In scripting this biography of Shivaji, I needed to sift by means of an unlimited assortment of papers, paperwork and books within the Marathi language. The vast majority of the Marathas’ personal information have been burnt throughout enemy assaults or destroyed by the Marathas themselves after Shivaji’s demise, as their battle with the Mughals intensified and because the Mughals underneath Aurangzeb took Raigad and different essential forts, the place the highest official paperwork have been saved.
No matter household papers nonetheless survived within the houses of some Marathas have been hidden by them after the tip of the Peshwa period in 1818 for concern of the brand new British rulers cracking down on them on suspicion of an anti-British conspiracy by these nonetheless owing their allegiance to the Maratha rulers. The British openly confiscated the information they discovered, not permitting the general public any entry to them.
However slowly, as nationwide consciousness grew within the late nineteenth century, an archival motion of kinds developed in western India, with its proponents urging households at hand over paperwork to historians who may protect and look at them, and concurrently interesting to the British Raj to open up the archives that they had hid. The efforts bore fruit.
Pioneering historian
The pioneering Maratha historian who led the archival motion was VK Rajwade. He painstakingly collected, on the flip of the century, twenty-one volumes of paperwork, mainly non-public papers of Maratha households and official state correspondence within the nature of orders or income preparations.
These are certainly priceless for any historian, and they also proved for me within the analysis, as did the supplies put collectively by generations of students of the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal of Pune like BG Paranjpe, DB Parasnis, KN Sane, KV Purandare, DV Apte, DV Kale and G.S. Sardesai. Sardesai’s eight volumes of Marathi Riyasat present an encyclopaedic view of Maratha historical past and of the lengthy Maratha-Mughal battle.
Throughout his time – broadly the primary half of the 20 th century – not solely students writing in Marathi, comparable to TS Shejwalkar, KV Keluskar, and VS Bendrey, but in addition these writing in English, apart from Sardesai himself – comparable to Jadunath Sarkar, MG Ranade, KT Telang, Bal Krishna, Surendra Nath Sen, CV Vaidya and HG Rawlinson – contributed handsomely to exploring Shivaji’s life and occasions. 5 modern-day historians stand out as their heirs – GH Khare, Setumadhavrao Pagadi, Narhar Kurundkar, AN Kulkarni and GB Mehendale (who wrote in each English and Marathi) – for his or her work checked out new discoveries and findings and interpreted them for the current era. But most of their writings stay accessible largely to students of historical past. It’s with a deep dept of gratitude that I’ve referred to their work extensively on this guide, in order that they will attain the twenty-first century reader curious to know and study Shivaji.
Earlier errors and omissions
The English works on Shivaji specifically, most of them printed within the first half of the 20 th century, endure from a surfeit of outdated materials. Jadunath Sarkar’s guide Shivaji and His Occasions is a living proof. For many years it was considered the usual English work on Shivaji. Sarkar, sadly, acquired a number of issues mistaken, most of which Marathi historians subsequently both identified or corrected with corroborative proof.
To offer an instance, Sarkar wrote that Shivaji had renamed the Kondhana fort as Sinhagad after one in all his closest lieutenants, Tanaji Malusare, was slain there throughout a spectacular assault on the Mughal garrison in 1670 and stated, ‘Gad aala, pan Sinha gela’ (The fort’s gained, however the lion’s lifeless). The legend made its method into textbooks and within the widespread creativeness in Maharashtra, and has been repeated endlessly, in ballads, cinema and the theatre.
The reality, although, is that Kondhana was at all times referred to as by its different identify of Sinhagad, and there are letters extant from earlier than Tanaji’s demise that point out the identify. It was exactly as a result of it was referred to as Sinhagad that Shivaji used the lion metaphor – and never the opposite method spherical.
Sarkar and most different English biographers of Shivaji, together with the British official Dennis Kincaid, additionally nearly completely uncared for two essential up to date works on Shivaji’s life. These works are by Shivaji’s officers and chroniclers Parmanand, who wrote Shivabharat, and Sabhasad, who wrote Sabhasad Bakhar. Their writings throw appreciable gentle on Shivaji’s life.
The precise phrases {that a} latest biographer of Thomas Cromwell used about his shut contemporaries writing about him could be utilized to Parmanand and Sabhasad: ‘We have to keep in mind that…they have been there,’ and ‘we have to respect their observations and comprehend their limitations and considerations.’ The overlooking of their texts has critically hindered writings on Shivaji’s life in English.
Translated information
Translations of Persian works and official paperwork and information of the Mughals, of the Nizam Shahi of Ahmadnagar, of Bijapur and of Golconda by Sarkar, GH Khare, Pagadi and lots of others helped me to document the viewpoint of Shivaji’s adversaries and to know how they perceived him and altered their perceptions of him and responses to him over time. Sarkar’s translation of paperwork within the Rajasthan archives helped to illumine components of Shivaji’s go to to Agra, his imprisonment and his escape.
The officers of the British East India Firm wrote copiously about their actions all throughout peninsular India within the seventeenth century, and so they recorded appreciable particulars about Shivaji and his actions, together with his two raids on Surat. I’ve critically examined their information for these particulars and for his or her typically adversarial and typically transactional perspective.
Equally, information of the Portuguese rulers of Goa and their officers, translated from the unique by the scholar PS Pissurlencar, and the diaries of the French official of Pondicherry Francois Martin on the time of Shivaji’s southern marketing campaign of the late 1670s offered uncommon and barely quoted accounts of Shivaji.
Apparently, the primary overseas biographer of Shivaji was a Portuguese man based mostly in Marmugao in Goa throughout his lifetime, Cosme da Guarda. Although his biography was printed in 1695, that’s, fifteen years after Shivaji’s demise, da Guarda had spoken to many individuals within the Deccan earlier than writing it, and it offers attention-grabbing insights into how Shivaji was seen by the folks of the area throughout that point and of latest discussions round his character, politics and his momentous conflict with Aurangzeb.
The Italian traveller Niccolao Manucci was a part of the Mughal military and had the chance to satisfy Shivaji and have conversations with him. He recorded a lot materials in his diaries which I’ve consulted and, the place related, quoted. Different European travellers and officers comparable to Francois Bernier, Jean de Thevenot and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier additionally left accounts, within the traditional European model of documenting most of what they have been observing round them. Their observations got here in useful at occasions the place the account was believable and the proof supportive; their flights of fancy, as certainly these of all of the others, Sabhasad and Parmanand included, I’ve roundly rejected.
