A coloured perspective of history

Ratna Raman

Ranjit Desai, whose short stories, plays and novels engage readers “at the highest level of emotional dialogue,” and was awarded the Padma Shri in 1973, is the author of Shriman Yogi. Shivaji: The Great Maratha is a translation of Desai’s tome into English by Vikrant Pande.

Both the narrative and the translation provide a comprehensive case study of the dissemination of history, “through a work of fiction with some parts based on facts.” The imagined contexts that Desai creatively conjures up and Pande translates contribute to the groundswell of how two communities, the Hindu and the Muslim, view each other. This book enables us to recognise that stories that fill and inform impressionable minds and memories and feed into prejudices, promoting and perpetuating stereotypes, must be offered as cautionary tales.

 This saga of Chatrapati Shivaji begins a little before his birth in 830 AD. It uses both history and biography to show the gradual foundations of the Maratha Empire and its extensive forays over great parts of India through the 17th century, ending with Shivaji’s death in 1680.

We are introduced to the warriors of Maharashtra and their volatile groupings, factions and animosities. Divided into 11 books, the first book outlines the fraternities and foes. It shows the earliest antagonisms that exist between the Jadhavs and the Bhosales, warrior chieftains with their various forts. Jijabai’s father, Lakhuji Rao Jadhav, comes looking for her husband Shahaji Bhosale with an unsheathed sword. Shivaji is the second son of Jijabai and Shahaji Bhosale. He comes of age in the midst of these feuds, while in the backdrop the reign of Nizam Adil Shah and Shahjahan and Aurangzeb, and the arrival of the British unfold.

 Shivaji, with great strategizing and dexterity and guerrilla warfare, conquers fort after fort beginning with Rohideshwar, Torna Kondana and Purandar by overpowering the local chieftains, who owe allegiance to Adil Shah. Jijabai’s father is a general in the Nizam Shahi dynasty while his son-in-law, Shivaji’s father, serves under Mohammed Adil Shah of Bijapur. 

In 17th century, Marathwada comprised of fortified kingdoms, ruled by Hindu chieftains who served under the more powerful Muslim rulers. This 20th century narration, translated in twenty-first century looks back into the previous centuries from the perspective of regional chauvinisms and majoritarian belief, projecting Shivaji as Shriman Yogi, a raja yogi, the celebrated sage among warriors.

The Moghal rulers and the Nizam are the arch-villains. Shivaji is the just Hindu chieftain, who is guided by his mother, a powerful queen ruling on her own, since his early adolescence. The false Padmavati narrative that Shivaji hears as a young lad, clinches the deal, inspiring him to implement Hindavi Swarajya to replace the oppressive rule of lecherous Muslim overlords.

When a fourth, fifth and sixth marriage alliance is fixed for Shivaji, he demurs, saying that he would have preferred to have one wife like Lord Rama, because having many wives was again, a practice followed by the Moghuls. This is an incorrect observation as the practice of monogamy among Hindu males is fairly modern. Shivaji’s eight wives are one of the better kept secrets of his life. 

The Nizam, Murad, Aurangzeb and other Muslim chieftains are all seen as infidels, barbarians, greedy and cruel men. When a local Patil rapes a young girl who commits suicide, Shivaji orders the culprit’s arms to be broken, telling him that he has behaved like a Muslim. An older Shiva, however, overlooks his son Shambaji’s misdemeanours. When Shivaji speaks to Hindu chieftains who have been overpowered at Purandhar, he informs them that they have escaped beheading, because he (Shivaji) is not a Muslim. 

The Marathas themselves are known to have followed a policy of guerrilla warfare,  attacking forts and plundering towns. Each fort seized by Shivaji and his men yields abundant gold and jewels and captives. The battles are bloody and brutal. Shivaji is a skilled adversary, as he travels from Agra to Banaras and carves an empire through annexed forts and forts he constructs from Surat and Karnataka to Tanjavore. 

Shivaji’s older son Shambaji, however, joins the Mughals as a mansabdar and Shivaji’s wife Soyarabai wants the monarchy for her son, Rajaram. The book closes with Shivaji’s illness and death and the threat of an impending attack by Aurangzeb and the ascent of the British. Shivaji’s remaining queens share a fraught relationship, Shivaji wants to divide the kingdom between his two sons and the dream of Hindavi Swarajya reaches a poignant end, outside of the framework of the book.

It is true that in centuries long gone by, pillaging, looting, plunder, heavy taxation and bloody battles remained the lot of common people under both the Hindu and the Muslim rulers. It is disappointing that a narrative, written in modern democratic India where citizens follow a multiplicity of faiths, projects one community favourably and views the other through the lens of deeply rooted prejudices as rank outsiders with the worst of motives. Complex political processes, and the resultant interactions, interrelationships and cultural exchanges are insufficiently engaged with and Shivaji’s life is apotheosized at the expense of actual history.

The Marathas under Shivaji are projected as a proto nationalist force, fighting for a Hindu India. It feeds into the chauvinistic regional politics of 20th century Maharashtra. Were the Marathas really the saviours of Hinduism, and can we see them as such, with the hindsight of the twenty-first century? Accounts by their brethren in Bengal and Orissa from previous centuries give lie to this popular perception. Hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, Shivaji’s military heritage to the Marathas, generated fear and terror in Bengal. The Marathas were called bargi ( Persian word indicating light cavalry), and the long ditch built along the northern extremities of Calcutta to keep out the marauding Marathas in the 1740s is made mention of by Odisha’s Supreme Poet, Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843-1918) in his historical romance Lachhama. Accounts from Bengal and Orissa, speak of the brutal and bloody ransacking and the massacre of innumerable Hindus. 

Older histories must be made available to future generations. However, hagiographies that celebrate the heroism of one man from one community over another will only accelerate the reinvention of hostilities and hatreds that could shred the delicate political and socio-cultural fabric of our times. Perhaps, explanatory forewords by translators, highlighting both omissions and hyperboles should be in place.