Shivaji
Shivaji Bhonsle, venerated in Maharashtra as the father of "the Maratha
nation", was born in 1627 into a family of Maratha bureaucrats. His
father, Shahji, was the jagirdar of the Sultan of Ahmadnagar in Pune, but he
shifted his allegiance to the Sultan of Bijapur; Shivaji’s mother, Jiji Bai,
was devoted to her son, particularly after her husband took a second wife. This
was not the only time that Shahji shifted his loyalties: when the Mughal
emperor Shah Jahan decided to lead his forces into the Deccan,
Shahji decided to accept the offer of a mansabdari from Shah Jahan. However,
upon the emperor’s retreat in 1632, Shahji decided to accept once again the
suzerainty of the Sultan of Ahmadnagar. However, as a consequence of the accord
reached between the Sultan of Bijapur and Shah Jahan, Ahmadnagar could not hold
out much longer, and Shahji was taken captive.
Shivaji, though his father was exiled from
Pune, was raised in the city that was to become the capital not only of Maratha
power, but the seat, as it were, of real and imagined Hindu martial traditions.
(Much later, it is in Pune that armed resistance to the British led to a
campaign of terror and assassination, and it is from Pune that Nathuram Godse,
the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi, emerged to press forth the case for a masculine
Indian nation-state.) Some historians have argued that Shivaji grew up with a
hatred for Islam, but there is little in the historical record that directly
substantiates any such reading. For a good many years, Shivaji and his band of
Marathas, who can with some justice be claimed as having originated the idea of
guerrilla warfare in India,
plundered the countryside, and Shivaji came to acquire a formidable reputation
as a warrior. But Shivaji’s main interest lay in subduing Bijapur, and the
opportunity presented itself when the Sultan, Muhammad Adil Shah, died in
November 1656. Aurangzeb had designs upon Bijapur as well, and his general
Afzal Khan, at the head of an army of 10,000 troops, surrounded Shivaji in his
fortress, Pratapgarh.
The most celebrated act of Shivaji’s life,
if historians are to be believed, is his killing of Afzal Khan in 1659.
According to the most commonly accepted narrative of events, Afzal Khan agreed
to meet Shivaji in person to accept his surrender. It is suggested that Afzal
Khan had treacherous designs upon Shivaji, but evidently he received a fatal
dose of his own medicine before he could murder Shivaji. The Maratha leader
carried a small dagger in one hand, and a tiger’s claw in the other, but these
little weapons were concealed by the long sleeves of the loose-fitting clothes
he wore. As the two men hugged each other, Afzal Khan nearly stuck a dagger at
Shivaji’s side, but the Maratha passed his arm around the Khan’s waist and, to
quote from the admiring biography by Jadunath Sarkar, "tore his bowels
open with a blow of steel claws". It is a chilling fact that this episode,
in which neither Afzal Khan nor Shivaji appear to have shown much honor, should
have been described, amidst the euphoria of the celebrations in 1974-75 to mark
the 300th anniversary of the coronation of Shivaji, as the "most glorious
event in the history of the Marathas." (See R. V. Herwadkar,
"Historicity of Shivaji-Afzal Khan Confrontation", in B. K. Apte,
ed., Chhatrapati Shivaji: Coronation Tercentenary Commemmoration Volume (Bombay: University of
Bombay, 1974-75.)
As is purported to be quite common with
‘Oriental armies’, Afzal Khan’s entire force is described as having become
panic-stricken at the death of their commander, and Shivaji was left
victorious. His triumph over Afzal Khan is often said to mark the birth of
Maratha power. In 1664, Shivaji dared even to plunder Surat, a trading town with rich mercantile
traditions and rich merchants, but this invoked the fury of Aurangzeb, who sent
his general Jai Singh to deal with this irritant. Shivaji was compelled to
surrender, and even accepted, as had his father, Aurangzeb’s offer of a mansab
of 5,000 in the Mughal army. Shivaji’ hagiographers at this point pause to reflect
on their hero’s daring escape from the court of Aurangzeb. Though Shivaji had,
by 1670, recaptured many of the fortresses he had previously surrendered to
Aurangzeb, the hagiographers do not always mention the fact that he continued
to petition the Mughal emperor to be entitled a "Raja". This petition
was granted in 1668.
