Mahratta Maratha : No people saw through the deeply laid designs of the European adventurers, especially the English traders as did the Mahrattas, right from the time of Shivaji. While in 17th century Robertus de Nobilous successfully effected mass conversions to Christianity of even high caste Hindus in & around Madurai, while Jagat Seth & Umichand in the 18th century helped the establishment of England’s political sway in Bengal, the Mahratta country enjoyed comparative immunity from the religious & political depredations of Christianity for a long time…. The basic considerations underlying Shivaji’s administration were noted down by one of his contemporaries in the booklet Amatya-Neeti. One chapter is devoted to the commercial community contains specific warning against European traders, especially English. The need to guard against their penetration, esp. in the maritime & coastal tracts, is stated with startling emphasis. The spread of religion & the acquisition of territory as being their objectives are clearly stated. Though British rule had been established in many parts of India by 1835, the only uniformity to which the conquered territories could lay claim was their subjection to foreign rule. The year 1707, the death of Aurangzeb signalling the end of Mogul dominance, can be taken as the starting point of the rise of the Mahratta people. The Rajputs, feudatories of the Mogul since more than two generations had lost the ambition & the capacity to take over. The Sikhs had attained to a great political eminence in spite of the proximity to Delhi & Kabul, but that very fact prevented them from filling up the void. Shivaji had gradually & progressively challenged the central power of Delhi. That Aurangzeb, after Shivaji’s death, personally descended into the Deccan with the avowed purpose of crushing the Mahrattas, was an implied recognition on his part of the fact that the Mahrattas were the only rival to the Mugals. The practical aspect of the maxim ‘nothing succeeds like success’ enabled Bāji Rao I to raise the Mahratta power to the level of an all-India power with outposts like Indore & Gwalior in the north, Nagpur in the centre & Miraj & Ramdurg in the south. The history of the Mahrattas for a quarter of a century before the 3rd battle of Pāṇīpat in 1761 & for nearly a decade after that event is a record of their attempt to handle the central administration of India, not as an Imperial power, but indirectly as its agents. Historians often assert that the defeat of the Mahrattas at Pāṇīpat was responsible for the non-fulfilment of their cherished desire. A closer study of what had been happening as the Mahrattas marched victorious from Cuttack (Odishā) to Attock (district beside Peshawar known as Pathān land) would show, however, that even without the blow at Pāṇīpat, they could not have kept the ground they had covered. Shivaji’s success in establishing Swaraj in Mahārāshtra was as much due to his military genius as to the background of the general awakening & the missionary effort in Mahārāshtra. Ramdas had pithily declared that “The sword wins territories but far-sighted statesmanship alone retains what is won.” Assimilation of the conquered territories, making the people feel that it is their Raj & the establishment of an orderly administration were tasks, which the statesmanship & the missionary effort of the 18th century Mahārāshtra found too stupendous to grapple successfully. As a consequence, the Maharattas appeared to be just political upstarts & usurpers in territories which they administered.... Though the tendency of the Indian mind to welcome a total foreigner in preference to an Indian from a remoter part of the Indian continent cannot be altogether left out of account, the unpalatable fact has to be admitted that the Mahrattas could not win over, or at least reconcile, to their mission peoples in provinces, where their sword had flashed & their flag flew. Dupleix & Clive could recruit sufficient local men to their ranks for extending the sphere of their conquests. Govindpant Bundelā had, on the other hand, to report to Poona that a standing army of 20,000 Mahrattas was necessary to retain Bundelkhand in the Mahratta Empire. The prospect of any success in empire-building was thus gloomy because the Mahrattas had woefully neglected the vital cementing processes. When the dream of empire-building melted away with the death of the Peshwa Madhav Rao I in 1772, when internecine strife commenced & when there was no longer any central authority to act as a cohesive force, it is no wonder to see fissiparous tendencies raising their ugly heads once again & asserting themselves. And yet the British, by then the supreme masters of intrigues, false promises, making & reneging on treaties, could not even begin to break open the Maratha Confederacy until after the death of Nana Fadnavis in 1800. [Based on S.L. Karandikar, Lōkamānya B.G. Tilak – the Hercules & Prometheus of Modern India, Pune, 1957; S. Bhattacharya’s D.I.H.] Sri Aurobindo: The Mahrattas, perhaps the strongest & sanest race in India today, present a very peculiar & interesting type; they are south-western & blend two very different characters; fundamentally a material & practical race, a race of soldiers & politicians, they have yet caught from the Dravidians (q.v.) a deep scholastic & philosophical tinge which, along with a basic earnestness & capacity for high things, has kept them true to Hinduism, gives a certain distinction to their otherwise matter-of-fact nature & promises much for their future development. [SABCL 3:214; s/a Devagiri]
... The programme of this organisation was at first Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott—Swaraj meaning to it complete independence. The word Swaraj was first used by the Bengali-Maratha publicist, Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, writer of Desher Katha , a book compiling all the details of India's economic servitude which had an enormous influence on the young men of Bengal and helped to... State with the title of Thakur. The Thakur was not a member of the council in Bombay; he stood above it as the leader of the whole movement while the council helped him to organise Maharashtra and the Mahratta States. He himself worked principally upon the Indian Army of which he had already won over two or three regiments. Sri Aurobindo took a special journey into Central India to meet and speak with Indian ...
... toothwash then much in vogue. The Yogi refused saying, "I never use medicines. My one medicine is Narmada water. As for this tooth I have suffered from it since the days of Bhao Girdi." Bhao Girdi was the Maratha general Sadashiv Rao Bhao who disappeared in the battle of Panipat and his body was never found. Many formed the conclusion that Brahmananda was himself Bhao Girdi, but this was an imagination. Nobody... for tea. I hope he will give me good cakes! I hope it did not turn out like my first taste of Mahratti cookery–when for some reason my dinner was non est and somebody sent to my neighbour, a Mahratta professor, for food. I took one mouthful and only one. Oh God! sudden hellfire in the mouth could not have been more surprising. Enough to burn down the whole of London in one wild agonising swoop ...
... appeared, not long after, in February-March 1910 in the Karmayogin; but it was during his stay at Baroda that Sri Aurobindo first received the impact of the story, drawn from Maratha history. Baji Prabhou is a story of Maratha heroism that, in effect, must have struck its readers when it first appeared as a veritable salvo of patriotism. It could be called an epic fragment if not a mini-epic in... - ...a mingled mass. Pathan and Mogul and the Rajput clans, All clamorous with the brazen throats of war And spitting smoke and fiire. 38 But the determined group of defensive Marathas hurls back wave upon wave of enemy detachments; and still they come, wave after wave - They came, they died; still on the previous dead Page 115 New dead fell thickening. Yet by... Shivaji return. 41 While thus the afternoon mellows into evening, Baji's men continue to fight with fanatic courage and desperate determination against "Agra's chivalry glancing with gold"; and Maratha mountaineers prove ultimately more than a match for the city-dwellers of Agra: So fought they for a while; then suddenly y Upon the Prabhou all the Goddess came. Loud like a lion ...
