Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
It is not, after all, in British India (i.e., in that part of India
which we directly administer) that the Brahmanical and reactionary
character of Indian unrest, at any rate in the Deccan, can best be
studied. There it can always be disguised under the "patriotic" aspects
of a revolt against alien rule. To appreciate its real tendencies we
must go to a Native State of the Deccan about 100 miles south of Poona.
Kolhapur is the most important of the Native States under the charge of
the Bombay Government, and its ruler is the only ruling Mahratta chief
who can claim direct descent from the great Shivaji, the
"Shivaji-Maharaj" whose cult Tilak made one of the central features of
his political propaganda. He is the "Chhatrapati Maharajah," and is
acknowledged to be as such the head of the Mahratta Princes of India.
One would have thought that such a lineage would have sufficed in itself
to invest the Maharajah of Kolhapur with a certain measure of sanctity
in the eyes of Tilak and his followers. Far from it. His Highness is an
enlightened ruler and a man of great simplicity of character. He takes a
keen interest in the administration of his State, and has undertaken, at
no small cost to his Exchequer, one of the most important irrigation
works yet attempted in any Native State. But he committed what Tilak
and his friends regarded as two unforgivable offences: he fought against
the intolerance of the Brahmans and he is a faithful friend end ally of
the British _Raj_. Hence they set in motion against him, the descendant
of Shivaji, in his own State, exactly the same machinery of agitation
and conspiracy which they have set in motion against British rule in
British India.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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