marATha history as polemic

Maratha History as Polemic: Low Caste Ideology and Political Debate in Late Nineteenth-century

Western India ROSALIND O’HANLON

University of Cambridge

A STRIKING feature of Marathi vernacular literature towards the end of the nineteenth century lies in the sudden surge of interest in the Maratha warrior hero, Sivaji, and his feats of leadership in the great expansions of Maratha power that took place in the seventeenth century. Of all the work on Sivaji written at this time, the most familiar is probably Mahadev Govind Ranade’s Rise of the Maratha Power, published in 1900, in English. Besides this, there appeared in the last three decades of the century an unusually large number of Marathi works celebrating Sivaji’s exploits.¹

This upsurge of interest in Sivaji was not confined to the vernacular literature. In the same period, Sivaji was also made the focus of a number of active groups and movements. Most familiar of these is, of course, the attempt by Bal Gangadhar Tilak to make Sivaji the symbol for a mass-based nationalist movement in Maharashtra. Other groups, such as the Sivaji Club in Kolhapur, active in the 1890s, tried to employ the figure of Sivaji in a series of quite different political projects.²

Interest in and concern with the period of Maharashtrian history represented by the figure of Sivaji was by no means new in Maharashtra’s popular culture. The exploits of Sivaji and his successors and the martial feats of his armies in the great expansion of Maratha power were a powerful and emotive subject for celebration in the rural society of pre-nineteenth-century Maharashtra. Stories from this period of Maratha history had always formed a central part of Maharashtra’s rich oral tradition. These stories were most commonly told in the Marathi ballad form, the pavada. A pavada nearly always celebrated the deeds of Maratha heroes in battle. They were sung by Gondhalis, a sub-caste of professional musicians who would be called in to perform for most village festivals and entertainments. In these accounts of deeds of heroism by Sivaji, his lieutenants and his armies, it is possible to gain some understanding of a worldview that seems to have been shared by most sections of Maharashtra’s traditional rural society, from the ordinary cultivator to the élite Maratha landowner. For these groups, whose ancestors might have combined a martial career in Sivaji’s mavali armies, with the life of a landowner or cultivator in periods of peace, the figure of Sivaji could represent both those who owned the land and identified themselves with it, and those who protected the land and its people. Other groups in pre-nineteenth-century Maharashtra could likewise identify with the past glories of Maratha history, albeit in slightly different ways, and the exploits of Brahman, Prabhu, Maratha, kunbi and mahar were all celebrated as examples of the heroism of Sivaji’s followers. The best evidence for this largely pre-literate tradition, by which groups in rural society expressed a social and political identity through the celebration of episodes from Maratha history, is to be found in a large collection of traditional Marathi pavadas, made by a British administrator, Harry Acworth, at the end of the nineteenth century. ³

What was new about the pavadas and accounts of Sivaji’s life and exploits that were published towards the end of the century was, first, that they were written down, and second, that they seem to have been written from a much more overtly ideological standpoint. The traditional pavadas which Acworth recorded clearly served a social and ideological purpose in the popular culture of pre-nineteenth century Maharashtra. In their descriptions of the qualities of warrior heroes, they presented symbols for the expression of group loyalties and a model of behaviour that derived in part from Maharashtra’s own variety of kshatriya images and values. As such, the Marathi pavada might be argued to have served traditionally to reinforce group loyalties and to integrate the quite disparate social and territorial groups led by the Maratha princes and their ministers, the peshwas.⁴ The pavadas and other verse and prose works written in the late nineteenth century seem if anything to have served quite opposite, and socially disintegrative, purposes. In their accounts of Sivaji and his armies, they sought to elevate one leader or social group at the expense of others, and thus to advance contradictory and competing interpretations of Maharashtra’s history and culture. In this way, the latter became an arena for the expression of conflicting political and social identities put forward by quite disparate social groups. It is perhaps worth noting that much of the basic factual material for this later writing on Sivaji derived in fact from the researches of English historians. Grant Duff in particular seems to have served as a mine of information for Marathi polemicists of quite different political views.⁵

Here it is hoped to examine three such late nineteenth-century interpretations of the Sivaji period of Maratha history, each written from the perspective of quite different social groups.

Jotirao Phule

The first is a pavada by Mahatma Jotirao Phule, the leader of western India’s early movements of low caste protest, which was published in 1869. It presented Sivaji as the leader of Maharashtra’s sudras, and ascribed his achievements to the strength and skill of his sudra and ati-sudra armies, rather than to his Brahman ministers. The lower castes of Maharashtra, the tillers of the land and its protectors in times of war, thus provided the purpose and meaning behind the creation of the Maratha state. Phule strongly denied any Brahman role in the creation of the Maratha state. He posited conflict between Brahmans and the lower castes as a central feature of Maharashtrian culture. He argued that Brahmans had added, to their traditional religious power, a formidable new sphere of secular influence within the administrative and political structures of the British raj. He thus tried to make the pavada the vehicle for these groups’ claims in the nineteenth century to stand as the rightful leaders of Maharashtrian society and the representatives of its traditions.