... manipulation of native chieftains; at the same time they exploited the disunity among various Indian kingdoms, to subjugate the entire subcontinent. The Marathas - the successors of Shivaji - had built a Maratha empire; but they were notorious for their plundering raids, and many states were forced to pay them protection money as a means of direct and indirect subjection. In 1761... series of wars were fought between the British and the Indian kingdoms; these were the Anglo-Mysore wars, the Anglo-Maratha wars, the Anglo-Sikh wars and the Anglo-Gurkha wars. The Company took control of Mysore by defeating Page 5 Tipu Sultan in 1792; the Marathas were convincingly defeated in 1819. Further, the company expanded its rule by defeating Nepal in 1814-16, Sind in... formidable foes; it was only after four wars that they took complete control of the areas ruled by Tipu Sultan. The war against the Marathas led by Nana Phadnavis followed. By 1799, Tipu Sultan was defeated and in the following twenty years the mighty power of the Maratha confederacy was reduced to ashes and dust. In the meantime, the Moghul emperor in Delhi had shrunk to a mere shadow of his former ...
... Provincial Union... let the Bengalis & Mahrattas organize themselves & spread their influence over the rest of India. the genius of the Bengalis is at present original, creative, moving towards development & acquisition, the genius of the Mahrattas critical, conservative, standing in the concentration of what it has already developed & acquired. Mahratta activity has been the most brilliant passage... Book One Book One Writings and a Resolution 1890-1906 Bande Mataram On the Bengali and the Mahratta The relation of the Bengalis to other races of India Bengali & Mahratta creation & concentration traditions. weight of intellectual basis. Rajput. Islam. Bihar. resulting unerringness of tendency as illustrated by vernacular literature,... did not proceed upon a sufficiently intellectual basis. Had the movement of thought & intelligence expressed in the writings of Ramdas, Tukaram, Moropunt been allowed first to fulfil itself & the Mahratta development refrained from transferring itself too hastily into the sphere of political action, the result might have been more sure, more lasting. The Bengali is not weighted in the race by traditions ...
... volunteers lifted up chairs over the head of Tilak to beat him. At that the Mahrattas became furious." The Mahratta youth all jumped down towards the platform. And "a Mahratta shoe came hurtling across the pavilion aimed at the President...." Nevinson takes it up here. "Suddenly something flew through the air —a shoe! —a Mahratta shoe 1 — reddish leather, pointed toe, sole studded with lead. It struck... Mother's Chronicles - Book Five 45 A Mahratta Shoe "History very seldom records the things that were decisive but took place behind the veil; it records the show in front of the curtain," said Sri Aurobindo. "Very few people know that it was I (without consulting Tilak) who gave the order that led to the breaking of the Congress and was... forth. Amid uncertainty a general anticipation of peace prevailed. The Nationalist party men were instructed to allow all speakers a fair hearing and create no tumult. But unknown to older leaders, a "Mahratta leader —a lieutenant —came to me and asked me whether they should break the Congress," recalled Sri Aurobindo. "I said, 'y ou must either swamp it or break it.' They couldn't swamp it as the other ...
... young Gujerati volunteers lifted up chairs over the head of Tilak to beat him. Page 82 At that the Mahrattas became furious, a Mahratta shoe came hurtling across the pavilion aimed at the President Dr. Rash Behari Ghose and hit Surendra Nath Banerji on the shoulder. The young Mahrattas in a body charged up to the platform, the Moderate leaders fled and after a short fight on the platform with... accurately the facts as Sri Aurobindo remembers them. So far as he knows there was no attempt at fire. The session of the Congress had first been arranged at Nagpur, but Nagpur was predominantly a Mahratta city and violently extremist. Gujerat was at that time predominantly moderate, there were very few Nationalists and Surat was a stronghold of Moderatism though afterwards Gujerat became, especially ...
... s 02-May-1908 A great deal of capital is being made by the Moderate Press of the difference of attitude between Bengal and Maharashtra Nationalism over the acceptance of the creed. The Mahratta Nationalists are many of them willing to sign the creed on the understanding that it is not put forward as an ultimate aim of Indian political effort. The Bengal Nationalists, with one or two exceptions... statement of belief or precise definition of objects which would limit the aspirations of a people. To sign it would be against their reason, against their conscience and against their rights. The Mahrattas take a different standpoint. Mr. Tilak at the Nationalist Conference in Surat declared that absolute autonomy must be the ultimate goal of our efforts, but a partial autonomy may be a halfway house... turned away. It was because the Bengal delegates refused to sign that the party as a whole did not appear at the Pandal to resume the struggle for progress. The position taken up by Mr. Tilak and the Mahrattas has not altered. They object to binding down the future by a creed, but they would not object to signing a statement putting self-government within the Empire as an immediate object if such signature ...
... between the Afghan invader, Ahmad Shah Abdali and the Marathas. Ahmad Shah belonged to the Durrani clan of Afghanistan, and after the assassination of Nadir Shah in 1747 he occupied the throne of Afghanistan. He died in 1773. But during that time he invaded India eight times, occupied the Punjab, and won a tremendous victory over the Marathas in the Third Battle of Panipat. But soon his own men compelled... toothwash then much in vogue. The Yogi refused saying, 'I never use medicines. My one medicine is Narmada water. As for the tooth I have suffered from it since the days of Bhao Girdi.' Bhao Girdi was the Maratha General Sadashiv Rao Bhao who disappeared in the Battle of Panipat 1 and his body was never found. Many formed the conclusion that Brahmananda was himself Bhao Girdi, but this was an imagination.... compelled him to return to Afghanistan. However his victory proved to be a disaster for the Marathas. Even more disastrous was the blow it dealt to the Mughals throne, as it marked the eclipse of the imperial power of the Mughals. In a way this battle decided the fate of India for it facilitated the growth of British power in India. Page 82 through a rusty nail that entered into his ...
