There is precisely one King, one, singular, solitary, unambiguous King, whom I, a freedom-loving, liberal-thinking citizen of a sovereign democratic republic stumbling through the 21st century, can look up to without embarrassment, without qualification, and without the faint guilt that so often accompanies the veneration of men who wielded absolute power. One King whose thinking I genuinely wish my present-day leaders would study, absorb, and, dare I say it, actually emulate. One King whose relevance, far from fading with the centuries, seems almost perversely to grow sharper with each passing year of our increasingly confused and rudderless times.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj was born on this day in 1630 to Jijamata on Fort Shivneri.
Happy happy birthday, majhya raja, majhya daivata, majhya Shivba.
The arithmetic of what you built, from a teenager with a handful of Mavle warriors and an idea that must have seemed preposterous to everyone except you, is staggering enough. But it is not the arithmetic that moves me. It is the architecture of your mind: the pluralism, the restraint, the fierce protection of the ordinary person, the instinctive understanding that power must serve, not merely rule. In a century drowning in bigotry and brutality, you were, somehow, neither.
Without you, modern Maharashtra does not exist in this form. And without that Maharashtra, the India we inhabit today, for all its noise and imperfection and magnificent, maddening complexity, would have been a profoundly different, and I suspect lesser, thing.
Jai Shivaji. Jai Maharashtra. Jai Hind.
