thus, two kinds of people who would not be able to term his state as one after their own heart. One group would be those who believe in discrimination and domination in the name of faith, and would like to overstate Shivaji’s role as a protector of the faith. Shivaji did once issue an order to his soldiers saying ‘cows and Brahmins’ should not be harmed, but it is utterly reductive and misleading, and a case of reading history backwards for the benefit of modern-day religious conservatives, to label him ‘protector of cows and Brahmins’ for this reason. In his era, the ritualistic and caste-based order was strong, and with cows and Brahmins symbolizing such an order, he was sending out a reassuring message to the larger, tradition-bound society. There’s nothing to suggest he attached any special importance to these two categories. All the evidence is that he stood by so-called Brahmins and non-Brahmins alike, as much for the Ramoshis and other tribals who were among the guardians of his forts as for the Marathas, Kayasthas, Kolis, Bhandaris and Muslims like his navy admiral Daulat Khan who fought shoulder to shoulder with him.
The second set of people who cannot claim his state as their own are those who see the affirmation of Indian civilization in the denial of the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’; this group attempts to stall any discussion and dialogue on the likely trauma that Islamic conquest over a period of several centuries caused to Hindu cultural identity, despite the element of syncretism that may have existed parallelly, and also seeks to excuse the undeniable religious dimension of the attacks on Hindu temples by framing them as mere assaults on seats of power.
The term ‘Hindawi’ was current during Shivaji’s times in the Deccan, and it indicated the vast majority of the land’s Hindu population, its diverse tribal population, and indeed, all the indigenous peoples. It included, interestingly and increasingly over time, the majority of Deccani Muslims who, having entered over the seas through the western coast centuries ago, had been absorbed as one with the land and had made the land their own – as against those coming in more recently from the northern parts who were seen as being imbued with a different set of values.
What of the ‘Maharashtra dharma’ then, which has been named in some of the poetic verses of the seventeenth century, particularly those of the Lord Ram-worshipping saint Ramdas, as denoting Shivaji’s state? Is it evidence of a Maratha state? Shivaji’s state was of course a Maratha state. Deeply and profoundly so. His self-respecting Maratha mother Jijabai gave him spine and spirituality; his father Shahaji and the Bhosle family as a whole, with its military feats, awakened him to his potential; the hardiness and dedication of his fellow Marathas and the resilience of the native Kunbis and other peasants that Phule spoke about were the sinews of his power; and the deeply humanistic philosophy of the Maharashtrian bhakti saint-poets, from Namdeo and Dynaneshwar to Tukaram, lay at the core of his worldview.
The reference to ‘Maharashtra dharma’ by Ramdas, an unstinting admirer of Shivaji, points to a set of ethical, spiritual and cultural values and principles of the Marathi-speaking regions, which were all part of a broader Hindu identity. The stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata which Shivaji’s mother told him constituted the same cultural heritage, as did the ochre flag he selected for himself and the Maratha war cry of ‘Har Har Mahadev’ in the name of Lord Shiva. The fundamentally Maharashtrian and macro Hindu civilizational identity are not unreconciled here; in fact, they are truly culturally united. If that were not the case, Shivaji would not have asked Chhatrasal, a youngster of the Bundela clan in the north, who approached him seeking to join his army in the early 1670s, to head home instead and set up a state of his own against the Mughals and against Aurangzeb.
In the final phase of his life in the second half of the 1670s, Shivaji’s campaign of conquest covered large parts of present-day Telangana, Andhra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. This is yet another sign that his political dream was not restricted to the Marathi-speaking regions, though Maharashtra would always be the nucleus and the heart. The ‘what ifs’ of history are tantalizing. Shivaji died in 1680, having marched all the way up to the eastern coast. What more lands would he have conquered and administered is something we can only guess. But his successors among the Marathas did not restrict themselves to Maharashtra either; they ventured deep into the northern and eastern parts of Hindustan.