... Moguls poured, Swords numberless and hooves that shook the hills And barking of a hundred guns. These bore The hero backward. Silently with set And quiet faces grim drew fighting back The strong Mahrattas to their hills; only Their rear sometimes with shouted slogan leaped At the pursuer's throat, or on some rise Or covered vantage stayed the Mogul flood A moment. Ever foremost where men fought... Baji set the gleaming sign, then clasped His friend and, followed by the streaming host That gathered from the rear, to farther hills Rode clattering. By the Mogul van approached Baji and his Mahrattas sole remained Watched by the mountains in the silent gorge. Small respite had the slender band who held Fate constant with that brittle hoop of steel; For like the crest of an arriving wave... Yet by paces slow The lines advanced with labour infinite And merciless expense of valiant men. For even as the slopes were filled and held, Still the velocity and lethal range Increased of the Mahratta bullets; dead Rather than living held the conquered slope,— The living who, half-broken, paused. Abridged, Yet wide, the interval opposed advance, Daunting those resolute natures; eyes once bold ...
... It is time that public opinion should forbid this habit of self-laudation in our leaders. The Mahratta leaders have a much keener sense of the decorum and seriousness which public life demands. Recently a movement was set on foot in the Deccan to celebrate Mr. Tilak's birthday and pay to the great Mahratta leader almost the same honours as are paid to the memory of Shivaji in the Shivaji Utsav. The ...
... expressed within him, but he has the power because he is the incarnation of the people. God in the nation is the deity of which the monarch must be the servant and the devotee. Vithoba, Virat of the Mahrattas,—Bhavani, incarnate as India,—in that strength I conquered. Page 483 JAYSINGH Your political ideal was great, but your standard of means was abhorrent to our morality. Ruse, treachery... enunciated. I offered my head to Bhavani and She bade me keep it to scheme and plot for the greatness of the nation. I gave my kingdom to Ramdas and he bade me take it back as a gift from God and the Mahrattas. I obeyed their commands. I slew when God commanded me, plundered because it was the means He pointed out to me. Treacherous I was not, but I helped my weakness in resource and numbers by ruse and ...
... apprehensive of a big row at the Surat Congress and the risk of physical injury to you, your friends made special arrangements with Barin to keep you safe. SRI AUROBINDO: I don't know about any row. A Maratha leader—a lieutenant—came to me and asked me whether they should break the Congress. I said, "You must either swamp it or break it." They couldn't swamp it as the other party was too strong in number ...
... do this than Mr. Tilak. He is the very type and incarnation of the Maratha character, the Maratha qualities, the Maratha spirit, but with the unified solidity in the character, the touch of genius in the qualities, the vital force in the spirit which make a great personality readily the representative man of his people. The Maratha race, as their soil and their history have made them, are a rugged... counted three periods each of which had an imprisonment for its culminating point. His first imprisonment in the Kolhapur case belongs to this first stage of self-development and development of the Maratha country for new ideas and activities and for the national future. The second period brought in a wider conception and a profounder effort. For now it was to reawaken not only the political mind... small knot of pioneer workers; it marked him out to be the strong and inflexible leader of a strong and sturdy people. The second found him already the inspiring power of a great reawakening of the Maratha spirit; it left him an uncrowned king in the Deccan and gave him that high reputation throughout India which was the foundation-stone of his present commanding influence. The last found him the leader ...
... pamphlet Audi Alteram Partem indicated a desire on the part of the Loyalists to leave backstairs tactics for the open field of fair and honest controversy. We drew our first information from the Mahratta and naturally inferred that the pamphlet was intended for public circulation, nor is there anything in the printed copy which has come into our hands to show the contrary. We presume, however, that ...
... to pass unchallenged. Our contemporary refers to the meeting in the Amrita Bazar Office last year as an All India Conference. He ought to know perfectly well that it was nothing of the kind. The Mahratta Nationalists were extremely anxious for a settlement and they approached the Bengal Moderates to that end through the mediation of Sj. Motilal Ghose. The terms arrived at were so humiliating that... draw the attention of all weak-kneed Nationalists to the ban placed by the Bombay Government on the candidature of Page 342 the distinguished and able Poona Nationalist, Mr. N. C. Kelkar. Mahratta Nationalism has never been so robustly uncompromising as the Bengal school in its refusal of co-operation in the absence of control, and Mr. Kelkar, though a sincere and ardent Nationalist, a friend... from all real weight on the Councils. But by what reasoning any Nationalist can imagine that he will escape the operation of the excluding clauses, we are at a loss to understand. We may also ask our Mahratta brothers what advantage they have gained by being less rigid than ourselves. They are, if anything, more rigorously persecuted than we are in Bengal. Weakness of any kind does not pay in dealing with ...
... against the British in itself was futile; however, he felt that India was not yet prepared for an armed revolt. He had a genius for organisation and started the newspapers 'Kesari' and 'The Maratha' in 1881; later in the early 1890s he started the annual celebration of 'Shivaji Festival' and 'Ganapati Festival' which served as a platform for people to join in the Nationalist Movement... founded the newspaper Bombay Chronicle in 1910. Gopal Krishna Gokhale entered into public life in 1886 at the young age of 20. While contributing articles to the English weekly Mahratta, he was attracted by the idea of using education as a means to awaken patriotism among the people of India. He was promoted to Secretary of the Deccan Education Society. Later he was given charge ...
... "it was known" that he was coming to India? Not until Mr. Tilak's name was before the country and they saw that none of the mediocrities they had suggested could weigh in the scale with the great Maratha leader. Not by these sophisms will the Calcutta autocrats escape the discredit of their actions. Page 166 ...
... race in which the national idea attained its most conscious expression and most nearly attained realization, was the Mahratta people who drew their strength from the village democracies and brought them to interest themselves in the struggle for national independence. If the Mahrattas had been able to rise above the idea of provincial or racial separateness, they would have established a permanent empire ...
... drawn into the field of all-India politics and became the principal spokesman of Nationalist India. He was, in Sri Aurobindo's words, "the very type and incarnation of the Maratha character, the Maratha qualities, the Maratha spirit, but with the unified solidity in the character, the touch of genius in the qualities, the vital force in the spirit which make a great personality readily the rep... uproar, the young Gujarati volunteers lifted up chairs over the head of Tilak to beat him. At that the Mahrattas became furious, a Mahratta shoe came hurtling across the pavilion aimed at the President, Dr. Rash Behari Ghosh, and hit Surendranath Bannerji on the shoulder. The young Mahrattas in a body charged up to the platform, the Moderate leaders fled; Page 270 after a short fight... Aurobindo divided the Lokamanya's active life into three periods. Born in 1856 in the year of the Mutiny at Ratnagiri, Tilak began as a teacher at Poona and started the Kesari in Marathi and the Mahratta in English. During the first period, 1880 to 1890, he was prosecuted for defamation and had to spend four miserable months in jail, prison conditions at the time being atrocious. He withdrew from ...
