A History of the Mahrattas v1.c5.s4.55

v1.c5.s4.55

Nor again was the success of the Marāthī poets, from Jnānadēv to Srīdhar, in overcoming the prejudices of caste anything more than partial and temporary. Far more efficacious than the devotional teaching of the poets in suppressing caste-exclusiveness and fostering a sense of ‘nationhood’ was the rise to power of the Sūdra, Sivājī, and his constant association with himself in the task of political and military administration of men who, in many instances, were not Brahmans. With Prabhus acting as his civil and military officials, with Marāthās and Bandhāris forming the bulk of his forces, with Kolīs or Rāmosīs acting as his comrades in hazardous enterprises, and with Mahārs and Māngs holding his hill-forts, the general mass of the people must have obtained a clearer and more practical idea of a common nationality and the limitations of an exclusive caste-system than they could ever have obtained, wholly illiterate as they were, from the public repetition of quotations from the *abhangas* of Tukārām or Nāmdēv. And when Sivājī’s descendants degenerated into a line of royal phantoms and the Pēshwās usurped all power, the ancient spirit of caste-exclusiveness reasserted itself with redoubled force, and the passionate cry of the Marāthī poet, ‘Find, O find, some means or other, To bring God and man together,’ was forgotten amid the caste-disputes and the class-intrigues of that era of Chitpāvan predominance. While accepting, therefore, all that admirers of the old Marāthī poetry claim for it as regards the truly reverent, spiritual and catholic character of its message, one cannot but point out that its influence at the time it was composed, upon the general population of Mahārāshtra cannot have been as great as is occasionally pretended, and that its power to mould the public mind did not survive the early days of Marāthā political dominance. ‘There was no attempt,’ says Professor J. Sarkar,¹ in reference to the character of the Marāthā State, ‘at well-thought-out, organized communal improvement, spread of education, or unification of the people, either under Shivaji or under the Pēshwās. The cohesion of the people in the Marāthā State was not organic, but artificial, accidental, and therefore precarious. It was solely dependent on the ruler’s extraordinary personality and disappeared when the country ceased to produce supermen.’