Girish Kuber’s facile re-imagining of a past

M Rajivlochan

It frequently comes as a surprise to nationalists that nations are all artificial constructs. They are created by a bit of allurement, a bit of seduction and a large amount of coercion. Great nations learn to hide the coercion by providing services.

That of course hasn’t happened in Maharashtra, where people were and remain some of the least served among the states of India. Even linguistically, there are at least four major language regions in Maharashtra even though only one is currently forced on everyone in the guise of a linguistic identity.

The belief that there is a nation, all-loving, all-accomplished, and has visionary ‘leaders’ continues to seduce people. The latest to be seduced is Girish Kuber, who goes about reconstructing the history of ‘MahaRashtra’, duly legitimated by a sword-carrying Shivaji on the cover and a long lament about the Maratha who might have been Prime Minister.

Facile re-imaginings of the past such as this one are problematic. One-dimensional authors are condemned to hide much in order to justify their subject. For example, the greatest achievement of Yashwantrao Chavan, the Maratha leader alluded to earlier, lay in saving his political skin in 1960, by succumbing to separatists lest they take over the mantle of leadership. In contrast, faced with an equally fierce separatism in Punjab, Kairon was able to hold his own against the pressures from Delhi, sideline all his competitors and ensure the existence of a united Punjab, all because he was able to earn the goodwill and respect of the people of Punjab. In Delhi, Chavan’s stint came to a sorry end because while Indira Gandhi had a special connect with the people of India; Yashwantrao Chavan barely had the support of anyone.

Shivaji’s tragedy was that he was around as a sovereign ruler for a period of just five years and 10 months. Too little a time to set up either a nation or a state system. His heirs and successors were ousted from power by the Brahmin Peshwas based in Pune. The Peshwas used their sword to create a Maratha empire about which Kuber does not wish to talk. It extended from the west to the east and all the way north up to Punjab. In Bengal, ‘Maratha’ was a word used by mothers to threaten unruly kids. The Peshwas also had a darker secret. In the later years of their rule, their society came to formally support a toxic and violence-based caste discrimination which hadn’t been seen in India till then.

As the British took over governance, people walked away from those noxious memories. Leaders like Jotiba Phule advocated a European ideal of equality. ‘Native’ is the word that Kuber casually uses for them, displaying amazing insensitivity. Shivaji came alive in the mindscape only in the 1890s when Tilak reminded people of him in an effort to bring them out of political torpor. The great Tilak, though, gets short shrift in this book. “He did not have enough energy left to oppose Gandhi’s decision,” it says.

The one opportunity that Maharashtra did get to grow came when the successful businesses and industries of Mumbai, run by Gujaratis and Parsis and managed by south Indians, tried to pull the boondocks out of their poverty. But there too growth was stymied by the Shiv Sainiks, who preferred to express their views on nationhood by using a lathi when a word would do. The book of course leaves out the fact that Congress governments routinely winked at such violence with which the Shiv Sainiks enforced their will on everyone. Just as it leaves out the harm done to economic growth and social harmony by communal riots that were allowed by various Congress governments.

To offset any charge of being bigoted in narrative, Kuber does mention the role of various Muslims in the employ of Shivaji. What goes unnoticed in such a search for communal harmony from that past is that in the Battle of Bhima Koregaon (1818), Mahar soldiers, regarded as untouchable and unsoldierly in those times, fought a pitched battle and defeated Peshwa’s forces. The soldiers in the Peshwa’s troop were all Muslim Arabs.