The second account, published in 1889, was by a reformist Karhada Brahman, Rajaramsastri Bhagavat. Bhagavat set out to argue that western Indian society had always been distinguished by the absence of social conflict, and by its ability to synthesize the best in local and all-India religious culture into a harmonious whole, and argued the achievements of Sivaji to be the product of this harmony. The third account, a pavada by Ekanath Annaji Josi, a Brahman conservative, published in 1887, displayed little interest in Maharashtra’s local culture and religious traditions, and presented Sivaji as the saviour of orthodox Hinduism from the threat of Islam. Josi’s pavada also spoke implicitly against the corruption of Hindu religion by western influences in the nineteenth century.

It is hoped that these comparisons may suggest several more general lines of thought about political debate in western India in this period. First, there is the intrinsic interest of Phule’s own account, as he attempted to construct an ideological basis for the unification of all non-Brahman castes, and for the rejection of Brahmanic religious authority and the social and political hierarchies which he argued it to have generated in the nineteenth century. Secondly, these accounts, with their clear ideological and polemical purposes, indicate the ways in which social groups still rooted in pre-nineteenth-century culture, could have been mobilized for political activity in the late nineteenth century, and they reveal the importance of overtly ideological appeals in this process. Thirdly, the comparison of three writers who, as it will be argued, were either actually aware of each others’ work and ideas, or writing for the same publications, helps illuminate some features of political debate in late nineteenth-century western India. It suggests that one way in which social groups expressed their social and political identities may have been through competing interpretations of Maharashtra’s history and culture. This in turn helps to emphasize the extent to which a concern with the ideological expression of social status and political identity existed in all areas of society, and constituted in itself a real arena for political debate. Each of the three writers examined were, of course, addressing themselves to different audiences, Phule to cultivating and low castes, Bhagavat to the social reformist and moderate nationalist, and Josi to the Hindu orthodox and more overtly anti-British. Nevertheless, there was also a level on which these divergent accounts of the same events of necessity competed with each other more directly, and formed part of a unitary political debate of great importance to the social groups who engaged in it.

The great expansion of Maratha power in the seventeenth century, and Sivaji’s wars with the Mughals could be interpreted in a number of ways, and used to make statements about society and politics in Maharashtra in the nineteenth century. In Sivaji’s exploits might be seen the past glories of the kunbis and Marathas of western Maharashtra, the men of the maval that formed the body of Sivaji’s armies, and the decline of Maratha power attributed to the growth of Brahman influence as effective leadership was transferred to the Brahman peshwas. At the other extreme, Sivaji’s success might be attributed to his Brahman adviser, Ramdas. Sivaji’s own intentions might be interpreted in a number of different ways. In his wars against Muslim rule, he might be seen as go-Brahman pratipalak, the protector of cows and Brahmans, and hence of orthodox Hindu religion. Alternatively, his attempts to lead his Maratha and kunbi armies to every corner of India might be interpreted as an attempt to extend the power of these numerically dominant castes. The evidence of co-operation between all castes in the Maratha administration, and Sivaji’s own policy of attempting to achieve a balance of power between Brahmans, Prabhus, Marathas and lower castes, presented an opportunity for a view of Maharashtra’s history and culture which stressed social harmony and a genuine synthesis between local traditions and the social structures laid down in the social theory of classical Hinduism. Another source for differences in interpretation lay in the ambiguity of the status of Sivaji in varna terms. Sivaji had, of course, been invested with the sacred thread at his investiture in 1674, but even then there had been some dispute over his right to vedic ritual.⁶

The possibility of ascribing to Sivaji either kshatriya or sudra varna status was, of course, a reflection of the more general indeterminacy, for quite large groups in rural society, of varna status in a local culture which contained both a martial and an agricultural tradition, and families claiming Rajput descent on the basis of genealogies which could be rewritten to accommodate new claimants. By extension, the question of Sivaji’s status in varna terms raised the issue of that of all groups and families in rural society who claimed to be true Marathas of Rajput descent. Sivaji’s investiture with the sacred thread at his coronation could thus form a focus for all Maratha aspirations towards kshatriya status. His martial exploits and his de facto position as a ruler could be seen more generally as backing for the claims that later formed so prominent a part of non-Brahman and Maratha ideology, the claim to stand as the kshatriyas of Maharashtra, the rightful protectors of the land and the leaders of the people.⁷ Sivaji’s career also presented ideal material for anti-British and nationalist interpretations, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s attempts to employ Sivaji as a symbol in this way have been well documented.