... in Maharashtra between 22 December 1907 and 1 February 1908. Reports of eleven of them survive. Two were published in the Bande Mataram shortly after their delivery. Another was published in the Mahratta , an English weekly newspaper. Five others are known only by means of Marathi translations, while three exist only in the form of summaries or transcriptions made by the British police. There are ...
... has written a book where another such instance is given. When he went to the Himalayas he met a Sannyasi who at once addressed him by his name and then spoke in Marathi fluently although he wasn't a Maratha. What surprised Hansraj was that he soon began to speak in English. How did he know that Hansraj knew English? SRI AUROBINDO: If he knew Hansraj's name, it was not difficult to know other things ...
... what will happen is that the Nizam will be the first to be kicked out. He knows it very well. PURANI: He claims that Hyderabad has always been independent. But in fact in five battles with the Mahrattas, it was utterly defeated; not a single battle went in its favour. Yarjung says that the Nizam is contributing so much to the war fund, so he must be treated as an ally, equal in status. SRI AUROBINDO: ...
... won by Moghul or Briton, but from a small privileged class. On the other hand the strength and success of the Marathas and Sikhs in the eighteenth century was due to the policy of Shivaji and Guru Govind which called the whole nation into the fighting line. They failed only because the Marathas could not preserve the cohesion which Shivaji gave to their national strength or the Sikhs the discipline which ...
... attitude is in consonance with the practice of free peoples, the spirit of modern politics and the principles of democracy. Mr. Tilak has established his position by his articles in the Kesari and Mahratta with the most crushing completeness and there is no possible answer to the array of authorities, precedents and sound argument which he has marshalled in those pieces of perfect political reasoning ...
... sweetheart. (Laughter) And "Estelle" to a French girl! He is trying to make my biography out of my poetry! He also says that "Baji Prabhou" was written in Gujarat under the influence of Tilak and the Mahrattas. In fact it was written in Calcutta. (After reading the whole instalment) He has not made enough out of the poetry. He ought to have said that Myrtilla was addressed to a Greek girl—a girl whom ...
... Carnduff. So long as these cases are still sub judice , we reserve our general comments on the trial. At present we can only offer a few remarks on special features of the judgment. The acquittal of the Maratha, Hari Balkrishna Kane, must give universal satisfaction, as his conviction in the absence of any evidence in the least establishing his guilt would have been a gross miscarriage of justice. The rejection ...
... country as a whole. Someone, in writing about the Mahrattas, said that they had tremendous national egoism but no unity, and that their system of Jagirdars 6 was the cause of their ruin. Very often these Jagirs were given as hereditary posts without any consideration of the individual's fitness. Khare, ex-chief minister, also said to the Mahrattas, "You don't know what Swaraj is, you never had it ...
... on there was a revolutionary spirit in Maharashtra and a secret society was started in Western India with a Rajput noble as the head and this had a Council of Five in Bombay with several prominent Mahratta politicians as its members. This society was contacted and joined by Sri Aurobindo somewhere in 1902-3, sometime after he had already started secret revolutionary work in Bengal on his own account ...
... whose opinions it "mirrors", it is not the creed of the country at large. With the exception of a fast-dwindling minority of Anglophiles the whole of India has learned to honour the name of the great Mahratta leader and patriot. His social and religious views may not agree with those of the "enlightened", but we have yet to learn that the Congress platform is sacred to advanced social reformers, that the ...
... separate? PURANI: He also says that the British took India from Muslim hands. So they were the more recent rulers. Somebody from Madras has replied that India was taken from the Sikhs, Rajputs and Mahrattas. The Muslims were already decadent at that period. SRI AUROBINDO: That is true, though there was still some Muslim rule. PURANI: The Madras man also says that the argument about being rulers ...
... south of France, and there was only the glossy blackness of his hair and the richer tint of the olive in his face to suggest a non-European origin. His grandfather, son of the mixed alliance of a Maratha Sirdar with the daughter of a French adventurer in the service of Scindia, had been the first to settle in France purchasing an estate in Provence with the riches amassed and hoarded by battle and... the balcony with a hand shading his eyes. It was Richard Lancaster Abelard, heir of the old house, he who knew nothing of the door and the balcony. And then the strong descendant of old French and Maratha fighters recoiled as if he had received a blow. He did not look again but hastily crossed the balcony and entered his room casting a glance of loathing as he passed to each side of him, once at the... unerring; but, after all, was not this merely the equivalent in man to the instinct which so often warns children and animals of their friends and enemies? It was probable that the adventurous life of his Maratha forefathers, compelled to be always on the alert against violence and treachery, had stamped the instinct deep into the hereditary temperament of their issue. All the rest of the phenomena valued by ...
... Surat, in the same third class. In the camp the leaders, instead of making separate arrangements, would sleep in the same room along with the others. Rich, poor, Brahmin, businessman, Shudra, Bengali, Mahratta, Punjabi, Gujarati, we all stayed, slept, ate together with a wonderful feeling of brotherhood. We slept on the ground, ate the normal fare, made of rice-pulse-curd, in every way it was superlatively... body." To put the matter cogently we quote Sri Aurobindo's statement which neatly covers the facts. "The session of the Congress had first been arranged at Nagpur, but Nagpur was predominantly a Mahratta city and violently extremist. Gujerat was at that time predominantly Moderate, there were very few Nationalists and Surat was a stronghold of Moderatism though afterwards Gujerat became, especially ...
... winter at least. If I cannot come then, I will, if you like, try and make some arrangement for you to be taken there. I am glad your father will be able to send me a cook when you come. I have got a Maratha cook, but he can prepare nothing properly except meat dishes. I don't know how to get over the difficulty about the jhi . Sarojini wrote something about a Mahomedan ayah , but that would never do ...
... power in which year and how long his reign lasted or the date when the Battle of Plassey was fought. What we teach, rather, is how in ancient times the Aryans formed the nation, how today's Marathas became Marathas, how the Bengalis became Bengalis, how the Punjabis became Punjabis. Once the students have understood these things clearly, it does not matter if they fail to know the year of the Battle ...
... depends. People who are dynamic can't remain without doing something. They do not realize that if they have the inner silence the effectivity of their work is increased a hundred fold. Some Maratha came when I came to Pondicherry, inquired what I was doing : when he heard I was doing "nothing", he said "it is a great thing if one can do it. It is a capacity to do nothing"! Disciple ...
... ss and making psychic more active. Just as this point the Mother came in and the talk was suspended. PURANI (while sponging Sri Aurobindo) : There is a story, told originally by Lalji, of a Mahratta lady. In ecstatic moments of some descent from above, she can explain the Gita and other scriptures, though she herself is not educated. In those moments her face takes on a blue colour. She says ...
