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Had Shivaji committed five or fifty crimes more terrible, I would have been equally ready to prostrate myself not once but one hundred times before the image of our lord Shivaji ... Every Hindu, every Mahratta must rejoice at this spectacle, for we too are all striving to regain our lost independence, and it is only by combination that we can throw off the yoke.
His sons had revolted against him, his sombre fanaticism had estranged from him the Rajput princes of whom Akbar had made the pillars of the Moghul throne, and though he had reduced to subjection the last of the independent Mahomedan kingdoms of India, he had exhausted his vast military resources in long and fruitless endeavours to arrest the growth of the new Mahratta power, to which Shivaji had not unsuccessfully attempted to rally the spiritual forces of disaffected Hinduism.
It was in a praiseworthy object that he murdered Afzul Khan for the good of others. If thieves enter our house and we have not strength to drive them out, should we not without hesitation shut them in, and burn them alive? Shivaji strove to drive them forth out of the land of his birth, but he was guiltless of the sin of covetousness. Do not circumscribe your vision like frogs in a well.
Kolhapur is the most important of the Native States under the charge of the Bombay Government, and its ruler is the only ruling Mahratta chief who can claim direct descent from the great Shivaji, the "Shivaji-Maharaj" whose cult Tilak made one of the central features of his political propaganda.
Nothing was better calculated to enlighten them than another feature introduced also from the Deccan into the "national" propaganda. In the Deccan the cult of Shivaji, as the epic hero of Mahratta history, was intelligible enough.
Nowhere can one measure as in Delhi the greatness of its fall, and its fall had begun before it ever came into conflict with the rising British power. It had been shaken to its foundations by the far more ancient power of Hinduism, which Islam had subdued but never destroyed. In the seventeenth century Shivaji, the hero still to-day of the Hindu revival of which Mr.
But in Bengal his name had been for generations a bogey with which mothers hushed their babies, and the Mahratta Ditch in Calcutta still bears witness to the terror produced by the daring raids of Mahratta horsemen. To set Shivaji up in Bengal on the pedestal of Nationalism in the face of such traditions was no slight feat, and all Mr.
He was the triumphant champion of Hindu orthodoxy, the high-priest of Ganesh, the inspired prophet of a new "nationalism," which in the name of Shivaji would cast out the hated mlencchas and restore the glories of Mahratta history.
Though we shall have to risk our lives in a national war, we shall assuredly shed the life-blood of our enemies. It was on the occasion of the Shivaji "coronation festivities" that the right nay, the duty to commit murder for political purposes was first publicly expounded. With Tilak in the chair, a Brahman professor got up to vindicate Shivaji's bloody deed:
There had been long minorities in Kolhapur, and, especially during the more or less nominal reign of the present Maharajah's predecessor, Shivaji IV., who ultimately went mad, the Prime Minister, a Chitpavan Brahman of Ratnagiri, acquired almost supreme power in the State, and filled every important post with his fellow caste men, of whom he introduced more than a hundred into the public service.
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