DEMEANING SHIVAJI, DENIGRATING DHARM
Dr. Jai Maharaj
[ From: "Vishal Agarwal" <vishals...@yahoo.com>
[ Subject: Demeaning Shivaji, denigrating dharm
[ Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2004
Demeaning Shivaji, denigrating dharm
By Sandhya Jain
The Pioneer
January 27, 2004
Having purchased and read James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu
King in Islamic India only after it was officially
withdrawn by the publishers, I cannot view the events at
the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) as
totally unjustified. Certainly, attacks on centres of
learning have no place in Hindu ethos and must not recur.
Yet, having gone through 105 pages of shoddy polemics
posing as historical research, I am constrained to state
that Oxford University Press needs to re-examine its
commissioning policy if it hopes to retain credibility as
a publishing house.
Moreover, the BORI scholars acknowledged by Laine must
honestly inform the nation of the extent to which they
are responsible for the unwarranted assertions – we
cannot call them conclusions, as no evidence has been
adduced or offered – in the impugned book. Far from being
a meticulous scholar who has uncovered unpalatable truths
about a revered historical figure, Laine is an anti-Hindu
hypocrite determined to de-legitimize India's ancient
civilizational ethos and its grand rejuvenation by
Shivaji in the adverse circumstances of the seventeenth
century. BORI is not generally associated with
substandard scholarship, and should explicitly declare
its position on the actual contents of the book.
Laine exposes his agenda when he foists the unnatural
concept of South Asia upon the geographical and cultural
boundaries of India; this is awkward because his
discussion is India-centric and specific to the
Maharashtra region. He is also unable to disguise his
discomfort at the fact that Shivaji withstood the most
bigoted Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, and established
political agency for the embattled Hindu community,
amidst a sea of Islamic sultanates. This has so unnerved
Laine that he repeatedly makes inane remarks about Hindus
employed under Muslim rulers and vice versa, to claim
that the two communities lacked a modern sense of
identity, and could not be viewed as opposing entities.
What he means, of course, is that Hindus of the era
cannot be ceded to have had a sense of ‘Hindu' identity.
Reading the book, I was struck by the fact that it did
not once mention Shivaji's famed ambition to establish a
Hindu Pad Padshahi. This is a strange omission in a work
claiming to study how contemporary authors viewed
Shivaji's historic role, and the assessment of his legacy
by subsequent native and colonial writers. The most
notable omission is of the poet Bhushan, who wrote:
''Kasihki Kala Gayee, Mathura Masid Bhaee; Gar Shivaji Na
Hoto, To Sunati Hot Sabaki!'' [Kashi has lost its
splendour, Mathura has become a mosque; If Shivaji had
not been, All would have been circumcised (converted)].
Bhushan's verse has immense historical value because the
Kashi Vishwanath temple was razed in 1669 and thus lost
its splendour, and the Krishna Janmabhoomi temple was
destroyed and converted into a mosque in 1670. Bhushan
came to Shivaji's kingdom from the Mughal capital in
1671, and within two years composed Shiv Bhooshan, a
biography of Shivaji. It clearly states that Shivaji
wanted to set up a Hindu Pad Padshahi.
Hence the view that Shivaji had no ideological quarrel
with Aurangzeb and was only an adventurer in search of
power and resources is juvenile. Laine obviously
subscribes to the secularist school of historiography
that decrees that Hindus must forget the evil done to
them, a phenomenon Dr. Koenraad Elst calls negationism.
But history is about truth, and Hindu society's long and
painful experience of Islamic invasions and the
subsequent Islamic polity has been so well documented in
standard works like Cambridge History of India, that it
is amazing a modern historian should claim there was no
tension between Muslim rulers and their Hindu subjects.
Shivaji strove consciously for political power as an
instrument for the resurrection of dharm (righteousness),
a quest he termed as ''Hindavi Swarajya,'' a word having
both geographical and spiritual-cultural connotations.
When still in his teens in 1645 CE, Shivaji began
administering his father's estate under a personalized
seal of authority in Sanskrit, an indication that he
envisaged independence and respected the Hindu tradition.
A 1646 CE letter to Dadaji Naras Prabhu refers to an oath
that Shivaji, Prabhu, and others took in the presence of
the deity at Rayareshwar, to establish ''Hindavi
Swarajya.''
Shivaji was aware of the economic ruin and cultural
annihilation of Hindus under the various sultanates. He
desired to end this suffering, but was personally free
from bigotry, as attested by contemporary Muslim
chroniclers, notably Khafi Khan. It is therefore galling
when Laine smugly proclaims: ''I have no intention of
showing that he was unchivalrous, was a religious bigot,
or oppressed the peasants.'' A.S. Altekar (Position of
Women in Ancient India) has recorded how Shivaji, in
stark contrast to Muslim kings and generals of his era,
ensured that Muslim women in forts captured by him were
not molested and were escorted to safety. It is
inconceivable that Shivaji would not know that Hindu
women similarly situated would have to commit jauhar. It
is therefore incumbent upon Laine and BORI to explain
what ''unchivalrous'' and ''bigot'' mean.
The insinuation about ''bigot'' is especially
objectionable in view of Laine's insistence that Shivaji
had no particular interest in Hindu civilization and no
proven relationship with the revered Samarth Ramdas or
sant Tukaram. A Maharashtrian friend suggests that Laine
has probably not read the references cited in his book!
What the reader needs to understand is that Ramdas'
historical significance lies in the fact that he openly
exhorted the people to rise against oppression and hinted
in Dasbodh that Shivaji was an avatar who had come to
restore dharm. By denying that he was Shivaji's spiritual
mentor, Laine seeks to disprove that the great Maratha
wanted to establish a Hindu Pad Padshahi.
Ramdas, a devotee of Raam (Vaishnava sampradaya), visited
the Khandoba temple at Jejuri, Pune; apologized to the
god (Shiv) for boycotting the temple due to the practice
of animal sacrifice there; and built a Hanuman temple at
its entrance. I mention this to debunk Laine's pathetic
insistence that devotion to a personal god divides Hindu
society. This is alien to our thinking; we see no
conflict between Ramdas and the Bhavani-worshipping
Shivaji.
Then, there is Laine's tasteless allegation that Shivaji
may possibly (whatever that means) be illegitimate,
simply because Jijabai, who bore many children while
living with her husband in the south, gave birth to
Shivaji on her husband's estate near Pune and continued
to live there. Maharashtrians point out that Shahaji had
to send his pregnant wife to safety in Shivneri due to
political instability. Shahaji was on the run with the
boy king Murtaza Nizamshah, in whose name he controlled
the Nizamshahi. After its fall in 1636, service in the
Adilshahi took him to Bangalore (his remarriage produced
the distinguished Thanjavur-Bhonsle dynasty); he
administered his Pune lands through Dadaji Konddev.
My response to Laine's profound Freudian analysis is that
he has thanked his wife and children and dedicated his
book to his mother; I couldn't but notice the absence of
a father. Is one to deduce something from the omission?
Laine can relax: since the Vedas, Hindus have placed only
proportionate emphasis on biological bloodlines; there is
no shame if a man cannot mention his father; a true
bastard is one who does not know the name of his mother.
End of forwarded message from "Vishal Agarwal" <vishals...@yahoo.com>
Jai Maharaj
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