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Shivaji and His Times c20.s2: Early Marathi accounts

Shivaji and His Times c20.s2

Language
English

Early Marathi accounts

c20.s2.1

The only contemporary records of Shivaji's and even Shambhuji's times that now survive are in English and Persian and none at all in Marathi. The earliest Marathi history of his reign,—if we may apply this dignified title to Sabhasad's brief and confused recollections,—was written in 1694, and the skeleton *Jedhe Shakavali* later still. Laudatory poems by bards hankering for rewards from patrons who are flattered to the top of their bent, cannot claim to be histories. On the other hand, the Persian and English sources were absolutely contemporary, promptly set down in writing, often detailed and dated, and carefully preserved since then. Their writers belonged to a higher intellectual type than the Marathi chroniclers, as is clearly seen from a comparative study of the materials in the three languages.

c20.s2.2

Even the *Sabhasad Bakhar*, though written by a contemporary of Shivaji, is not based on State-papers and written notes, because it was composed while Rajaram was closely besieged in Jinji fort, to which he had escaped from Maharashtra by the skin of his teeth, leaving everything behind him, and after roving hither and thither in constant risk of capture. Such a master and his servants, running with their lives in their hands, before relentless pursuers, could not have burdened themselves with papers during their perilous flight across the entire Deccan peninsula. Sabhasad's work, therefore, is entirely derived from his memory—the half-obliterated memory of an old man who had passed through many privations and hardships. But he was a contemporary and servant of Shivaji, while Malhar Ram Rao Chitnis wrote 130 years after that king's death, and had no State-papers of Shivaji's or Shambhuji's times, because he does not cite a single document, and all his true facts are derived from Sabhasad, thereby proving that he had no independent source of information. Therefore, I have totally rejected Chitnis.