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At any rate, Tilak brought Shivaji to the forefront and set in motion a great "national" propaganda which culminated in 1895 in the celebration at all the chief centres of Brahman activity in the Deccan of Shivaji's reputed birthday, the principal commemoration being held under Tilak's own presidency at Raighar, where the Mahratta chieftain had himself been crowned.
Leaving for a moment the direct path, which climbs to the crest of the hill past the Buddhist caves and cisterns, we walk along a dainty terrace lined with champak and sandalwood trees and passing under a carved stone gateway halt before the shrine dedicated to Shivaji's family goddess.
Khadilkar, had lost nothing of its vitriolic pungency in his absence. The celebration with renewed pomp in 1900 of Shivaji's "birthday" at Raighar marked the resumption of Tilak's operations.
I remember how one moonlit evening we went up this river in a little boat. We stopped at one of Shivaji's old hill forts, and stepping ashore found our way into the clean-swept little yard of a peasant's home. We sat on a spot where the moonbeams fell glancing off the top of the outer enclosure, and there dined off the eatables we had brought with us.
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.
With the Ganpati celebrations the area of Tilak's propaganda was widely increased. But the movement had yet to be given a form which should directly appeal to the fighting instincts of the Mahrattas and stimulate active disaffection by reviving memories of olden times when under Shivaji's leadership they had rolled back the tide of Musulman conquest and created a Mahratta Empire of their own.
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.
Whether it was actually upon the rough walls of this small chamber that Shivaji's eyes first rested is open to considerable doubt, and probably they are but a small portion of a once spacious mansion which covered the surrounding area, now relic-strewn and desolate, and in which the family of the chieftain resided.
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:
Some say it was this letter which first inspired Tilak with the idea of reviving Shivaji's memory and converting it into a living force.
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