Chhatrapathi Shivaji

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The resulting mixed idiom, with an interesting infusion of Sanskrit tatsamas (loan words) is found, for example, in Sivaji's letter to Dadaji Naras Prabhu, deshpande of the Rohida valley, where the major appeal is to a territorial rootedness in the valley as well as putative wider subcontinental identity (again, Perso-Arabic is highlighted):

shahasi bemangiri tumhi va amhi karit nahi Srirohides-vara tumce khoriyatil adi kuladeva tumca dongarmatha patharavar sendrilagat svayambhu ahe tyani amhas yas dilhe va pudhe sarva manoratha Hindvi svarajya karun puravinar ahe tyas bavas haval hou naye khamakha sangava.33
[You and I are not being disloyal to the Shah. Sriro-hidesvara, the original presiding deity of your valley, exists in self-created form next to the sendri tree on the plateau at the crest of your mountain: he has given me success and will in future fulfill the desire of creating a Hindavi kingdom. So say to the Bava (ad-dressee's father): “Do not be unnecessarily down-cast.”]

But while such local knowledge and identity could be valuable to the head of a small principality, a subconti-nental imperial system could benefit from a high lan-guage that favored no specific ethnicity – the role played by Persian in the Mughal Empire. In later years, Sivaji and his son and successor Sambhaji seem to have con-sidered the possibility of Sanskrit playing such a role. Thus the Rajavyavaharakosa – a thesaurus of official us-age – was prepared shortly after Sivaji's coronation as Chatrapati. This has sometimes been presented as an effort at the triumphant return of Sanskrit with the end of Muslim rule. S. B. Varnekar, for example, claims that the author was commissioned to write this text in order to save the language of the gods (devabhasa).34 The text itself is much more modest: “Having completely up-rooted the barbarians (mleccha), by the best of kings a learned man was appointed ... to replace the overvalued Yavana words (atyartham yavanavacanair) with educated speech (vibudhabhasam).”35 There is, for a period, a sig-nificant change in register in official documents, with a new prominence given to Sanskritic terminology, even though Marathi remained the official language. I shall return to this theme later in this essay.

http://www.cssaame.ilstu.edu/issues/24-2/guha.doc<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Pollock also suggests that some of Jagannatha’s Sanskrit verse was modeled on the well-established Persian theme of a lamentation over the unattainable beloved.49 the well-known Sivabharata,50 as well as several lesser-known Sanskrit kavyas. Sivaji patronized the important Rajavyavaharakosa, a thesaurus of Sanskrit official terms The northern Bhonsle kingdom established by Sahuji’s son Sivaji seems, in the last years of Sivaji, and more vigorously under Sambhaji, to have aimed at a rein-statement of Sanskrit as a language of history and even of diplomacy. We have. There was also a certain effort to correspond with the Rajput courts of Rajasthan in Sanskrit.51 In part, this may have been a counter to the increasingly Islamic tone of Aurangzeb after 1678. In the last years of Sivaji's reign, and throughout that of Sambhaji, titles were Sanskritized to a considerable de-gree and we find significantly more Sanskrit words in official documents. This continued with the succession of Rajaram (1689) and the desperate guerilla struggle of the ensuing years, when every ideological appeal was thrown into the scales, with routine use of jihad by the Mughals, and appeals such as this from the Maratha ruler: “svamice rajya mhanaje deva-brhamanaci bhumi. Ya rajyaci abhivrddhi vhavi ani Maharashtradharma ra-hava.”52 (That the Lord [Rajaram] holds this kingdom is equivalent to the Gods and Brahmans holding it. This kingdom must be sustained and the dharma pertinent to Maharashtra survive.)

We also have a return to a stronger emphasis under Rajaram and Tarabai on the ethnic Maratha character of the kingdom. In a letter – likely one of many sent in the desperate year 1690 – Rajaram wrote to Baji Sarjerao Jedhe, “he Marasta rajya ahe” (this is a Maratha king-dom).53 Writing in 1693, the experienced minister Krishnaji Ananta Sabhasad nostalgically read ethnic as-sertion into Sivaji's coronation as Chatrapati in 1674. “In this epoch all the great kings have been barbarian (mlec-cha); now a Marast padshah became chatrapati. This was no ordinary event.”

http://www.cssaame.ilstu.edu/issues/24-2/guha.doc<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->