In this way, then, it was possible to make all sorts of statements about society and politics in nineteenth-century Maharashtra in the language of historical debate about the Sivaji period. The decision by many groups to conduct social and political debate in this apparently rather oblique way was not, however, a random one. It may help to illuminate some aspects of the political movements and mobilization of social groups who still conceived of their political identities in terms of the symbols and values of traditional culture. The question also concerns the role of ideas, symbols and values, both in the definition of group identities and loyalties, and in the attempts by politicians to mobilize mass political support.

The social groups in Hindu society to which Phule, and indeed any other would-be leader of a mass movement in western India, would have to address himself, were still rooted in traditional rural culture. Such groups were pre-literate, and they lacked the political and educational skills that would have allowed them to engage directly in the new modes of formal and organized political activity that were coming to dominate political life there towards the end of the century. It was not likely that an illiterate patil in the maval would have conceived of his identity or his social status in terms of the meetings of committees, the election of representatives and the holding of conferences.

However, it is possible to see, in the figure of Sivaji and the traditions which were attached to the glories of the Maratha past, some of the ways in which such social groups did conceive of their social and political identity. It was precisely this strong and already existing emotional freed their country from the mlecchas and sought to protect cows and Brahmans, and so they leave them filled with false religious patriotism.⁸

Here Sivaji was called a sudra and identified with all the other lower caste heroes of whom, on Phule’s account, the Brahmans had taken advantage. One of the central elements in Phule’s interpretation in the pavada derived from the ambiguity of varna classifications in Maharashtra that has already been mentioned. It was precisely this ambiguity between the status of sudra and kshatriya which Phule played on in the pavada, providing as it did a perfect reflection of the tensions within Maharashtrian culture itself which form one of the driving forces behind Phule’s work. A difficulty in interpretation for the historian here lies in trying to understand whether, in the context of the mid-nineteenth century, the identification of Sivaji as a sudra would have been a controversial one. Certainly, the reverence in which Sivaji is held in present-day Maharashtra would not admit of such an identification, but this was not necessarily so before the investment of Sivaji with such potent symbolism. ⁹

There is another dimension to the pavada which should be emphasized because it might easily be lost in the somewhat disintegrative process of analysis. The pavada was not merely a partisan account. It is filled with a genuine sense of awe and celebration at the achievements of Sivaji, and with a great love for, and identification with, the wild and rugged landscape of western Maharashtra from which he drew the inspiration for an independent base, and the hardy troops, the men of the maval, to realize his plans. Here, in this fusion of his own social polemic with a series of symbols that were at once well known, potent and intensely evocative, Phule achieved one of the most compelling expressions of his worldview.

Phule did not stop with the figure of Sivaji in his attempt to recruit symbols from popular culture to the cause of the low castes. The basis of Phule’s ideological platform throughout his life, and his symbol for the unification of all non-Brahmans against Brahmans, was the vision of a pre-Aryan golden age of India, in which the cultivators prospered under the benign rule of King Bali, the Daitya king of Hindu mythology. In this idyllic kingdom, Phule argued, all the people were called kshatriya because they owned and worked on the land, the kshetra. The prosperity of Bali’s kingdom, however, aroused the cupidity of Aryan Brahmans from the north. As with King Bali, Phule makes the mythical figures of Brahma and Parashuram into real historical characters, and portrays them as the leaders of the Aryan invaders. Having defeated the kshatriyas in battle and subjected them to their political rule, the Aryan Brahmans devised a system of religious belief calculated to sanctify and perpetuate their power. This Phule characterized as the origin of orthodox Hindu religion itself, and held it responsible for all the subsequent suffering of the lower castes and untouchables.

This ancient history of India formed, then, the second dimension to the pavada. The triumphs of the marali armies of Sivaji recalled the more ancient martial past of the sudra kshatriyas under King Bali, and the meaning of Sivaji’s career became the inheritance of the mantle of King Bali, in the leadership of the people and the protection of the land.

In giving the pavada this second dimension, centred around King Bali, Phule incorporated into his account another potent symbol. In the mythology of the epics and puranas, of course, Bali was the Daitya King who was deprived of his kingdom by Vishnu, incarnated as the Brahman dwarf, Vaman. But besides his all-India significance, Bali was also a powerful symbol in the popular culture of Maharashtrian society in the nineteenth century. Here, as far as the evidence goes, the figure of Bali seems to have had two main associations; firstly, an identification with the tillers of the soil, with the land, labour and the support of life; and secondly, significantly, as an evocation of the golden age, a happier state of society now vanished. In his classic Gavagada, of 1915, one of the first Marathi attempts at an examination of the sociology and culture of the village in Maharashtra, T. N. Atre discusses the figure of Bali. Here Atre also brings out the potent symbolism in Maharashtrian culture of the life of the village, the tilling of the soil, and the figure of the kunbi himself, the labourer and provider. In a predominantly rural society, the idea of the land and the tiller of the soil, the labourer whose toil and sweat provided nourishment and support for all, would clearly evoke a strong sense of identification and loyalty. Atre describes the association of the kunbi with the figure of King Bali.

