Picture a writer at his desk in 1907, building the case for a king. K.A. Keluskar wants to do something delicate. He wants to take the two brahmin mentors out of the story — Dadaji Konddev, the steward who supposedly raised the boy, and Ramdas, the saint who supposedly gave him his mission — and he wants to do it without starting a fight. Other historians have already planted their flags. Rajwade says the dream of swaraj came from Dadaji. Ranade says the religious ground was laid by the Pandharpur bhakti movement. To push back directly is to pick a brawl with the brahmin establishment over who owns Shivaji.1
So Keluskar reaches for the one card no one at the table can trump. He plays the mother.
He writes that Jijabai was "the primary influence" of Shivaji's youth.2 He says the boy did not even meet Ramdas until 1672, long after the great victories were already won — so the saint could not have lit the fire.3 He calls Rajwade's Dadaji theory a "heresy."4 And then he lands the line that does the real work: "How true it is that one sweet and loving word from the lips of a mother makes a deeper impression on the heart than ten-thousand speeches."5
That sentence looks like sentiment. It is a move on a board. Laine sees it cleanly: Keluskar "strategically elevates Jijabai here, for what Hindu would ever challenge his ode to the mother?"6 The mother is unattackable. To honor her is the safest thing a Hindu writer can do. And in the act of honoring her, Keluskar quietly empties the brahmin mentors of their importance. Nobody can object — because objecting means standing against the mother. That is the whole trick. Praise that demotes. A tribute that is also a demolition.
The strategic elevation of Jijabai is a rhetorical maneuver: you crown an unchallengeable figure as the true source of a hero's greatness, and in doing so you displace the figures you actually want to remove — without ever having to attack them head-on.
Keluskar's target is the brahmin claim on Shivaji. In the standard tellings, two brahmins shape the king. Dadaji Konddev, the administrator, plants the seed of independent rule. Ramdas, the saint, supplies the spiritual charter. Both readings hand the credit for Shivaji's vision to brahmins.7 Keluskar wants that credit somewhere else. But he cannot simply say "the brahmins did nothing" — that is a partisan claim, and it invites a partisan war.
So he routes the demotion through the mother. He does not argue that Dadaji was unimportant in the abstract. He argues that the real impulse came from Jijabai, and the brahmin's role shrinks to nothing as a side effect. The mother is the lever. She is chosen precisely because she is beyond dispute. No Hindu reader in 1907 is going to stand up and say a mother's love matters less than a steward's tutoring. The cultural reflex protects the move. Keluskar borrows that reflex and points it at his rivals.8
This is why the elevation is "strategic" rather than merely affectionate. Jijabai may well have been a real and decisive force in Shivaji's life — that is not the point. The point is the use Keluskar makes of her. He selects her for the job because of what she cannot be attacked for being. The feeling is genuine; the deployment is calculated. Both things hold.
And the same logic — whose figure gets crowned, whose gets dropped — runs all the way through how the legend is cast. The mother is one instance. The martyrs are another. Which heroes get sung in the long retelling is, just as much, a function of who is doing the singing and what caste they belong to.
The machinery has three moving parts.
First, the unchallengeable move. Keluskar needs a piece on the board that the other side cannot capture. The mother is that piece. In the Hindu emotional grammar of the period, the mother sits beyond argument — to honor her is reflexive, to question her place is to mark yourself as cold. By making Jijabai the source, Keluskar puts his real claim behind a shield no opponent can lower without looking like a monster.9
Second, the demotion that rides along. Once the mother is the source, the mentors have nowhere left to stand. If Jijabai planted the dream of swaraj, then Dadaji did not — and Keluskar goes further, saying Dadaji actually "laboured hard to counteract" those thoughts.10 If the fire was lit in youth by the mother, then Ramdas, met only in 1672 after the victories, arrives too late to matter; Keluskar even cites the historian Sardesai to suggest the influence ran the other way, from king to saint.11 The brahmin mentors are not refuted. They are simply crowded out by a figure no one can move.
