प्रस्तावना

There is a kind of magic bound up in the name Shivaji itself — simply to say it aloud calls up a strange, involuntary reverence, and a restless eagerness stirs somewhere within. What lies behind that extraordinary name is what I now wish to set down. I once received an invitation from a school in Mumbai to speak at its annual function, and I was asked to tell the story of Shivaji's life to the gathering. The programme began at three o'clock. Four or five thousand people had assembled for the occasion — teachers, students, parents, and a good many mothers who had brought their small children along as well. Their restlessness soon threatened to derail the whole event. Thinking quickly, I told the organizers, "If you can't quiet them down, let me try." I then pronounced, in a firm, carrying voice, a single sentence: "One day, the year-old baby Shivaji planted himself stubbornly in Jijabai's lap and would not stop squirming and thrashing about — try as she might, his mother could not console him." The moment I began this small story, the infants and their mothers in the front rows turned their attention to it, and quiet spread through the hall almost at once. I went on spinning out this invented little tale, painting Shivaji's infancy in such vivid detail that my talk that day became thoroughly absorbing — so much so, in fact, that describing his childhood alone left no time to go any further into the rest of his life story. The whole occasion, in the end, went off splendidly — and all of that was owed to the power carried by this one name, Shivaji. That experience taught me something: that Shivaji's childhood is every bit as captivating as the valor of his adult greatness. And so I began examining, in chronological order, the circumstances of his conception, his birth, his infancy, and his early education. Gathering together the scattered references to these matters that I found here and there, it became clear to me that the essential seed of his later greatness and of his life's whole course had already been fully sown in this earliest period. Studying his childhood, seen in this light, is something well worth every reader's attention. The young Shivaji's great passion was to wander off wherever his fancy took him; he could never sit still indoors for a moment. Where he might go, and what mischief or worse he might get into, was Jijabai's constant anxiety, day and night. As he grew a little older he would gather boys his own age and roam the wild country with them, and for days on end his mother would have no idea where he was or what he was doing, which kept her in a state of continual worry. Shivaji's own boyhood escapades deserve to be understood in much the way Krishna's childhood exploits are understood. Just as calamity after calamity befell Vasudeva and Devaki, so too did they befall Shahaji and Jijabai — indeed, theirs might fairly be called even more severe. What sheer strength of intellect alone can accomplish in an ordinary man is something Shivaji's example makes plain, and our history offers scarcely another example so vivid, and so touched with affection, as his. G. S. Sardesai Kamshet