When one talks about the villages, the first things that spring to mind are the fields and the soil. When the word village is mentioned the mind is immediately pervaded by the ornaments of King Bali: fields, crops, grass, trees, cows, sheep, goats, shepherds, farmers, cowherds, canals, tanks, wells, the plough, the harrow, the wheel and the buckets from which the bullock draws water from the well. It seems inconceivable that anyone could live in a village unless they labour on the land. Without the kunbis, no one would have settled in the villages at all. It is they who produce the grain and provide for the sustenance of others. It is the kunbis who have taken up the burden of providing for the support and nourishment of the world, and so the people call the kunbis King Bali’. The Puranic story of how King Bali gave away the world to Vaman is very well known. There is no occupation like that of tilling the soil for building up the strength the Marathi word is bala] of the body, and all other castes agree that no caste is as strong as the kunbis. Therefore, perhaps as Brahmans are called pandita, so the kunbis are called Bali, meaning ‘possessed of strength’.¹⁰

In this way, King Bali, and the kunbi with whom he is identified, are associated with the classic quality of danshura, the virtues of strength, generosity and perseverance.

The figure of Bali was also associated in popular culture with a vanished golden age. This is most clearly expressed in the very common Marathi proverb ‘May all sorrows and troubles disappear and the Kingdom of Bali come’. This verse was repeated at the Dassara festival, and the marriage of a kunbi. As with Sivaji, Phule’s choice of the figure of Bali gave him access to already existing loyalties and enabled him to recruit these to his cause.

As well as incorporating symbols from popular culture, Phule also tried to reflect in the pavada social processes that already existed amongst the agricultural castes of western India, who formed an important part of Phule’s intended audience. Mention has already been made of the ambiguity of varna status in the local social structure. This applied particularly in the case of the kunbi-mali-Maratha complex of castes. The lack of any reliable quantitative evidence about processes of upward social mobility in this area makes it very difficult to generalize. But it is a fair summary of the evidence that is available to say that there was a very flexible boundary between the vast mass of ordinary kunbi families, who would have regarded themselves as sudra, and those who, although engaged in agriculture in a broadly similar way, regarded themselves as ‘pure’ Marathas and hence as kshatriya, by claiming a Rajput descent through the groups of families mentioned in the genealogies of the Maratha clans. It was a commonplace, expressed in the proverb kunbi mazala Maratha jhala ‘when a kunbi prospers he becomes a Maratha’ that with patience and money a kunbi might win his way into the smaller circles of assal Maratha families.¹¹

This process of upward social mobility did not involve a claim to the status of kshatriya in vacuo, but to that of Maratha kshatriya. The social position and attributes which were sought were drawn largely from the images and symbols of the local warrior and kingly traditions of the Marathas.¹²

Phule sought to reflect and employ these tensions in his pavada, and for this purpose the two figures of Sivaji and King Bali were ideal material. In Sivaji, Phule was able to depict all the tensions in the position of the kunbi-mali-Maratha caste group more generally. In his account of India’s ancient past through the figure of King Bali, he provided the means of resolving these tensions, in constructing a ‘historical basis for the virtual equation of the two social categories sudra and Maratha kshatriya. In claiming that all sudras and ati-sudras should rightfully call themselves Maratha kshatriyas, he was able to harness the impetus of an actually existing process of upward social mobility to quite unconventional and very radical ends. The resulting ambiguity in non-Brahman ideology was thereafter a great source of strength to the non-Brahman movement, and a source of weakness. While it allowed to some extent the retention of traditional loyalties and aspirations in a new radical guise, there was a possibility always of a slip back into a simple sanskritizing claim without the qualifying radicalism of Phule’s own thought.

Phule opens the poem with an abhang. Here, the mythical stories of the battle between King Bali, the protector of the cultivator and the common man, and the Brahman Parashuram are recited as actual historical fact from which stemmed the present-day oppressions of the low castes and untouchables.