Third, the caste politics underneath. This is not abstract reverence — it is a positioning play, and the positions are caste positions. Keluskar was a Saraswat, a caste that claimed brahmin status but was ranked beneath the Chitpavan and Deshastha brahmins, and that carried significant alliances with the CKPs.12 Saraswats, like CKPs and Marathas, had had their own caste status challenged by the elite brahmins of Maharashtra.13 Ranade and Tilak — the men whose readings Keluskar pushes against — were both Chitpavans.14 So when Keluskar cuts Dadaji and Ramdas down to size, he is a marginal-brahmin reformer trimming the Chitpavan-brahmin claim on the national hero. The ode to the mother is the polite surface of a caste fight.
The same machinery decides which martyrs the legend remembers. The hero's mother is one piece on the board; the hero's dead are another. And the dead are sung selectively, by whoever has an interest in singing them.
Keluskar's elevation of Jijabai is not a stray gesture — it is one card in a coordinated hand, and the rest of the hand confirms the read.
Look at the title of his book: Ksatriyakulavatamsa Chatrapati Sivajimaharaj yance Caritra — "The Biography of Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, Ornament of the Kshatriya Race."15 That word, kshatriya, is doing political work before the first chapter. Keluskar presented the biography to the Kolhapur prince Shahu just two years after Shahu had won a long campaign to have his kshatriya status upheld by an authoritative Shankaracharya.16 The book opens by reciting Shivaji's descent from the Solar and Lunar dynasties and the Rajput royalty of Udaipur.17 A Saraswat author is handing a freshly-vindicated Maratha prince a biography that loudly affirms exactly the kshatriya status the brahmin establishment had been contesting. The genealogy and the mother-elevation are the same project from two angles: both lift the Maratha claim and lower the brahmin gatekeeper.
The handshake with Phule's movement is explicit. Keluskar was Phule's colleague.18 His sympathies, Laine notes, run toward the Marathas, the CKPs, and even Phule's entire nonbrahmin movement — and that is exactly what you would expect from a Saraswat whose own caste status had been challenged by the same elite brahmins.19 The rejection of the Pandharpur movement's influence — Ranade's central thesis — is the other half of the same handshake. By denying that bhakti reform either shaped Shivaji's vision or did much to ease caste inequality, Keluskar opposes Ranade directly while keeping his own nonbrahmin sympathies intact.20 Every move points the same way.
Take the sentence itself. "The glorious thoughts of founding a new Hindu dynasty were not implanted in Shivaji's mind by Dadaji Kondadev, who on the other hand laboured hard to counteract them.... The real impulse then came from Jijabai. How true it is that one sweet and loving word from the lips of a mother makes a deeper impression on the heart than ten-thousand speeches."21
Read it as argument and it is thin — there is no evidence offered that Jijabai said any particular word, or that Dadaji counteracted anything. Read it as a move and it is masterful. The first clause demotes the brahmin steward (he not only failed to inspire, he actively worked against the dream). The second clause installs the mother. The third clause — the "sweet and loving word" — makes the installation unanswerable, because to dispute it you would have to argue that a mother's love is weaker than a tutor's lessons, and no Hindu reader of 1907 will take that side. The sentimental flourish is not decoration. It is the lock on the door.22
Now watch the same caste-logic select the martyrs. Phule, and his colleague Keluskar, both lavish attention on two heroes who happen to be CKPs. The first is Baji Prabhu Deshpande, whose last stand at Ghod Khind — the pass later renamed Pavan Khind — held off Siddi Johar's pursuing troops so Shivaji could escape the Panhalgad blockade of 1660 and reach Vishalgad. Baji, in the standard account, gave his life to buy his master's escape, dying happy only once he heard the signal-guns confirming Shivaji had arrived safely.23 The second is Murar Baji Prabhu, commander of Purandar, who rallied his Mavalis against Diler Khan's Mughal siege in 1665, refused Diler Khan's offer of titles with the retort that he was "a true servant to Shivaji" and would sooner die than yield, and was shot dead with an arrow as he charged the Khan's elephant.24
