James W. Laine - A Case of Historical Authenticity vs. Political Correctness

An American author James W. Laine’s historical book on a seventeenth century Indian warlord ‘Shivaji: a Hindu king in Islamic India’ (Oxford University Press, 2003, 144 pp) has created an ugly controversy in India.

Laine, a professor of religious studies at Macalester College in Minnesota, traveled extensively the western parts of India, studied several scholarly works and interviewed numerous people to collect the material for his research work.  He was assisted in this task by the Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

Shivaji is not well-known outside India. He hailed from a family of warriors.  Some of his ancestors served as military commanders under various local kings in western India. Shivaji’s father, Sahaji worked for the South Indian Sultanate of Bijapur, which occasioned his extended stay away from home. A scion of Maratha nobility, Shivaji grew under the able and astute guidance of his mother, Jijabai to become the chieftain of his clansmen in the rugged mountainous region around Pune in Western India. He fought several valiant battles and started annexing small neighborhood kingdoms from the age of sixteen and later set out on a glorious expedition to conquer the South.  He offered a constant and irksome resistance to the mighty Mughals, the world’s most powerful rulers of the time and exasperated them through his guerilla warfare tactics in the rugged mountains of the Western Ghats.  Shivaji died in 1680 at the age of 50 after running a fever for three weeks.

Over the years numerous legends, folklore and ballads have elevated Shivaji’s stature to a larger-than-life profile portraying him as the symbol of militant Hindu nationalism. However, some historians debunked him as a regional plunderer and freebooter. They suggest that Shivaji’s defiance weakened the centralized authority and helped spreading anarchy, thus paving the way for eventual colonization of India by the British. Laine traces the Shivaji legend from the earliest sources to the contemporary accounts of his life. Laine in his last chapter acknowledges that there are different ways of reading and writing the biography of Shivaji. History writing is not a one-point programme; it is an interim report. Nor is it wise to be a debunker. Laine maintains that there is no standard biography of Shivaji. The author asserts that the primordial view that the Hindus and the Muslims were pitted against each other and were always fighting is false. The author seems to be of the view that the representation of Shivaji as a symbol of modern day Hindu militancy is an anachronism.

Islam was more of a cosmopolitan culture during the heydays of the Mughals. Hinduism always represented as a peaceful and practical way of life rather than an organized religion - not a strong motivational force to unite the multiplicity of cultures, languages and ethnicities of the Indian subcontinent.  The fault lines of conflicts and distinct identities dividing the Indian ethos along religious affiliations had not yet sharply developed during Shivaji’s time.

In describing Laine’s book Oxford University Press writes, “The legends of his life have become an epic story that everyone in western India knows, and an important part of the Hindu nationalists' ideology. To read Shivaji's legend today is to find expression of deeply held convictions about what Hinduism means and how it is opposed to Islam.”

The incendiary part of Laine’s book contains references to the illegitimacy of Shivaji’s birth.  On p.93 of the book Laine reports on hearsay, "Maharashtrians tell jokes naughtily suggesting that his guardian Dadaji Konddev was his biological father."

The controversial book being a scholastic work, though a slender one, very few of the offended public actually read the book. It took the vested political interests several months from the date of its publication to digest the material and to incite the public, which triggered public outcry across Maharashtra.  In January 2004, an irate mob ransacked the Oriental Research Institute in Pune destroying over 30,000 rare manuscripts and Indological research works.  Elsewhere in Maharashtra the mobs targeted attacks on the Oxford University Press and some prominent bookstalls. The Maharashtra Government lost no time in banning the book in the state.  Some interested parties got the author and the publisher indicted for criminal proceedings by a court order.

It took two years of legal wrangle for the Bombay High Court to lift the ban on the book upholding “the right of a citizen to be informed”.  Soon after, the Supreme Court of India quashed the lower court’s order for criminal proceedings against the author and the publisher.  "It is very improbable to imagine that any serious and intense scholar will attempt to malign the image of this glorious institute," the court ruled.  Despite court orders the political parties still try to capitalize on this controversial issue.  A fiery Hindu militant leader in Mumbai issued a “fatwa” to his followers to burn the copies of the book regardless of court orders.  The political will on the part of the ruling government to remove hurdles for the smooth implementation of the unpopular court orders seems to be lacking.