The child of the great warrior kshatriyas;
in the tretayuga in the time of the Yavanas
By nature courageous, they feared him in battle;
he fought ceaselessly for his country
Such a great power afflicted Parashuram sorely;
twenty-one times, one after the other
Such great warriors were called great enemies;
they made the sons of the twiceborn tremble
Deny them learning when they were broken;
they called them mahar and mang
Fearful they took revenge of the conquered enemy;
like a snake, the son of ingratitude. ¹³

Although Phule does not argue it explicitly–indeed had he done so the parallel would have lost much of its effectiveness-it seems that what he is trying to achieve here is a conflation of the figures of Baliraja and Sivaji, and through this to assimilate Sivaji to a tradition of great non-Brahman rulers and protectors of the common man. Both are great leaders of the sudra-kshatriyas, both fight to save Maharashtra from an external enemy and its alien culture. In this abhang Phule is clearly talking about King Bali, as he makes obvious by referring to the struggle between Parashuram and the kshatriyas in the third age, or Tretayuga. But the parallel with Sivaji is evident, and continues through the pavada. In the short prose introduction to the work, Phule goes straight to the point as to its purpose–that it may be useful to the kunbis, malis, mangs and mahars, the ruined kshatriyas’.¹⁴ He explains that he has been careful to write it in language that will appeal to these classes. He links the subject of the pavada directly with his own worldview, by recounting the origins of the caste system in the Aryan invasions, the persecutions of the kshatriyas by Parashuram and his designation of an untouchable caste of those who opposed him most determinedly, and the institutionalization of all these divisions by later Brahman rulers in a body of fictional religious writings which were claimed to be the word of God. ¹⁵

Phule begins the poem with the refrain:

I sing the pavada of Bhosle, the jewel of the kulavadis,
Of Chhatrapati Sivaji.¹⁶

Here Phule identifies Sivaji directly with the kunbis, through the term kulavadi. In Gulamgiri he derived the first term from the second, apparently a fairly common interpretation. He continues, proceeding now to varna status:

The patron of the kunbis he gives the sacred thread to his caste brothers, The destroyer of the Muslims¹⁷

Here Phule makes what is perhaps a more overt reference than before to the kind of social mobility which his worldview makes possible for those who accept it. This is, of course, of a very unconventional kind, and one which was not likely to be accepted on the same terms as ordinary sanskritization. It was sanskritization in name; as it has been argued, Phule probably hoped to reflect objective social processes. But the claim to kshatriya status in Phule’s scheme simultaneously did away with the whole varnashramdharma scheme that lay behind it, and replaced it with a radical reinterpretation based on history, that converted such a claim into a more general assertion on the part of the lower caste community that the meaning of the local cultural tradition was a non-Brahman one, and social status defined in non-Brahman terms.

This aspect of Phule’s scheme was always likely to remain ambiguous when translated into social reality. As it has been argued, there was the danger of its being used to assert a conventional kshatriya status for élite non-Brahman castes; indeed the 1890s saw a whole flood of literature claiming kshatriya status for the Marathas, some of it produced by Phule’s erstwhile colleagues, a danger of which Phule was sharply aware ¹⁸ On the other hand, the offer of a kshatriya status, albeit an unconventional one, was clearly an important element in the popular appeal of Phule’s programme, but one which might have remained a mere theoretical assertion unless it was more directly connected with existing processes of upward social mobility. In the claim that the common cultivator could share in the kshatriya status of his caste brother Sivaji, Phule, it seems, was trying to bridge this gap, to connect his scheme with conventional social aspirations, but to place them in a very different context.

Having described the beauties of the baby Sivaji in quite conventional terms, Phule inserts an episode which appears to be entirely of his own creation. His mother, Jijabai, leads him into the garden, sits him down and tells him the story of their ancestors, the kshatriyas of pre-Aryan India. In this account, the country’s weakness before the Muslims is ascribed to the previous Brahman persecution of the martial races, and Sivaji’s anger against the Muslims arises when he sees that this is the second time that his country has suffered in this way.

With devotion to her husband
she led her son into the garden
She sat him in the shade of a tree
She recalled for him the memory of his ancestors
Tears filled her eyes
The lords of the land destroyed
She told him what had happened originally.
Because they were living in the lands [kshetra] they were called kshatriyas
On the land they lived happily Robbers from other countries came to the Himalayas
They stayed hidden

He describes the defeat of the kshatriyas at their hands, led by Brahma and Parashuram, and the fate of those who resisted them:

King Brahma became their leader, by whom the laws were made
He then created the divisions [bheda]
After his death, Parashuram ran amok
He tormented the remaining kshatriyas
Becoming mangs and mahars many were driven into exile
The Brahman was said to be immortal.¹⁹

Jijabai describes to him the great happiness of the pre-Aryan kshatriyas, ‘your forefathers’, their destruction and the subsequent victory of the Muslims in India. She recounts the sufferings of the Hindus at the hands of the Muslims:

They left Kabul, they crossed the river
They wore beards, they tortured the Hindus
They cut off the Brahman’s shendi, they offended their sensibilities
They broke their idols, they knocked down their temples
They broke their carvings and smashed their caves
They had a taste for beef and wouldn’t touch the pig
They harrassed Khandoba in the Jejuri fort
The bees were let loose and they were thwarted ²⁰
They remove the images and send them to Kabul
They cut the woods and loot the villages
They besiege castles, setting up ladders
Defeat the Hindus and attack dharma.²¹

