New History of the Marathas v1.c16.28

v1.c16.28

3. Shivaji and a Hindu Samrajya.—It is necessary to inquire whether Shivaji ever entertained a desire to found a Hindu empire for the whole of India. There is no knowing what would have happened if he had been vouchsafed the long life which his opponent Aurangzeb enjoyed, or at least if he had lived ten years longer than he did. His base was certainly broad enough to sustain any expansion of his small Maratha kingdom in the Deccan. He had practically subjected the territories south of the river Godavari. His main object was to win religious freedom and not territory. He certainly would have been foremost to defend the Hindu religion all over India. “*Hindavi-Swarajya*” was the title he has used for his national scheme in one of his letters (to Dādāji Naras Prabhu in 1645), meaning thereby that he wanted to strive for a Hindu religious autonomy for the whole country. Sambhāji in his Danapatra calls him *Haindava-dharma-Ud-dharaka*.³ Shivaji's famous letter to Aurangzeb breathes such a spirit. Although he died prematurely, his ideals did indeed continue to inspire his successors for more than a hundred years after him, particularly the Peshwas right upto the time of Mahadji Sindia, who tried to free the Hindu holy places of north India from Muslim control, and who indeed obtained from the Emperor Shah Alam a *firman* prohibiting the slaughter of cows throughout the country. Peshwa Bālāji Rāo in one of his letters boasts of being a true disciple of Shivaji, meaning that he followed the latter's ideals. Shivaji's levy of *Chauthai* and *Sardeshmukhi* was conceived in the spirit of an all-India instrument of expansion. A poet of Mirza Raja Jaysinh's court credits his patron with the feat of having “subjected kings like Shivaji who aspired to the imperial seat of Delhi.”⁴