... greater and more widespread diffusion of the revolutionary drive and its action." There were many leaders of all-India calibre —world-class, I ought to say—during the Swadeshi days, such as the Mahratta Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Punjabis Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh and the Tamilian Chidambaram Pillai. Bengal had a galaxy of them. But that Sri Aurobindo was the driving force behind the movement... State with the title of Thakur. The Thakur was not a member of the Council in Bombay; he stood above it as the leader of the whole movement while the Council helped him to organise Maharashtra and the Mahratta States. He himself worked principally upon the army of which he had already won over two or three regiments. Sri Aurobindo took a special journey into Central India to meet and speak with Indian ...
... this view and supporting it, is the second postulate that there must be an entire levelling down and sweeping away of all differences; aristocrat and peasant, Brahmin and Sudra, Bengali, Punjabi and Mahratta, all must efface their characteristics and differences before any resistance to foreign domination can be attempted, even if such resistance were desirable. The third postulate is that a healthy ...
... to survive by the same force, abated but not slayable, retreating and maintaining for a time her ancient political system in the south, throwing up under the pressure of Islam Rajput and Sikh and Mahratta to defend her ancient self and its idea, persisting passively where she could not resist actively, condemning to decay each empire that could not answer her riddle or make terms with her, awaiting... of the people or that they were even in later times an active power for political strife and disunion,—except indeed at the end, in the final decline, and especially during the later history of the Mahratta confederation; but they did become a passive force of social division and of a stagnant compartmentalism obstructive to the reconstitution of a free and actively united life. The evils that attended... south long preserved its freedom as of old against the earlier indigenous empire and there was not so long a distance of time between the extinction of the kingdom of Vijayanagara and the rise of the Mahrattas. The Rajputs maintained their independence until the time of Akbar and his successors and it was in the end partly with the aid of Rajput princes acting as their generals and ministers that the Moguls ...
... many of whom had studied something at least of history, could ever have cherished them. But when Mr. Naoroji began his career nothing more real and solid was possible. The falling in pieces of the Maratha Confederacy and the overthrow of the Sikh power had left the Punjab and the Deccan stupefied and apathetic; the rest of India was politically exhausted and inert. In such circumstances it was inevitable ...
... accidental, external, vyavaharika . Essentially there was, between the devout Brahmin and the devout Sudra, no inequality in the single Virat Purusha of which each was a necessary part. Chokha Mela, the Maratha Pariah, became the guru of Brahmins proud of their caste purity; the Chandala taught Shankaracharya: for the Brahman was revealed in the body of the Pariah and in the Chandala there was the utter presence ...
... Gujarat & Sindh show the same practical temper by their success in trade & commerce, but the former has preserved more of the old Western materialism & sensuousness than its neighbours. Finally the Mahrattas, perhaps the strongest and sanest race in India today, present a very peculiar & interesting type; they are south-western & blend two very different characters; fundamentally a material and practical ...
... Meet She who was to be his companion in this dangerous enterprise was on her way. "I began my Yoga in 1904 without a Guru," wrote Sri Aurobindo ; "in 1908 I received important help from a Mahratta Yogi and discovered the foundations of my Sadhana;" then, clearly he said, "but from that time till the Mother came to India I received no spiritual help from anyone else." When they met, they ...
... waste it on an insufficient occasion. The Natus were deported because it was suspected that they were behind the Poona assassinations and that the assassinations themselves were part of an elaborate Maratha conspiracy. In the Punjab there was nothing but a riot; for the persistent wild rumours of the disarming of regiments and murder of Europeans have received no confirmation of any kind. Deportation ...
... The forces that support the work around one are quite different from the Divine Consciousness. I had an experience in the Guest House with a man of what may be called an intense type. He was a Maratha. He came to see me. When I came down I felt all around me forces of confusion and death. At once I gathered myself. He was surrounded by forces of disintegration and chaos. Such contacts are dangerous ...
... in India occurred at Surat when Sj. Surendranath Banerji was refused a hearing and on the next day when Mr. Tilak was threatened on the platform by the sticks and chairs of Surat loyalists and the Mahratta delegates charged and after a free fight cleared the platform. The refusal to hear a speaker by dint of continuous clamour, hisses and outcries is of such frequent occurrence in England that it would ...
... opinion, is an admirable thing so long as it is not accompanied with vindictive personal cruelty. We remember a correspondent of an Anglo-Indian print at the time of Mr. Tilak's sentence calling on the Mahrattas to admire the leniency of the British Government, because it treated him as an ordinary felon instead of impaling him or sawing him to pieces. The Statesman writes in the same spirit. The second ...
... You enjoyed Swaraj when you were harassed by Mahomedans. A similar commandment was conveyed to you through Tukaram, Ramdas and others, Page 835 and in obedience to this commandment all Marathas joined. Shivaji, the warrior, came from you, and Swaraj was established in Maharashtra. The poor were rescued from molestation by the wicked and the country prospered. The present state of affairs ...
... Sindh for nearly 300 years. In spite of the establishment of the Sultanate at Lahore in 1206, the major part of India remained under Hindu rule throughout the thirteenth century. The Rajputs, the Marathas, the Sikhs 1 and other Hindu kings continued to offer stiff resistance to the "Muslim invaders — the greedy barbarians who were attracted by the proverbial 1. In fact, Sikhism, founded ...
... preserved, caste came to count less rather than more in politics as time went on. All the great nation-builders have ignored caste as a political factor and it was only when the national spirit of the Mahrattas declined after Panipat that a cleavage on the lines of caste took place which is still a slight danger to Nationalism in the South. It is curious to find the British rulers who have done their best ...
... Shiva aspect. SATYENDRA: Are Vishnu and Krishna Gods of the overmind.? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, that is, they manifest through the Overmind. Purani then related a few more experiences of that Mahratta lady. There was no comment from Sri Aurobindo. After some time Sri Aurobindo himself started to speak. SRI AUROBINDO: About Nolini Sen. I don't understand what the difficulty is about the vital ...
... tremendous uproar, the young Gujarati volunteers lifted up chairs over the head of Tilak to beat him. At that the Mahrattas became furious, a Mahratta shoe came hurtling across the pavilion aimed at the President, Dr. Rash Behari Ghosh, and hit Surendranath Banerjee on the shoulder. The young Mahrattas in a body charged up to the platform, the Moderate leaders fled; after a short fight on the platform with ...
... many tender, passionate or glorious images. Bankim's influence has been far-reaching and every day enlarges its bounds. What is its result? Perhaps it may very roughly be summed up thus. When a Mahratta or Gujerati has anything important to say, he says it in English; when a Bengali, he says it in Bengali. That is, I think, the fact which is most full of meaning for us in Bengal. It means besides ...