Here, Phule strikes a rather unusual note. As a rule he is very favourable to other religions, particularly monotheistic ones, and he usually stresses the community of men rather than their religious differences; while his deprecation of the attacks on the Brahman, on idols and temples, and on dharma seems rather out of character. It may be that what Phule is trying to do here is to arouse more overtly pro-Hindu’ sympathy than he is used to dealing with, in order to strengthen the attractions of Sivaji- but it is of course a lower caste and unorthodox Sivaji which he presents. Having aroused more conventional ‘Hindu’ sympathies, Phule presents his own version of the source of Sivaji’s inspiration:

As his mother’s teaching was impressed upon his mind,
his rage against the Yavanas grew,
And he made his plan to fight them.²²

Phule repeats these themes as he describes Sivaji’s first ventures. Having gathered the men of the maval, he captured the fort of Torna and planted the flag of the Hindus. But again Phule separates this from a more Brahman-centred view of Sivaji, denying that his Brahman teacher, Ramdas, had any great influence on him:

Who should be the guru of the fish that play in the water?²³

He recounts the exploits of Sivaji in the maval: of the capture of Sinhagad, Purandar, Rajmachi, Lohagad and Tikona, strategic forts in the rugged terrain to the south and west of Poona. In this invocation of names, all of them a familiar part of the landscape of western Maharashtra, it is almost as though Phule is conjuring up for his reader each part of the land itself, to endow it with a new significance, evoking the exploits of the soldier-cultivators of western Maharashtra and the glories of their leader, Sivaji. Phule dwells at length on Sivaji’s unequalled power:

For four years there was no controlling Sivaji
The son was devoted to his father
He killed Chandrarao Mora and took Javali
He took another fort, Vasota,
He built Pratapgad and made someone there peshwa
He devised new titles
He sent threatening letters to those who treated him dishonourably
He sent his men to loot
By a back road they went quietly to Ahmadnagar
They looted elephants and horses
Fine clothes, jewels, gold coins -no price could be set on the riches
He took the Bargir into his service
He took forts on the sea shore and started keeping boats
He took the Pathans under him.²⁴

In this description of the exploits and successes of their leader, it is as though Phule is inviting his sudra readers to experience the same sense of power vicariously, to assert that despite their lowly rank in the present scale of social and religious values, there had been a time when no opponent could stand before them, the memory of which should create a bitter dissatisfaction with present-day society. Having described the famous encounter between Sivaji and Afzul Khan, the prolonged fight with Siddhi Johar, and the brave stand made by Murarji Baji Prabhu and the mavalis, Phule dismisses another potential source of Brahman influence on Sivaji:

He made Ramdas his guru only in order to win the love of the people.²⁵

After a description of Aurangzeb, Phule then inserts a short passage that resembles a simple abhang in form. This introduces, apparently quite suddenly, the subject of the divine, the creator and preserver of the universe. In the introduction he had referred to the workings of the divine in human affairs. “The supreme being [Phule uses the term Bhagavan], the creator of the world, who watches over the whole world and who gives wisdom to all, felt pity for us poor sudras, so he made his most beloved children, the English, into rulers, and sent them to India to free us kshatriyas from the snares of the Brahman devils”.²⁶

Phule then continues with this theme and presents a view of the divine nature in keeping with his position as a political activist:

The first and eternal one; the cause of all Life and death; he gives sustenance
Only he can save; only he can strike down He watches over everything; the cause of all movement
Constant care; he gives direction I will look into the past;
I will reflect in my mind Pronouncing the name; the life of the world
Keep your balance and seek
Understand the meaning and cut your bonds.²⁷

Here, then, in his most explicit reference to the place of the religious in human affairs, Phule does not use the figure of Sivaji to enjoin the protection of the particular religious form of Hinduism in the way that the more conventional writers also examined here employ him. As the basis of man’s religious life, Phule puts forward the diametrically opposite idea of a unitary deity who, in his power and justice, transcends all social and religious arrangements. His justice manifests itself as providence in human affairs, but he is immeasurably removed from them: beside his great majesty and power, particular human religious arrangements appear arbitrary and insignificant, the products of self-interest and delusion. This, it seems to me, is the contrast which Phule attempts to convey here. Moreover, the very freedom which this distance between the divine and the merely human social order allows to the human individual, acts as an injunction upon him to use his powers of reason and rational criticism to reconstruct his social world. This freedom is conditioned only by the justice inherent in the divine nature. In the last four lines of the section, then, the poet urges his readers to reflect upon their own condition, to look into the past the view of the past which Phule had presented earlier in the pavada –and to cut the bonds of the present.

