Shivaji and His Times c19.s2: §2. Causes of Shivaji's failure to build an enduring State
Shivaji and His Times c19.s2
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§2. Causes of Shivaji's failure to build an enduring State
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Why did Shivaji fail to create an enduring State? Why did the Maratha people stop short of the final accomplishment of their union and dissolve before they had consolidated into an absolutely compact political body?
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An obvious cause was, no doubt, the shortness of his reign, barely ten years after the final rupture with the Mughals in 1670. But this does not furnish the true explanation of his failure. It is doubtful if with a very much longer time at his disposal he could have averted the ruin which befell the Maratha State under the Peshwas, for the same moral canker was at work among his people in the 17th century as in the 18th. The first danger of the new Hindu kingdom established by him in the Deccan lay in the fact that the national glory and prosperity resulting from the victories of Shivaji and Baji Rao I. created a reaction in favour of Hindu orthodoxy; it accentuated caste distinction and ceremonial purity of daily rites which ran counter to the homogeneity and simplicity of the poor and politically depressed early Maratha society. Thus, his political success sapped the main foundation of that success.
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In the security, power and wealth engendered by their independence, the Marathas of the 18th century forgot the past record of Muslim persecution; the social grades turned against each other. The Brahmans living east of the Sahyadri range despised those living west, the men of the hills despised their brethren of the plains, because they could now do so with impunity. The head of the State, though a Brahman, was despised by his Brahman servants belonging to other branches of the caste,—because the first Peshwa's great-grandfather's great-grandfather had once been lower in society than the Desh Brahmans' great-grandfathers' great-grandfathers! While the Chitpavan Brahmans were waging social war with the Deshastha Brahmans, a bitter jealousy raged between the Brahman ministers and governors and the Kayastha secretaries. We have unmistakable traces of it as early as the reign of Shivaji. "Caste grows by fission." It is antagonistic to national union. In proportion as Shivaji's ideal of a Hindu swaraj was based on orthodoxy, it contained within itself the seed of its own death. As Rabindranath Tagore remarks:
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"A temporary enthusiasm sweeps over the country and we imagine that it has been united; but the rents and holes in our body-social do their work secretly; we cannot retain any noble idea long.
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Shivaji aimed at preserving the rents; he wished to save from Mughal attack a Hindu society to which ceremonial distinctions and isolation of castes are the very breath of life. He wanted to make this heterogeneous society triumphant over *all* India! He wove ropes of sand; he attempted the impossible. It is beyond the power of any man, it is opposed to the divine law of the universe, to establish the swaraj of such a caste-ridden, isolated, internally-torn sect over a vast continent like India."*
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Shivaji and his father-in-law Gaikwar were *Marathas*, *i.e.*, members of a despised caste. Before the rise of the national movement in the Deccan in the closing years of the 19th century, a Brahman of Maharashtra used to feel insulted if he was called a Maratha. "No," he would reply with warmth, "I am a *Dakshina* Brahman." Shivaji keenly felt his humiliation at the hands of the Brahmans to whose defence and prosperity he had devoted his life. Their insistence on treating him as a Shudra drove him into the arms of Balaji Avji, the leader of the Kayasthas, and another victim of Brahmanic pride. The Brahmans felt a professional jealousy for the intelligence and literary powers of the Kayasthas, who were their only rivals in education and Government service, and consoled themselves by declaring the Kayasthas a low-caste not entitled to the Vedic rites and by proclaiming a social boycott of Balaji Avji who had ventured to invest his son with the sacred thread. Balaji naturally sympathized with his master and tried to raise him in social estimation by engaging Gaga Bhatta who "made Shivaji a pure Kshatriya." The high-priest showed his gratitude to Balaji for his heavy retainer by writing a tract [or rather two] in which the Kayastha caste was glorified, but without convincing his contemporary Brahmans.[*]
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∗ From his *Rise and Fall of the Sikh Power*, as translated by me in *Modern Review*, April 1911.
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There was no attempt at well-thought-out organized communal improvement, spread of education or
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∗ Nor has he succeeded in convincing posterity. In 1916 Mr. Rajwade, a Brahman writer, published a denial of the Kayastha claims (*Chaturtha Sam. Britta*), on the occasion of editing this tract. He has provoked replies, one of which, *Rajwade's Gaga Bhatti* by K. T. Gupte, makes some attempt at reasoning and the use of evidence, while another, *The Twanging of the Bow* by K. S. Thakre, has the same tone as Milton's *Tetrachordon* or *Against Salmasius*! This is happening in the 20th century, and yet Mr. Rajwade and Prof. Bijapurkar (who persistently treated Shivaji's descendants as Shudras) are nationalists, even Chauvinists.