... That is not Hindi, I can tell you. SRI AUROBINDO: Then neither Hindi nor Bengali. One of their ladies wrote a letter to the Mother. It was a queer affair. People become Bengalis very easily. The Mahrattas whom I knew were practically Bengalis—except for their stubbornness. (Addressing Purani after some talk on political subjects) Gandhi has declared that he is not going to be hustled into a struggle ...
... Mahomedans, quite inoffensive people, sat at the edge of this, but Anandrao chose to confound them with the intruders and declared war on them. The style of war he adopted was a most characteristically Maratha style. He pretented to go to sleep and began kicking the Mahomedans, in his 'sleep' of course, having specially gone to bed with his boots on for the purpose. I had at last to call him off and put... at least. If I cannot come then, I will, if you like, try and make some arrangement for you to be taken there. "I am glad your father will be able to send me a cook when you come. I have got a Maratha cook, but he can prepare nothing properly except meat dishes. I don't know how to get over the difficulty about the jhi [maidservant]. Sarojini wrote something about a Mahomedan ayah, but that would ...
... heroic blank verse, breathing in every line the dauntless ardour of the protagonists—the angry impatience of Agra to put an opportune end to Shivaji's intolerable career and the grim resolution of the Mahrattas to thwart and foil the Moguls to the last. The language is full-winded and noble, with a staccato rapidity at times to heighten the impression of the deadly combat up and down the rugged slope of... glamour by being intensified into a high religious experience. In fact, the principal merit of the poem is the completely satisfying manner in which the author has revealed the spiritual heart of the Mahratta insurgence under Shivaji, the flaming inspiration of the patriot saint Ram-das which made the former a leader of men who thought and felt and acted as if they were instruments of a divine Power Bhavani... rocks, distressed the whole advance With prohibition by the silent slain. So the great onset failed. But the Mogul army was not to be disheartened; nor, on the other hand, would the Mahrattas yield an inch. Then The heads that planned pushed swiftly to the front The centre yet unhurt, where Rajasthan, Playmate of death, had sent her hero sons. They with a rapid royal ...
... since Trafalgar? They will be broken to pieces by the science and skill of the Mongolian. And the key of Asia will pass into Mongolian hands and the strength of India, the Sikh and the Rajput and the Mahratta, the force of Mahomedan valour and the rising energy Page 990 of new nations in Bengal and Madras will all be at the service and under the guidance of the Mongolian who will not fail to ...
... Tulsidas, Meerabai, Surdas, Chaitanya, Tukaram (vii) Establishment ofKhalsa: Guru Gobind Singh (viii) Vijay Nagar (ix) Annals of Rajputana (x) Rana Pratap (xi) The rise of Maratha Power (xi) Shivaji (xii) Sufism VII (i) Arrival of Europeans in India. East India Company (ii) Conflict and chaos of the 18th century Page 196 VIII ...
... belated adroitness used the disqualification of the Nationalist, Mr. N. C. Kelkar, to rehabilitate himself, if that be possible, by championing the cause of a political opponent. We do not know whether Mahratta sentiment will be shallow enough to be misled by this manoeuvre. The disqualification of Mr. Kelkar is an incident we welcome as again to our cause. On the other hand, apart from the empty formula ...
... spiritual relations until the Mother came back from Japan and the Ashram was founded or rather founded itself in 1926. I began my yoga in 1904 without a guru; in 1908 I received important help from a Mahratta yogi and discovered the foundations of my sadhana; but from that time till the Mother came to India I received no spiritual help from anyone else. My sadhana before and afterwards was not founded ...
... deliver India from Muslim rule. It was the Rajputs who first led this struggle in North India followed by the Jats, Marathas and Sikhs. In the South, this struggle was embodied in the Vijayanagar Empire. This struggle for independence came to its peak when the Marathas under Shivaji almost brought to an end the Muslim domination of India. The Muslim conquest was effected rapidly enough ...
... dynamic but you can have full dynamic activity out of the inner silence. Also you can remain without doing anything. People who are kinetic in a vital or mental way cannot remain like that. Some Marathas came to see me here and inquired what I was doing. I replied, "Nothing." One of them remarked that it was a great thing to do nothing. This is true. NIRODBARAN: Isn't the silence associated with ...
... the "Subjects Committee". Sri Aurobindo persuaded its chiefs in Bengal to come forward publicly as an All-India party with a definite and challenging programme, putting forward Tilak, the popular Maratha leader at its head, and to attack the then dominant Moderate (Reformist or Liberal) oligarchy of veteran politicians and capture from them the Congress and the country. This was the origin of the historic ...
... tell me that you do not believe in race?" "God forbid." "And you agree with me that an Aryan is various from anon-Aryan, and a Teuton from a Celt and a Celt from a Hindu, and a Rajput from a Mahratta, and that this is fine as an idea and sound as a theory and consonant with Nature, which is fond of sphering harmony within harmony?" "Yes, I agree with all that." "And by origin the Saxon varies ...
... The penalising of the pursuit of education in foreign countries and similar blunders recoiled on the caste system and it is notable that communities with a strong democratic common sense like the Mahrattas have even while adhering to orthodox religion avoided the worst of these errors. But the misuse of a necessary instrument is no argument against its necessary and discriminating use. We hold the use ...
... example of Mahadev Govind Ranade presents itself to my mind as the very type of this peculiar action so necessary to a period of large and complex formation. If a foreigner were to ask us what this Mahratta economist, reformer, patriot precisely did that we give him so high a place in our memory, we should find it a little difficult to answer. We should have to point to those activities of a mass of ...
... with the ms. of Bhawani Mandir, written by Sri Aurobindo in English. It was printed secretly at night in D. Gupta's Press at Kalitola under the supervision of Sudhir Sarkar of Khulna, Joshi (a Mahratta) and myself in pamphlet form. The pamphlet was fifteen to sixteen pages, and in it there was a scheme for the establishment of a temple to Bhawani, to be erected in some inaccessible hilly region ...
... Mother's Chronicles - Book Five 4 Bankim's Bengal At the intervention of the Maratha leader M. G. Ranade (1852-1904), the political series New Lamps for Old came to an end. Ranade, however, was keen to meet the intelligent and promising young critic. An interview was arranged that very year, and they met at Bombay. "I remember," wrote ...
... Mahomedans, quite inoffensive people, sat at the edge of this, but Anandrao chose to confound them with the intruders and declared war on them. The style of war he adopted was a most characteristically Maratha style. He pretended to go to sleep and began kicking the Mahomedans, in his "sleep" of course, having specially gone to bed with his boots on for the purpose. I had at last to call him off and put ...