Thus Phule produces a very skilful integration of social and religious polemic and, in the very vehicle later employed to put forward the particular and relativist claims of orthodox Hindu religion, he places his own notions of an eternal and universal deity as the ground of man’s religious life.²⁸

After the alliance with Bijapur and the despatch of Shaista Khan to deal with Sivaji, Phule describes his daring venture into the city of Poona and the raid on the Khan’s house. Here he describes Sivaji’s forces as Marathas, emphasizing his identification of the term with the non-Brahman community, rather than with all Marathi-speaking Hindus. This is followed by a description of the despatch of Dilir Khan and Jay Singh against Sivaji, and the magnificent defence of Purandar against the former by Baji Prabhu and his mavali forces.

The force of the deshis strikes at the robbers
By their attack the Mughal is driven back
Baji assembles his mavalis, takes his sword in his hand
Attacking he smites the Mughal
The Mogul flees, turning his back upon the mavalis
See, the brave men are afraid of a mouse.²⁹

It is clear in all this that Phule prefers to emphasize Sivaji as the man of action, the leader of the deshis and mavalis, rather than as the wise statesman and administrator, deliberating with his Brahman counsellors. He makes great play with the daring escape of Sivaji and his son from Delhi:

The Mughal thought that Sivaji had lost hope
He congratulated himself
The father and son lie in the baskets instead of the bread
The rest they leave to the servant
Making haste the servants take the baskets
They do the marvellous deed at night
They leave Delhi and set Sivaji free
They carried out the plan
In the morning the Mughal gnashed his teeth
He sent the Majam after him
He outwitted Aurangzeb; he took to horseback with his son
He put his son in front; he pretended to be a gosavi
They turned night into day; they reached Raigad
He bowed at his mother’s feet.

Phule then returns to the theme of Sivaji’s power, the awe in which all rulers stood of him:

The ruler of Hyderabad; the ruler of Bijapur
They trembled at him; they pay great tribute
He holds his durbar; he sits in thought
He makes good laws for his armies. ³⁰

Phule runs through the other standard episodes of Sivaji’s career, the assault on Sinhagad with Tanaji Malusre, the second sack of Surat, the levy of cauth in Khandesh, the exploits of Gujar and Moroba Pathan, the defeat of the next Muslim commander sent against him, Khan Jehan. In all of these, Phule emphasizes the bravery of the men of Sivaji’s army and the latter’s skill as a warrior, and the great power wielded by them together.

The meaning of Sivaji’s career for Phule, then, does not lie in any direct formula, such as the protection of the symbols of orthodox Hindu religion, the cow and the Brahman, from the Muslims, or the establishment of an independent Hindu empire. Instead, he uses Sivaji’s career as a vehicle for a much more general purpose, to convey an idea of the glorious martial past of the lower castes of western Maharashtra. From this past, the lower castes might draw the inspiration needed for their present struggles against the religious and secular powers of Brahmans in Maharashtra, and they might be led to see the essential community of all low castes in such a struggle. As it has been suggested, this in turn recalls the more ancient martial past of the sudras under King Bali, so that the Muslim invasion appears not primarily as a threat to the Hindu religion, but as a repetition of a previous invasion by an alien social and religious power. In this way, the ‘meaning’ of Sivaji’s career becomes the inheritance of the tradition of Bali, in the leadership of the sudra-kshatriyas, and the whole pavada takes on a double dimension. Phule draws all this together most effectively in the song sung by Sivaji’s followers at his death, which combines a powerful emotional appeal with the most precise polemic:

Speak to us, maharaj, why do you not speak
With your companions, your mavali troops, you waged war freely
You suffered heat and thirst; you had no fear of the rain
You wandered the hills and valleys; you brought the Yavana to his knees
You plundered many lands; you made our race great
With deep wisdom you fought; performed marvellous deeds on the earth
Although you gathered riches, you spent them wisely
You shared them with your soldiers–you had no love for wealth
Clever and attentive you forswore idleness
The small and the great troops-you never forgot them
King first among the Kshetrias (the sudras of the Deccan) you were without equal.

Phule emphasizes Sivaji’s concern with the tillers of the soil, the parallel to Maharashtra’s martial tradition, reflected in the figures of King Bali and Sivaji, the tiller of the land and its protector. He gave life to the peasants He does not deprive the rayats of their happiness; he passes new regulations Both great and small have redress; no one suffers oppression.³¹

Here, Phule fuses a sense of celebration at Sivaji’s marvellous exploits, his identification with the common man, the soldier and the tiller of the soil, and the simultaneous vision of this same common man as the original master of the land. It is a cry from the heart of the leaderless sudra of the present, in protest at the contrast between the greatness he had once known and his present rank as the servant of the other three varnas. At the end of the pavada Phule’s polemic becomes most explicit: With the aid of English learning I call myself the son of a Kshetria This puts to flight the schemes of Brahma Jotirao Phule sings of the son of the Kshudras, The chief and master of the peshwas.³²

From the identification with the tradition of Bali, Phule passes to a direct description of the tyranny of the Brahmans in the present, appealing to the figurehead of colonial power:

Oh Queen, you have the power;
Hindusthan is asleep
Everywhere, there is the rule of the Brahmans; open your eyes and see
In the small villages, the kulkarnis are the masters of the pen
In the mahals they hold great offices; thus they have high authority Like Yama, the mamledar gives the sudras ceaseless punishment
The poor foolish collector stands before the cunning chitnis
How great is the authority of the Brahmans in the revenue departments
The Bhats are everywhere; the kunbis have no redress
Joti says, we run for help, release us from these evils. ³³

Phule’s presentation of the life of Sivaji, therefore, attempts to convey a general sense of the achievements of the lower caste community, and to identify this with the history of Maharashtra itself. Other comparable accounts of Sivaji, by writers from quite different areas of society in Maharashtra form a strong contrast. It is interesting to note the short review of the pavada that appeared in the literary journal Vividhadnyan Vistar, to which Phule had evidently sent a copy of the poem.

The pavada on raja chhatrapati Sivaji. A copy of this has come to us. The author is some Mr Jotirao Govindrao Phule or other. When we read this book, we thought that to accept it would bring sheer disgrace upon the great and courageous Sivaji, and upon all Hindu people. We have no idea of the author’s address, so we are afraid that we are unable to send it back to him.³⁴

The hostility of the review may have had something to do with Phule’s later veiled references to the ‘vividhadnayani’ Chitpavan Brahmans about which he wrote in his mock letter to Parashuram in Gulamgiri; the term vividhadnyani of course, means ‘possessed of different sorts of knowledge and forms also part of the title of the journal, which translated means ‘A spread of different sorts of knowledge’.

It was not until the end of the 1870s that the interpretation of Sivaji’s career for contemporary ideological purposes really gathered momentum, which makes comparison with Phule’s work, published in 1869, somewhat difficult. One of the earliest attempts to write about Sivaji in this way was made by Gopal Hari Deshmukh, writing in the Prabhakar of 28 May 1848. Examining the different varieties of revolt against political authority, he argues that Sivaji’s war against the Mughals constituted ‘rajyasudharana’, a concern for the good of the state, and not merely a mutiny for the sake of gain. Lokahitavadi here presents Sivaji as the instrument by which political power was restored to Hindus as such, while he uses the term ‘Maratha’ to denote all Marathi-speaking Hindus, in contrast to Phule’s more specialized meaning. ³⁵ Apart from Phule’s work, there were few other accounts until the 1870s.

In 1871, Ramchandra Bhikaji Gunjikar published his Mocangad, an historical novel set in Sivaji’s time, but which is centred around a series of fictitious characters in one of the hill forts of the Deccan, ending with the capture of the fort by Sivaji. In 1873, Ganesh Sastri Lele published a life of Sivaji in verse, which was followed by another in 1874 by Kesav Laksman Jorvekar. ³⁶ But the pieces which seem to me to present the most useful contrasts to Phule’s work are published slightly later, when the figure of Sivaji was beginning to be taken up as a symbol of the independence of Maharashtra and of Hindus more generally, in which the idea of the integration of the masses of the people into a collective political whole, which Hans Kohn identifies as one of the distinguishing marks of nationalism, formed a central subject of polemic and debate.³⁷ These pieces are the life of Sivaji by Rajaramsastri Bhagavat, a reformist Karhada Brahman, published in 1889, and a piece of Ekanatha Annaji Josi entitled “The advice given by Dadoji Kondadev to Sivaji Maharaj published in 1877, to which Phule seems later to refer, as the work of a dichard Brahman.

Rajaramsastri Bhagavat

Rajaramsastri Bhagavat was a prolific essayist and much of his work was published in the Vividhadnyan Vistar, which had rejected Phule’s pavada some years earlier with such adverse comment. Bhagavat combined the career of a Professor of Sanskrit at St Xavier’s College, Bombay, with that of an active social reformer. He was greatly concerned with the condition of the low castes. He questioned the division of society upon the basis of birth, and advocated interdining and intermarriage. He presented an interesting contrast with Phule, it seems to me, because he combined this social reformism with a view of the history and culture of Maharashtra which Phule would almost certainly have rejected. Bhagavat expressed his interpretation of Maharashtra’s society and history in two works apart from his life of Sivaji Maharashtra dharma, published in 1895, and Marathya sambandhi Car Udgar, ‘A Few Words about the Marathas’, published in 1887. This view stresses the harmony and co-operation which existed between all castes in Maharashtra, and was indeed the defining quality of its culture, responsible for its periods of greatness. Bhagavat also asserts the existence of a pool of common social and religious culture, the integration of the all-India worldview of classical Hinduism into a distinctive local religious tradition, largely through the work of the saint poets. This pool of common culture at the local level, which transcends the boundaries of caste, he expressed in the term Maharashtramandal, the

Source: TW