http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/aakarvani/bajirao-the-great-hindu-nationalist-thats-only-in-the-movies/
Bajirao the great Hindu nationalist -- That's only in the movies
Aakar Patel in Aakarvani | India | TOI
I think I'll write about Bajirao Mastani today. I have not
seen the movie, nor do I intend to (only one Gujarati makes
the cut as director of watchable pap and that is neither
Sanjay Leela Bhansali nor Sajid Nadiadwala, but Manmohan
Desai, a true master). However, I have read Bajirao Mastani's
reviews and one of them said to my alarm, that the film
"explores the romantic side of 18th-century Maratha general
Bajirao Ballal Bhat, who fought and won 40 battles against
the Mughals with an aim to create a unified Hindu kingdom or
Akhand Bharatvarsha".
Whoa, hold it right there. First, the Marathas only
ever wanted a Marathi kingdom for themselves. It
was not unified, hardly *akhand* and never Hindu.
The Marathas were despised by other Hindu rulers,
and disliked by non-Marathi Hindus as well, as
history shows us.
Bajirao and the Marathas campaigned for one thing alone, and
it was called *chauth*. It meant a fourth of all revenue from
other kingdoms, no matter what the faith of king and subject,
and at collecting this Bajirao and the rest were efficient.
Maratha extortion caused Jaipur's Ishwari Singh to commit
suicide in December 1750. Sir Jadunath Sarkar (the Manmohan
Desai of our historians) writes of what followed in his
four-volume classic, *Fall of the Mughal Empire*: "On 10
January, some 4,000 Marathas entered Jaipur... (and)
despising the helpless condition of a king propped up by
their arms, seemed to have behaved towards Jaipur as a city
taken by storm. Suddenly the pent-up hatred of the Rajputs
burst forth; a riot broke out at noon, and the citizens
attacked the unsuspecting Marathas. For nine hours slaughter
and pillage raged."
The Marathas first invaded Bengal in 1742. Of their
behaviour, the *New Cambridge History of India* tells us that
"all authorities, both Indian and European are agreed". A
contemporary writer calls them "slayers of pregnant women and
infants" and Sarkar has recorded their gang-rape of Hindu
women, inexplicably stuffing the mouths of their victims with
dust and breaking their arms and tying them behind their
backs. The only Indian to try and protect his subjects
against the Marathas incidentally, was the Mughal governor
Ali Vardi Khan. So much for Akhand Bharat.
But I must say that the Marathas did not behave
differently from any other ruler or warrior
community, and the idea of a unified Hindu
sentiment exists only in the imagination of those
who get their history from the movies.
What the Marathas did striking north from the south, the
Sikhs did in the opposite direction (they called their
extortion 'rakhi', or protection, and it was 10% for all
Indians). It is undeniably true on the other hand that the
Marathas were originals.
It is important for this romance between Bajirao and Mastani
that she knew how to ride well because there were no
palanquins and howdahs travelling with the Marathas as there
were with the Mughals.
The Marathas were the Mongols of South Asia, always
on horseback, and with no infantry and no giant
camp behind. Even the scavengers who followed them
around, the bargis, rode. When the monsoons ended,
the Maratha army, about 40,000 men, rode across the
Narmada and Tapi, the border that marked off the
Deccan, and attacked 'Hindustan'.
Shivaji always organised this on a particular day: Dussehra
(Bal Thackeray continued this tradition of declaring war on
other Indians with his fiery Dussehra speeches). After the
death of the peasant king, power passed to the Brahmin
peshwas of whom the best was Bajirao. As the Mughal fighting
ability and finances (the two being interchangeable) declined
after Aurangzeb, the Marathas began penetrating increasingly
into hitherto unknown territory in the north. It was the
young Bajirao, then only in his teens, who determined,
rightly, in one of these raids that the Mughals had gone soft
and could no longer defend the realm.
From this point on, the Marathas began holding
ground instead of just taking their horses back. It
is why we see Marathi names like Holkar and Scindia
and Gaekwad in parts of India they do not naturally
belong. Everyone grabbed what they could and held
onto it, there was no Hindu or Bharat angle to any
of it.
Bajirao had one good battlefield victory, against Chin Qilich
Khan, first Nizam of Hyderabad. It was a positional win,
meaning the arrangement of Bajirao's force gave no space for
Khan and he gave up without much fighting. Like chess.
A similar situation came in Panipat, when Abdali positioned
the Marathas out. Bravely, the Marathas chose to fight and
were slaughtered. Scindia (Jyotiraditya's ancestor) and
Holkar, it may interest the reader, fled the field, and the
man who helped Abdali with supplies ensuring his win was Ala
Singh. Abdali rewarded him by making him Maharaja of Patiala,
Captain Amarinder Singh's ancestor.
Can you spot any Hindu or nationalist angle to any of it? No,
because it exists only in the movies.
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