The Cosmopolitan Deccan vs the Constructed Communal Shivaji

Two scholars pull the same plateau in opposite directions and neither is wrong. Pillai writes a Deccan where religion is almost never the fault line — a Sunni sultan worships Saraswati, Hindu Brahmins run a Shia sultanate, a Hindu emperor keeps a Quran by his throne, and the sultanates fight each other far more bitterly than they fight any Hindu power. The dividing lines that actually mattered were Dakhni-vs-foreigner, faction-vs-faction, this dynasty vs that one. Laine, studying the afterlife of Shivaji, shows how a later India read communal war backward into exactly this period — manufacturing a Hindu hero against Muslim invaders out of a world that did not think in those terms.

So they agree on the seventeenth-century facts and they should be allies. But they sit in tension over what the agreement implies. Pillai's cosmopolitan Deccan is offered as the real past that the communal myth betrays — history as the corrective. Laine would say there is no innocent "real past" to recover, because the very act of writing the cosmopolitan Deccan is itself an interested move in a live political argument (the liberal-secular counter-myth to the Hindutva one). Pillai writes as if recovering the cosmopolitan Deccan refutes the communal story; Laine's whole method says every recovery is another telling, and the cosmopolitan Deccan is a telling too — a kinder one, a truer one perhaps, but still a story told by someone who needs it to be true.