... entered the room and began to help him keep the proper posture. When Barin, tired, sat up, he looked at the stranger. He was short and fair, with blue eyes, a great big white turban on his head, and Mahratta shoes on his feet; clean and neat, though not overdressed. An indescribable but very pleasant aroma of purity emanated from his body. The stranger went away. So did Barin. He reached Chandod's station ...
... practising it for the last six years. It is untrue that any Balkrishna Lele or any lieutenant of Mr. Tilak is at Pondicherry; nor do I know, I doubt if anybody in India except Madras Times knows, of any Mahratta politician of that name and description. The statement about Madras Anarchists is unsupported by facts or names and therefore avoids any possibility of reply. It is untrue that any seditious journal ...
... including the Indian subcontinent. As soon as some sort of peace obtained in Europe among the warring nations, Martin breathed a sigh of relief. He was astute enough to procure a 'firman' (edict) from the Mahratta governor of the Deccan. Once officially established as the 'Director of the Coromandel coast, of Bengal and places in the South where the company will practise its commerce,' Martin set out to develop ...
... dreams and deeds were nurtured by the leading personalities of the country in different epochs. Again, Indian history is taught in such. a way that while a student becomes conversant with, say, Maratha period, he remains quite unacquainted with the Mughal period or earlier periods or subsequent periods. Page 107 Inter-connections of history are hardly presented or grasped. It is ...
... in the Mahratta (Poona), an English newspaper with which Tilak was connected. Another transcript, longer but employing more defective English, was published in the Daily Telegraph and Deccan Herald on 15 January. The Deccan Herald version was included in the Supplement to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 1972 and subsequently in Sri Aurobindo's Speeches . The Mahratta version... list of districts to be taken from Bengal and combined with Assam had been announced. First published in Bande Mataram: Early Political Writings - I in 1972. On the Bengali and the Mahratta: Notes . Editorial title. 1902 - 6. Written on a sheet of paper that was among those seized by the police when Sri Aurobindo was arrested in May 1908. The sheet was put in as evidence in the Alipore... text has been retranslated by the editors from a Marathi report. The Present Situation. Speech delivered at Mahajan Wadi, Bombay, on 19 January 1908. A transcript was published in the Mahratta on 2 February 1908. That text was revised by Sri Aurobindo and reprinted in the weekly Bande Mataram on 23 February. Subsequently it appeared in Two Lectures of Sriyut Aravinda Ghose, B.A. (Cantab ...
... and others. Deshpande requested me to write something in the Indu Prakash. There I severely criticised the Congress for its moderate policy. The articles were so fiery that M. G. Ranade, the great Maratha leader, asked the proprietor of the paper not to allow such seditious things to appear in his columns; otherwise he might be arrested and imprisoned. Deshpande approached me with this news and requested ...
... we say, 'its mendicant policy' ? At all events, the very first two articles made a sensation and were so incisive that the Congress leaders of the time were frightened. Mahadeo Govind Ranade, the Maratha leader, warned the proprietor of the paper that if this went on he would surely be prosecuted for sedition. Accordingly the original plan of the series had to be dropped at the proprietor's instance ...
... New Lamps for Old, however, was too strong a medicine at the time the articles were published, from 7 August 1893 to 5 March 1894. ‘The articles were so fiery that M.G. Ranade, the great Mahratta [Maratha] leader, asked the proprietor of the paper not to allow such seditious things to appear in his columns, otherwise he might be arrested and imprisoned. Deshpande approached me with this news and... Barin had not gone to Surat to participate in the I.N.C. conference, for the politicking of which he, as a terrorist, felt little more than disdain. He had gone to look for contacts with eventual Maratha terrorists, but he had found no activity of that kind there and was quite disillusioned. Aurobindo, from his side, wanted to take up yoga again and asked Barin to invite the yogi Vishnu Bhaskar ...
... and others. Deshpande requested me to write something in the Indu Prakash. There I strongly criticised the Congress for its moderate policy. The articles were so fiery that M.G. Ranade, the great Maratha leader, asked the proprietor of the paper not to allow such seditious writings to appear in his columns; otherwise he might be arrested and imprisoned. Deshpande approached me with the news and requested... toothwash then much in vogue. The Yogi refused, saying, "I never use medicines. My one medicine is Narmada water. As for the tooth I have suffered from it since the days of Bhao Girdi." Bhao Girdi was the Maratha general Sadashiva Rao Bhao who disappeared in the Battle of Panipat [14.1.1761] and his body was never found. Many formed the conclusion that Brahmananda was himself Bhao Girdi, but this was an imagination ...
... he has a great deficiency of knowledge, the result of an education meagre in quantity and absolutely vicious in method and quality. And he is inferior to other Indian races, such as the Madrasi and Maratha, in the capacity of calm, measured and comprehensive deliberation which is usually called intellect or reasoning power, and which, though it is far from the whole of thought, is essential to the c ...
... a flurry of wings, all the small birds fly away. I am often reminded of Sri Aurobindo's description at the Surat Congress of December 1907. "Rich, poor, Brahmin, businessman, Shudra, Bengali, Mahratta, Punjabi, Gujarati, we all stayed, slept, ate together with a wonderful feeling of brotherhood." There is the secret of all social reforms: to evoke a feeling of brotherhood. Among the Madrasi ...
... but from a small privileged class. On the other hand, the strength and success of the Marathas and Sikhs in the eighteenth century was due to the policy of Shivaji and Guru Govinda which called the whole nation into the fighting line. 27 When that cohesion or that discipline failed, the Mahratta and the Sikh power also dissipated itself. Then alien rule could thrive only so long as... and humour, ready in refined repartee, he is one of those men to be in whose company is a joy and behind whose exterior is a steadily growing fire of unseen devotion to a cause. And the Mahratta (Tilak's paper) succinctly declared: "Who knows but what is sedition today may be divine truth tomorrow? Mr. Aurobindo Ghose is a sweet soul." Likewise, messages poured upon Sri Aurobindo ...
... self-consciousness came nearest to achieving also organised political unity were the Sikhs for whom Guru Govind Singh deliberately devised a common secular and spiritual centre in the Khalsa, and the Mahrattas who not only established a secular head, representative of the conscious nation, but so secularised themselves that, as it were, the whole people indiscriminately, Brahmin and Shudra, became for a ...
... he has a great deficiency of knowledge, the result of an education meagre in quantity and absolutely vicious in method and quality. And he is inferior to other Indian races, such as the Madrasi and Maratha, in the capacity of calm, measured and comprehensive deliberation which is usually Page 78 called intellect or reasoning power, and which, though it is far from the whole of thought ...
