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Updated: May 19, 2025
Tukaram lived early in the sixteenth century, some years later than Lord Gauranga. This Maharashtra saint is chiefly remembered for his beautiful description of the effects of Illumination, in which he likens the human soul to the bride, and the bridegroom is God. This poem is called "Love's Lament," and might have been written by an impassioned lover to his promised bride.
He taught them, on the one hand, that India, and especially Maharashtra, the land of the Mahrattas, had been happier and better and more prosperous under a Hindu raj than it had ever been or could ever be under the rule of alien "demons"; and that if the British raj had at one time served some useful purpose in introducing India to the scientific achievements of Western civilisation, it had done so at ruinous cost, both material and moral, to the Indians whose wealth it had drained and whose social and religious institutions it had undermined, and on the other hand he held out to them the prospect that, if power were once restored to the Brahmans, who had already learnt all that there was of good to be learnt from the English, the golden age would return for gods and men.
The legends of Shivaji's prowess still lingered in Maharashtra, where the battlemented strongholds which he built crown many a precipitous crag of the Deccan highlands.
All Brahmans are not, of course, Chitpavans, but the Chitpavans supply an overwhelming majority of those Government officials, and their ascendency over every other Brahman sept in Maharashtra is undisputed.
It has played, and is conscious of having played, a conspicuous part in the history of India down to relatively recent times; and the Brahmans of Maharashtra, who were once its rulers, have preserved to the present day the instincts and the aspirations of a ruling race, combined with great force and subtleness of intellect.
Maharashtra, moreover, has historical traditions, by no means inglorious, of its own.
But in spite of such survivals, even in the sixth century Buddhism could not compete in southern India with either Jainism or Hinduism and there are no traces of its existence in the Deccan after 1150. For the Konkan, Maharashtra and Gujarat, Hsüan Chuang's statistics are fairly satisfactory.
But if Shivaji's memory still lived, it belonged to a past which was practically dead and gone. Only a few years, before an Englishman who had visited Shivaji's tomb had written to a local newspaper calling attention to the ruinous condition into which the people of Maharashtra had allowed the last resting-place of their national hero to fall.
A Chitpavan Brahman by birth, with the blood of the old dominant caste of Maharashtra in his veins, he has often been, both in the Viceroy's Legislative Council and in that of his own Presidency, a severe and even bitter critic of an alien Government, of which he nevertheless admits the benefit, and even the necessity, for India.
If amongst many Brahmans of Maharashtra hatred of the British is the dominant passion, amongst the Mahratta population at large whatever there is of racial and religious jealousy is mainly directed against the Mahomedans. This is partly, no doubt, a legacy of the old days of Mahomedan supremacy.
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