Why we need to revisit Shivaji’s idea of Hindu culture G N Devy jan 18, 2022 https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/shivajis-idea-of-hindu-culture-history-and-prejudice-7726717/ Text available at https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/shivajis-idea-of-hindu-culture-history-and-prejudice-7726717/
Shivaji celebrated Mughal rulers, had a cosmopolitan idea of India – unlike the Hindutva warriors we need to mute on TV.
Write Devy: I am aware that the present dispensation will not like Shivaji Maharaj’s analysis that Akbar was called “jagatguru” by people because he protected all, irrespective of their religion. Those who assassinated Pansare in 2015 did not like his description of Shivaji as a ruler interested in the welfare of all, irrespective of their faith. He quotes from the 1657 letter from Shivaji to Aurangzeb challenging the infamous jizya tax, “The Quran is a Heavenly Book. It is God’s utterance. It commands that God belongs to all Musalmans and, in fact, the entire world.” And further: “In masjids, it is He who is prayed to. In temples, it is He for whom the bells are tolled.”
Current Hindutva ideology is trying hard to establish that Hinduism is not the tolerant co-existence of faiths as Shivaji had interpreted or a way of life that acknowledges Ishwar and Allah as essentially the same. Going by the articulation of violence sought to be unleashed by the “dharam sansads” and the semi-official theorising of civil society as weaponry planted by the enemy, it is clear that Narendra Modi’s vishwaguru nation fantasy is poles apart from Shivaji’s idea of a jagatguru-ruler who professes no dharma but the raj dharma.
The RSS ideology of Hindutva, apart from being militaristic, is obsessed with tendentious historiography that sets aside all established scientific methods of reading the past and brings in untenable and wild pronouncements as historical truth.
It hitches together two entirely unrelated postulates. One relates to the question of the origin and spread of Sanskrit, the other relates to the Indus Valley civilisation. All available linguistic and archaeological evidence shows that there was no Sanskrit in India prior to the Vedas and our Indus Valley ancestors had no link with Sanskrit, half a millennium before its first appearance in India. The calendar also brings into the frame Adolf Hitler, without forgetting to mention that Hitler was “elected to power”. It asserts that the Vedic civilisation is the alpha and omega of Indian civilisation.
The concocted historical narrative and militant view of religion make this loud brand of Hindutva go against all that the Indian traditions of thought and spirituality hold precious in Buddha and Basaveshwara, in Kabir and Gandhi, in Charvaka and Ambedkar.