Shivaji’s coronation in 1674 as
Chhatrapati, or "Lord of the Universe", constitutes the next pivotal
chapter in his biography. It was in part to mark his independence from the
Mughals, and to repudiate his formal relation to them of a feudatory, that
Shivaji had himself crowned, but the very gesture of defiance points to the
fact that he recognized the overwhelming power of the Mughals. Moreover, as a
Shudra or low-caste person, Shivaji had perforce to enact some ceremony by
means of which he could be raised to the status of a kshatriya or traditional
ruler. To this end, he enlisted the services of Gagga Bhatta, a famous Brahmin
from Benares, who did the Brahminical thing in
falsely certifying that Shivaji’s ancestors were kshatriyas descended from the
solar dynasty of Mewar. 11,000 Brahmins are reported to have chanted the Vedas,
and another 50,000 men are said to have been present at the investiture
ceremony, which concluded with chants of, "Shivaji Maharaj-ki-jai!"
The greater majority of the historians and
other scholars who have written on Shivaji have supposed that his battles with
Aurangzeb, as well as his coronation, cannot be read as other than clear signs
of his unrelenting hatred for Muslims and his desire to be considered a great
Hindu monarch. But it is not at all transparent that his conflicts with
Aurangzeb should be read through the lens of a communalist-minded history,
where all conflicts are construed as the inevitable battle between Islam and
Hinduism. It is precisely to thwart the communalist interpretations of Shivaji
that Nehru made the pointed remark, in his Discovery of India, that
"Shivaji, though he fought Aurangzeb, freely employed Muslims" (p.
272). There is nothing to suggest that the animosity between the Shia rulers of
Bijapur and the Sunni Mughal Emperors was of a different order than the
conflict between the Hindu Shivaji and Aurangzeb, who were locked in battle
over political power and economic resources. It is also a telling fact that,
after the coronation, Shivaji struck a military alliance with the Muslim
leader, the Qutb Shah Sultan, and together they waged a campaign against
Shivaji’s own half-brother, Vyankoji Bhonsle. Shivaji died in 1680.
Shivaji and the Politics of History
In recent years, with the advent to power
of the Bharatiya Janata Party in national politics, and of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, the stock of Shivaji Bhonsle (1627-1680),
the Maratha leader, has once again risen high. One hundred years ago, the
Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak succeeded to a considerable extent in
reviving the political memory of Shivaji, and early nationalists, in search of
martial heroes, raised him to the eminence of a "freedom fighter".
Tilak’s contemporary, the Indian nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai, nicknamed the
"Lion of the Punjab", published a biography of Shivaji in Urdu
(1896), and commended him to the attention of the youth with the observation
that "Shivaji protected his own religion, saved the cow and the Brahmin
but he did not disrespect any other religion. This is the highest praise that
can be bestowed on a Hindu hero like Shivaji in the days of Aurangzeb."
Shivaji has assumed over the course of the
last few years an extraordinary importance in the debates over the Indian past.
To visit Maharashtra, particularly Pune, is to
come to the awareness that a great many public institutions and buildings have
been named after him, and even in Delhi
the gigantic Interstate Bus Terminal (ISBT), which services the needs of
millions of people every year, has recently been renamed the Chhatrapati
Shivaji Bus Terminal. It is presumed that Shivaji was one of the earliest
exponents of the idea of a Hindu nation, who kept the torch of Hindu resistance
alive during the days of Muslim rule (generally characterized as ‘Muslim
tyranny’). Lala Lajpat Rai, whom we have quoted previously, took the view that
Shivaji’s life demonstrated that "during any [sic] time in Muslim rule
Hindus did not lose any opportunity to show their valour and attain freedom nor
did they quietly suffer oppression." So long as Indian nationalists
persisted in portraying Shivaji as a Hindu leader who withstood Aurangzeb’s
military campaigns and religious fanaticism, they were given no hindrance by
the British; but when Tilak invoked Shivaji’s name and courage to rouse Indians
to resistance against British rule, he was convicted of sedition. The emergence
of Gandhi, and the adoption by the Indian National Congress of non-violence as
its official policy, did little to erode the popularity in which Shivaji was
held. His name was kept alive by armed revolutionaries and by a nation, stung
by charges that it was effete and incapable of offering resistance, eager to
flaunt a martial past; and the emergence of communalism in the 1920s, leading
eventually to demands for the creation of a Muslim state, again made it
possible to urge resistance to Muslim demands in the name of Shivaji.