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It was with a house so divided against itself that the Puna Brahmans of the 18th century hoped to found an all-Indian Maratha empire, and there are Puna Brahmans in the 20th century who believe that the hope failed only through the superior luck and cunning of the English!
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unification of the people, either under Shivaji or under the Peshwas. The cohesion of the peoples in the Maratha 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 among its rulers.
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A Government of personal discretion is, by its very nature, uncertain. This uncertainty reacted fatally on the administration. However well-planned the machinery and rules might be, the actual conduct of the administration was marred by inefficiency, sudden changes, and official corruption, because nobody felt secure of his post or of the due appreciation of his merit. This has been the bane of all autocratic States in the East and the West alike, except where the autocrat has been a "hero as king" or where a high level of education, civilization and national spirit among the people has reduced the evil.
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§3. Hindrances to true nationality in Shivaji's age.
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The society of Shivaji's age and country was so different from our own that some straining of the historical imagination is necessary before we can understand the difficulties that he had to combat.
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Land was the only stable thing in an ever-changing world, subject to the appalling outbursts of Nature's forces, which swept away man and his handiwork, and the even more violent transformations of political revolution. But the new conquerors always left the land to the old peasant because he alone could till it in that age of sparse population, and the revenue collection to the old hereditary middlemen, because they alone knew the details of the locality and could ensure some payment from the land to a distant sovereign who would have found it impossible to collect his dues from each petty tiller of the soil directly. The offices in connection with land, therefore, tended to become hereditary and the contractor of revenue blossomed in time into a landowner with a permanent family claim to a portion of the yield of his village or district. Attachment to one's ancestral land was the strongest passion in that age of little trade and no large-scale industry. I know of a Brahman family which migrated from the Ratnagiri district to Ahmadabad six generations ago, and no longer own an inch of land of their own in their ancient home nor keep any business connection with it, and yet they have carefully preserved for two centuries the old title-deeds of their long-abandoned lands.
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And, in that age land-rights were unsettled and perplexing in the variety and complication of the personal claims to one and the same tract. Illustrations of this state of things can be found almost everywhere in the Deccan; I give the case of Savant-vadi as readily available in print. In this small region there was in the sixteenth century a desai (or zamindar) of the Prabhu caste at Kudal for collecting the revenue on behalf of the Bijapur Sultan, with a *dalvi* or captain of the Rajput caste under him to lead his troops. The *dalvi* rebelled against his master the desai and sought the help of a neighbouring *savant* or chief of the Maratha caste. At first the desai suppressed the rebel with the support of his sovereign. But in the third generation an able *savant* rose to power, secured the desai-ship of Banda from Adil Shah, and after extirpating most of the Prabhu desais annexed the Kudal pargana. But some members of the dispossessed family escaped and revived their claim to the land. Next, Shivaji stepped in to oust the *savant*! Further complication was introduced by two branches of the same family (even two brothers) fighting for the same estate and transmitting their disputes to their sons and grandsons.
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Into this world of bewildering confusion of land-rights and revenue offices,—where nothing was generally known for certain or acknowledged as a clear final settlement,—Shivaji (like all other conquerors) burst as a new dissolving force. He had to give his own decision on these claims. All who lost their suits before him, all who were displaced in office by his nominees, immediately turned against him and tried to make their claims good by joining his enemies and opposing his Government. There was no national feeling, no acceptance of the law of the land however honestly administered.
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To every one in that age his own fief (watan) was the only reality, the only object of a man's lifelong endeavour, his highest reward on earth, while Fatherland (patria), if thought of at all, was felt to be an abstract idea, a nonentity. Watan could yield honour power and the pleasures of life, while patria was a mere word, a fancy of the imagination.
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A further hindrance to the growth of patriotism was the infinitely minute sub-division of society, which made the formation of one nation, or a compact body of men moved by community of life thought and interests, impossible, and even inconceivable. Apart from the impassable chasm between the Hindus and the Muslims living on the same soil and under the same rulers, the Hindus themselves were split up into innumerable mutually warring (or, at best, contemptuously detached and indifferent) fragments. Not only did caste despise and persecute caste, but even among the members of the same caste there were ditsinctions as sharp as those marking off the Muhammadan from the Hindu or the Shudra from the Brahman. Certain families claimed to be of nobler blood (*kulin*) than all others of the same caste and locality, and depressed and insulted the latter in society. The highest aim of a Hindu in that age—as even in our own times,—was to elevate his own family (and often also his own sub-division of a caste) in the social scale by lavish bounty to the Brahmans and the caste elders, by hypergamy, or by a nearer approach to the practices of the highest or "twice-born" castes. But the dominant families (or castes) tried to keep the newer or lower ones down at their former level of degradation by turning all the engines of social persecution against them. They took away from such daring aspirants and disturbers of the primeval stereotyped usage and custom, not only the benefit of the clergy but also all the amenities of social life and the services of the public servants of the village. This boycott or outcasting (*grāmanya*) was a more terrifying penalty than death itself.