... no constant Yoga behind them for methodically dynamising life with spirituality. In 1905, at the age of thirty-one Sri Aurobindo took to Yogic discipline. One of his helpers in Yoga, the Mahratta Lele, relates that three days of meditation in Baroda in 1908 brought Sri Aurobindo the complete cessation of the mind's activity in a Nirvanic peace: henceforth all his movements, inward or outward ...
... believed, in hindsight, that the mutineers, especially those of officer rank, seeking to reinstate the rule of Mysore, were in touch with the Poligars (feudal chieftains in the Deccan), the Holkars, the Marathas, the deposed rulers of Hyderabad and even the French in Pondicherry. They had set 14 July as the common date for mutiny, but Beg's treachery had hastened them. Fatteh Hyder, Tipu's first... 1776 and the French Revolution took place between 1789 and 1799. King George III ruled Britain while George Washington was the President of United States in the 1790s. In South Asia at that time, the Marathas and Tipu Sultan of Mysore were fighting the British. It was at this time that Pazhassi Raja revolted against the British in present-day Kerala. When Kerala was ruled from Mysore by Tipu and ...
... intensity. It is Sri Aurobindo's greatest contribution to patriotic literature, but it is more than patriotism, for its chief merit is the convincing way in which is disclosed the religious core of the Mahratta uprising under Shivaji's leadership. The key-passage, therefore, is the one that begins: not in this living net Of flesh and nerve, nor in the flickering mind Is a man's manhood seated ...
... fighter: Always wage the dharmic fight!' Thus exhorts Mahatma Gandhi. Bharati was confident of the Indians - comprising as they did the freedom-loving Rajputs, Mahrattas, Bengalis, Andhras, Tamils, Kannadigas and the rest - rising successfully to expel the foreigner even at the cost of their lives. In a song which Mr. H. R. Krishnan has described as the 'March Lorraine ...
... and vigour into a frail and weak though not unhealthy body . .. . ³ I hope your dinner at Dewas did not turn out like my first taste of Mahratta cookery – when for some reason my dinner was non est and somebody went to my neighbour, a Mahratta ¹ Sri Aurobindo,, On Himself (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972), pp. 21-39. ² Ibid., p. 90. ³ Ibid., p. 506.... men in the centres of work to propagate the Swadeshi idea which at that time was only in its infancy and hardly more than a fad of the few. One of the ablest men in these revolutionary groups was a Mahratta named Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar who was an able writer in Bengali (his family had been long domiciled in Bengal) and who had written a popular life of Shivaji in Bengali in which he first brought in ...
... The Vaishnava poetry of Bengal avoids except very rarely any element of intellectualising thought and relies purely on emotional description, a sensuous figure of passion and intensity of feeling: Maratha poetry on the contrary has from the beginning a strong intellectual strain. The first Marathi poet is at once a devotee, a Yogin and a thinker; the poetry of the saint Ramdas, associated with the birth ...
... Amongst these may be mentioned Khaserao Jadav, who was a magistrate and a colleague in the Baroda State Service, his younger brother Li Madhavrao Jadav of the Baroda State Army, and Phadke, a young Maratha Brahmin of genial temperament and a man of letters. In fact, for some years Sri Aurobindo lived in Khaserao's house at Baroda, a beautiful two-storeyed building situated on the main road of the town; ...
... Life Divine. 15 * Bapat was a member of Sri Aurobindo's revolutionary group. He escaped arrest in the Alipur Bomb Case. Later he "acquitted himself nobly in the roles of editor of Tilak's Maratha, leader of the Mulshi Satyagraha, an unostantatious participant in all the Congress movements, the leader of the Hyderabad Unarmed Resistance in 1938, the vanguard in the Goa struggle for liberation ...
... By then, Iyengar had been collecting a lot of English books by Indians and was trying to program them as a separate discipline of Indo-Anglian literature within the larger 1. The Mahratta, 18.6.1937.i think it was published from Pune in those days, I am not sure. Page 167 framework of English literature. Reviewing V.N. Bhushan's Horizons he wrote on 31.12.1937: ...
... Gangadhar Tilak or Lokamanya Tilak, as he was later called, was the most towering of the three leaders admits of no denying. ".. .He is the very type and incarnation of the Maratha character, the Maratha qualities, the Maratha spirit, but with the unified solidity in the character, the touch of genius in the qualities, the vital force in the spirit which make a great personality readily the rep... uproar, the young Gujerati volunteers lifted up chairs over the head of Tilak to beat him. At that the Mahrattas became furious, a Mahratta shoe came hurtling across the pavilion aimed at the President, Dr. Rash Behari Ghose, and hit "Surendra Nath Banerjee on the shoulder. The young Mahrattas in a body charged up to the platform, the Moderate leaders fled; after a short fight on the platform with... 1907. We have from Sri Aurobindo himself a pretty long description of what happened at this Congress: "...The session of the Congress had first been arranged at Nagpur, but Nagpur was a predominantly Mahratta city and violently extremist. Gujerat was at that time predominantly Moderate, there were very few Nationalists and Surat was a stronghold of Moderatism though afterwards Gujerat became, especially ...
... to freedom ' burst forth with the cry of " Vande Mataram " with a vision of free Mother India, and satyagraha was the method or the technique. The earlier movement ended in the establishment of the Maratha confederacy falling short of a united India and now the latest movement has given us a republic and a united India (though paradoxically, it has also brought the division of India along religious lines) ...
... arrested on 12 March 1908, which in turn led to an insurgent uprising in Tuticorin and Tirunelveli. Evidently the guru was following his disciple's exploits, for, Tilak's English weekly Mahratta regularly reported the events in far-off Tirunelveli. By the time a draconian double life sentence was imposed on VOC in July 1907, Tilak himself was jailed. While VOC languished in prison for the ...
... to survive by the same force, abated but not slayable, retreating and maintaining for a time her ancient political system in the south, throwing up under the pressure of Islam Rajput and Sikh and Mahratta to defend her ancient self and its idea, persisting passively where she could not resist actively, condemning to decay each empire that could not answer her riddle or make terms with her, awaiting ...
... men in the centres of work to propagate the Swadeshi idea which at that time was only in its infancy and hardly more than a fad of the few. One of the ablest men in these revolutionary groups was a Mahratta named Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar who was an able writer in Bengali (his family had been long domiciled in Bengal) and who had written a popular life of Shivaji in Bengali in which he first brought in ...
... last morsel and remark that it was a matter of great joy to feed such people." Poor Sri Aurobindo! During his long stay in Baroda he was utterly deprived of good cooking. He once remarked that his Mahratta servant knew only how to cook meat. In England, of course, cooking could not have been better either. Only when he visited Bengal he had the chance of enjoying good cooking, especially at Bhupalbabu's ...
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