Shivaji THE GRAND REBEL

Shivaji THE GRAND REBEL An Impression of Shivaji Founder of the Maratha Empire

Dennis Kincaid

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“That Grand Rebel Sevagee….” East India Company Correspondence (passim).

“Aurangzebe used to call Sevagi the Mountain Rat; and we have often wondered what affinity there could be to give occasion for his Epithet… but we have now found in Brett’s Feyjoo a description of the properties of which Feyjoo calls the Rat of India, that makes the appellation applied to Sevaji a compliment and very characteristic of his military policy. However, we must not be sure that Aurangzebe had this animal in his idea, until we know whether it exists in India Proper.” Orme.

Contents

Preface ix Prologue xi 1. Part One Childhood and Youth 1 2. Part Two Rebel 35 3. Part Three Chiefftain 87 4. Part Four King 203 Authorities 246 Endnotes 248

Preface

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ost English people have heard of the Moguls as almost the traditional pre-British rulers of India. They then find it puzzling that the earlier heroes of Anglo-Indian biography apparently never oppose any Moguls but are constantly in difficulties with the Marathas. They are perhaps reminded of their readings in Roman history at school when they find the stage occupied permanently by the Romans, to whom enter in turn a number of outlandish characters called Pyrrhus, Mithridates or Jugurtha just in time to receive their coup de grace. What they were doing behind the scenes before responding to their cue is left obscure. Similarly, in the history of India various tribes or kingdoms labelled Marathas only appear for the first time when clearly working up for chastisement. Such of their chiefs who were so unfortunate as to oppose Anglo-Indian celebrities are generally reprobated as rebels; their names, which Victorian writers made earnest but incorrect attempts to spell, provide an easy target for such sprightly historians of to-day as Mr. Guedalla, who are entertained by the un-English sound of them. But just as at school one’s curiosity was often piqued less by the

•  Preface x

inevitable Romans than by their unsuccessful opponents, many people must have vaguely wondered about these Marathas; the rise of whose power was exactly contemporaneous with the appearance of the English in India; who destroyed the Mogul Empire and disputed with both English and French for the mastery of a subcontinent; who once more opposed the English in the Mutiny, providing in Nana Sahib the cleverest and in the Princess of Jhansi the best and bravest, of the revolutionary leaders; and from whom have sprung rulers of such deserved repute as Princess Ahalyabai of Indore and the present Gaekwar of Baroda, and dynasties as devoted to the Empire as Gwalior and Kolhapur. This book is a study of the founder of the Maratha state whose memory inspired the rise of modern Hindu Nationalism, a man for whom a majority of Hindus entertain much the same sentiment as the Germans for Frederick the Second and the Italians for Garibaldi, and whom the Marathas adore as more than human.

Prologue

The Marathas

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he Marathas are the people who inhabit the triangular province of India known as Maharashtra, the base of the triangle lying upon the sea-coast from Daman to Karwar and the apex running inland to Nagpur. This territory is divided from north to south by a range of mountains, the Western Ghats. To the west of these mountains the country is low lying, fertile and damp; to the east it is dry and largely barren, pockets of earth alternating with outcrops of bare rock. The true home of those clansmen who built the Maratha power is in the country just under the eastern shadow of the Ghats, the narrow valleys bounded by spurs of the great hills. Until the lifetime of Shivaji there was no specifically Maratha state nor any sense of Maratha nationality. The kings of Central and Western India throughout the early and middle ages had their chief towns in the Maratha country, and the people of that country shared in the extraordinary prosperity of Western India in the first three centuries of our era. Trade with Europe was brisk; there were Greek merchants in all the coast towns and

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Greek mercenaries at the courts of local princes. In the fifth and sixth centuries these princes exchanged envoys with Sassanian Persia and constructed the astounding rock-temples of Ajanta. But away from the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the courts and the commercial centres, the character of the Maratha people would appear to have been then much the same as it is to-day or was in the time of Shivaji. A Chinese visitor of the seventh century thus described them: – “Their manners are simple and honest. They are proud and reserved. If any one is kind to them, he can be sure of their gratitude, but if any one injures them they will take their revenge. They will risk their lives to wipe out dishonour. If any one in distress appeals to them, they will lay aside all thought of self in their anxiety to help. Even if they have an insult to avenge, they never fail to warn their enemy. In battle, if they pursue the fugitives they always spare all who surrender…. These men love study and there are many heretics among them.” Shortly after this visitor returned home an Arab prince from Irak led an army up the Indus and in 720 annexed the lower Indus province to the Caliphate of Bagdad. It was the first instalment of the Mussulman advance. The Hindu Kingdoms of the north were reduced one by one, the size of India being so great that the various states found it even harder to combine against the Mussulman invader than European nations in the time of Pius II. The earlier supersession of Buddhism with its cosmopolitan culture and international affiliations by the revival of the national religion of Hinduism had led to the cultural isolation of central and southern Indian States. Now the Mussulman conquests broke the trade-links with north and west. The courts