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It was only human nature if the noblest members of the despised families (or castes) resented this injustice and tyranny of soceity and, in the bitterness of public humiliation, sought to be avenged on the persecuting church and State by going over to the enemies of their country and faith. Such action, on the part of the oppressors and the oppressed alike, is impossible where a true sense of nationality has taken root. Patriotism could not grow on the Indian soil (except among compact clans of blood-kindred like the Rajputs.) The State, as an impersonal continuous being,—higher and more durable than our individual selves, could not be conceived of by the rulers of Hindu India whose sole care was for the benefit of self and not for the good of the community as a whole.
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As an acute English observer wrote in 1803: "Every Maratha prince, and every jagirdar or military chief in the [Maratha] empire, has a *khazana* or collection of treasure, consisting of specie and jewels, which is lodged in a secret depository within the walls of a strong fortress, often erected for the purpose, on one of the most inaccessible mountains in his dominions. This private treasure is the first and never-ceasing object of his ambition to increase...No want of money for supporting a war, even in defence of his own territory, ever induces a Maratha chief to supply the deficiency from his private treasury; the loss of which would be to him a much more grievous calamity than the subjugation of his country."*
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Such were the men among whom Shivaji tried to build up his edifice of an independent national State, the men whom he had to employ as his instruments, the men to whom he had to leave his uncompleted task. The leaders were actuated by an insane pride of birth, an all-devouring jealousy about precedence, an ambition that blinded them to all consequences, an incapacity for self-subordination to law and corporate loyalty that marks lesser breads, a lack of political vision and of practical realism. As for the masses, they were human sheep, worthy to be led by such shepherds; their horizon was bounded by the hard conditions of their daily toil, with a simple emotional faith as their only solace.
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∗ *Asiatic Annual Register* for 1803, p. 4. A recent example was that of Daulat Rao Sindhia in 1809, as described by Capt. Broughton: "While Sindhia is daily submitting to these and similar insults [from his unpaid soldiery], he possesses a privy purse of 50 lakhs; which no distress either of himself or his troops is sufficiently powerful to induce him to violate." (*Letters from a Mahratta Camp*, Const. ed., p. 106.)
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In such conditions no superman even can create a nation and leave an enduring State behind him. Shivaji with his transcendent genius could have barely laid their true foundations if a long reign of internal peace had been granted to him and he had been followed by a line of worthy successors. But he lived for less than six years after his coronation, and his kingdom perished with his sons.
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§4. Neglect of the economic factor by the Marathas.
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The Maratha rulers neglected the economic development of the State. Some of them did, no doubt, try to save the peasantry from illegal exactions, and to this extent they promoted agriculture. But commerce was subjected to frequent harassment by local officers, and the traders could never be certain of freedom of movement and security of their rights on mere payment of the legal rate of duty. The internal resources of a small province with no industry, little trade, a sterile soil, and an agriculture dependent upon scanty and precarious rainfall,—could not possibly support the large army that Shivaji kept or the imperial position and world-dominion to which the Peshwas aspired.
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The necessary expenses of the State could be met, and all the parts of the body-politic could be held together only by a constant flow of money from outside its own borders, *i.e.*, by a regular succession of raids. As the late Mr. G. K. Gokhale laughingly told me when describing the hardships of the present rigid land assessment in the Bombay Presidency, "You see, the rate of the land revenue did not matter much under Maratha rule.
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In those old days, when the crop failed our people used to sally forth with their horses and spears and bring back enough booty to feed them for the next two or three years. Now they have to starve on their own lands.”
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Thus, by the character of his State, the Maratha’s hands were turned against everybody and everybody’s hands were turned against him. It is the Nemesis of a *Krieg-staat* to move in a vicious circle. It must wage war periodically if it is to get its food; but war, when waged as a normal method of supply, destroys industry and wealth in the invading and invaded countries alike, and ultimately defeats the very end of such wars. Peace is death to a *Krieg-staat*; but peace is the very life-breath of wealth. The *Krieg-staat*, therefore, kills the goose that lays the golden eggs. To take an illustration, Shivaji’s repeated plunder of Surat scared away trade and wealth from that city, and his second raid (in 1670) brought him much less booty than his first, and a few years later the constant dread of Maratha incursion entirely impoverished Surat and effectually dried up this source of supply. Thus, from the economic point of view, the Maratha State had no stable basis, no normal means of growth *within itself*.