Shivaji Bhonsle

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.