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of princes in the Maratha country became less showy and more provincial. Marathi began to emerge as a language distinct from its neighbours. 1290 saw the first considerable Marathi work, a translation of the sacred Gita. Exactly four years later the Afghan invasion of the Maratha country began. By 1313 the conquest was complete and the Marathas had to wait for three and a half centuries before Shivaji restored to them their independence. If the Mussulman conquest retarded the emergence of a Maratha state, it welded the Maratha people together in attachment to their religion; which began to centre increasingly round the cult of local saints, followers of Krishna and preachers of salvation through discipline and sacrifice. This religion of the Maratha country has little in common with the estatic and Cybelic cults of some parts of India over which foreign critics have wasted so much virtuous indignation. Nor are even those either characteristic of, or inevitable in, Hinduism; they are only as relevant to an estimate of that faith as the temple-conditions of Corinth to an estimate of the religion of the Greeks. Hinduism is the last remaining branch of the great religion of the Archaic Culture that was the ancestor, through Sumeria and Egypt and Crete, of the western world. Whereas in the West the irruption of the Aryan barbarians disturbed the equilibrium of the Archaic religion by a supersession of gods of forest and cave by sky-gods and hero-gods, in India the Aryan effect was transitory. If the world of the Indian epics resembles that of Homer, the air of a lonely village to-day is, once more, that of the cities of the Indus civilization; the same sense of nature, the cult of the genius loci, the worship of the snake and fertility fetish, the peaceful fatalism, the enormous respect for woman. One must remember

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that behind the feudal chivalry of the Rajputs, the facade of prosperous courts influenced by the Aryan ideal or by new clan traditions from the steppes, the quiet, intense life of the Hindu village continued in an unbroken tradition from Harappa till now. The Marathas, reacting from their domination by Mongol, Arab and Turk, emerged suddenly as a military people; but they drew their strength from the continuity of deep-founded traditions and from a certain solidity of character which has remained curiously unchanged. The description, quoted above, of a Chinese visitor in the seventh century might well be that of an English visitor to-day.1 Indeed, Englishmen and Marathas often discover a great mutual sympathy. The fight for control of India at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries was mainly between these two people. It required three wars to break the Maratha power. Yet you find less resentment and bitterness against the conqueror in those wars among Marathas than perhaps among any other people in India. The services of Maratha princes and Maratha soldiers in the Great War offer some proof of that. When you are wandering in the Maratha hills you chance upon a war memorial in some tiny hamlet; and it is moving to read that, say, eleven men went from that village (probably so small a place that you are surprised that it could send so many able-bodied men to the Army) to serve in Irak. Many of these village lads were at Kut. Very few men, once taken prisoner, returned or were heard of again. The clean-fighting Turk saw to that. Marathas are generally dark with firm, bronze- coloured flesh. Their figures are square and sturdy. They wear to-day, in

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their villages, much the same dress that their ancestors did a century or two centuries ago, a short divided skirt reaching to the knees and a jacket tied across the chest with coloured tape; a flat turban, generally red; sandals or red shoes, often carried in the hand for economy’s sake; and in wet weather a heavy dark cloak enveloping the body and flung over one shoulder. They are fastidious in cleanliness and pride themselves on the orderly neatness of their houses, the well-scrubbed floors, the freshlyplastered walls and the row of polished brass vessels in the kitchen. They are proverbial for their shame of acknowledging poverty. A Maratha who has only one penny left will spend that on butter to smear on his fingers and then sit at the door of his house washing his hands to give his neighbours the impression that he has just dined sumptuously.2 Their women are free of speech and notably outspoken; purdah being unknown among them. Indeed the Maratha woman is proverbial for her courage and endurance and for a peculiarly biting wit. She will readily talk even with a stranger or foreigner, but he should beware of her sharpening her wit on him, while her menfolk stand round shaking with merriment; at the same time she will not resent a retort, however sharp, and when the laugh is turned against her she will enjoy the joke at her expense as well as any one. She is seldom of striking beauty but her figure is sometimes of extraordinary elegance and symmetry. Her dress, the long Maratha sari, folded and worn with traditional care, falls with the grace of a Tanagra figurine’s chiton. The Maratha village centres round the village temple; often an old, finely-carved shrine shaded with silver-grey pipal trees.