With the creation in 1960 of the new state
of Maharashtra, carved out of the old Bombay
Presidency, Shivaji became canonized as the creator of the Marathi nation, and
the celebration in 1974 of the 300th anniversary of his coronation was to
furnish ripe opportunities for consolidating the view that he was even a
‘national’ leader. To take any other view was to invite retribution, as one
Marathi historian at Marathwada
University found out in
1974 when he was dismissed from his position for disputing the hagiographic
view of Shivaji. One volume of contributions, mainly by historians, was
entitled Chhatrapati Shivaji: Architect of Freedom (1975). Its editor states
that Shivaji "laid the foundation of a nation-state, the state of the
Marathas, on a firm, secular basis." But what is this nation-state of the
Marathas, and of what "freedom" was Shivaji the architect? Doubtless,
the Marathas were the dominant power in the Deccan
for much of the eighteenth century, but the argument for Maratha sovereignty,
and a Maratha nation-state, cannot so easily be sustained. Shivaji’s
successors, taking advantage of the weakness of the later Mughals, would play
more the role of plunderers and marauders than kings while still acting as the
tax-collectors for the Mughal emperors; by the second half of the eighteenth
century, they were also contending with the military strength of the East India
Company’s forces, though they were nonetheless able to capture Delhi and Agra,
the nerve centers of the Mughal empire, in 1770-71.
Similarly, it is only possible to
characterize Shivaji as the "architect of freedom" on the presumption
that Hindus were laboring under severe disadvantages and were suffocated by
Muslim tyranny before Shivaji freed them from their woes. One historian, taking
this view, put the matter rather dramatically in another volume commemorating
the tercentenary of Shivaji’s coronation when he described Shivaji as having
liberated the Marathas from three centuries of "alien rule" which had
"turned the natives fatalistic": "It was Shivaji who emancipated
them from this terrific mental torpidity. He created in them self-confidence .
. . He gave them back their dearly loved religious freedom." Yet this
assessment appears almost moderate, when we consider R. C. Majumdar’s opinion
that in the whole history of India,
there was no Hindu other than Shivaji "who made such a pious resolve in
his mind to save his country and religion from foreign yoke and
oppression." Dismissing with utter contempt the position of "modern
Hindu politicians and pseudo-historians" [a reference to Nehru among
others] who insist on "a complete assimilation between the Hindus and
Muslims after the first fury of intolerance and oppression was over",
Majumdar remarked: "But Shivaji was in any case free from such ideas. He
looked upon the Muslims as oppressive rulers and the Hindus as long-suffering
subject peoples."
To substantiate the Hindu communalist
reading of Shivaji as the architect of Hindu freedom requires that Hindu-Muslim
conflict be seen as the backdrop of his own times, just as it turns him into an
inveterate foe of Muslims. Yet Shivaji employed Muslims in his army, and he
forged alliances with Muslim rulers, in one case to wage a campaign against his
own half-brother. It is not at all clear why the conflict between Shivaji and
Aurangzeb should necessarily be viewed as a Hindu-Muslim conflict, rather than
as a contest over power, resources, and sovereignty. Moreover, there is little
documentary evidence to warrant the conclusion that Hindus in the Deccan were being systematically persecuted before
Shivaji arrived to free them from their yoke. Indeed, quite to the contrary, at
least some of the evidence points to the fact that many Muslim dynasties in the
south (mainly Shiite) retained a catholic attitude towards Hinduism. Few
historians in the 1970s, as communalism was becoming an important force in the
writing of Indian history, were prepared to reflect on how far it is possible
to infer from Shivaji’s encounters with Afzal Khan and Aurangzeb that people
belonging to various social strata similarly felt their lives to be bounded by
oppositional religious feelings. Yet, just as Aurangzeb and Akbar had become
symbolic figures in the emerging dispute between secularists and communalists,
so Shivaji was to become an iconic figure in the struggle to define the
‘authentic’ history of India.
With the rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party at the national level, and
earlier of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, the quest for a martial Hindu past has
received a new impetus, and since the conflict has moved to the domain of
history as well, it seems certain that Shivaji will continue to be viewed not
merely as a chieftain and even Maratha leader, which he doubtless was, but —
altogether erroneously — as the supreme figure in the "Hindu struggle for
freedom" from Muslim tyranny and as the inspirational figure for Indian
independence.