Keluskar narrates Murar Baji's death with his "usual fervour" — the Afghans recoiling from the swords of the infuriated Mavalis, the commander rushing the elephant "like a lion upon his prey."25 The fervour is real. But the selection is not neutral. The full elaboration of Baji Prabhu's story comes from Chitnis — and Chitnis was himself a CKP, employed at the Satara court at the very moment when Chitpavan brahmins were clinging to their authority in Pune and the CKPs were helping the Maratha rajas defend a fading royal heritage.26 A CKP chronicler at Satara was sure to highlight CKP heroes. The opposition between Chitpavan Pune and Maratha-CKP Satara, Laine notes, was a precursor of Phule's own movement.27
So the pattern is the same one running through the mother-elevation, just aimed at the dead instead of the living mentors. Which martyrs get sung — Baji Prabhu, Murar Baji — is a function of the singer's caste. Whose mother becomes the engine of the legend, whose martyrs become its saints: in both cases the casting is a caste audit, and the patriotism on the surface had to "overcome or hide the fractious impulses of caste disputes" underneath.28
The historian sits with two rival claims in front of him and a problem he cannot solve by force. Rajwade has written that the swaraj dream came from Dadaji. Ranade has built bhakti reform into the foundation. Both are Chitpavans; both have brahmins holding the credit. To answer them head-on is to be the marginal-caste writer picking a fight with the establishment — a fight he loses on status alone.
So he does not answer head-on. He picks up the mother instead. He writes the sentence about the sweet and loving word. He notes, almost in passing, that Shivaji did not meet Ramdas until 1672, the dates doing the demotion for him. He calls the Dadaji theory a heresy and lets the word sit. And he opens the whole book with the genealogy of a kshatriya king, handed to a prince who had just won that exact title back. Each move is gentle on its face. Together they hollow out the brahmin claim. And because the load-bearing piece is the mother, no reader can push back without seeming to insult her.
| Before — the dispute over the brahmin mentors | After — the unanswerable ode to the mother |
|---|---|
| Dadaji plants the dream of swaraj (Rajwade) | Dadaji "laboured hard to counteract" the dream; Jijabai is the real impulse |
| Ramdas the guru lights the spiritual fire | Ramdas met only in 1672, after the victories; influence may run the other way |
| Bhakti reform lays the religious ground (Ranade) | Pandharpur movement neither shaped the vision nor eased caste inequality |
| Credit sits with Chitpavan brahmins | Credit sits with the mother — and no Hindu can object |
Watch what the table costs the opponent. Every line on the left is a brahmin holding a piece of Shivaji. Every line on the right takes the piece back and parks it behind a figure that cannot be challenged. The writer never has to say "the brahmins are wrong." He only has to say "the mother is everything," and the rest follows.
You can spot this maneuver in any contested legend once you know the shape.
The first sign is an unchallengeable figure doing suspiciously heavy lifting. When a single source of a hero's greatness is also the one figure no one in the culture is permitted to question — the mother, the martyr, the saint, the founder — ask who benefits from putting the credit there. The unanswerability is the tell.
The second sign is a demotion that never gets argued. Keluskar never builds a case that Dadaji was unimportant; the importance simply evaporates the moment Jijabai is installed. When a rival is removed by displacement rather than by argument — crowded out, not refuted — the work is being done off the page, by the choice of who gets crowned.
The third sign is the caste fingerprint on the casting. When the heroes a writer elaborates all share his caste — Chitnis the CKP elaborating the CKP martyrs Baji Prabhu and Murar Baji — the selection is not a judgment about who was bravest. It is a judgment about whose bravery serves the singer. The legend's roster reads like a caste roster.
The failure to diagnose any of this is to read the sentiment as sentiment and stop there — to take the ode to the mother as nothing but love, the martyr-songs as nothing but patriotism, and to miss that the casting itself is the argument.
The hard tension here must be kept open, not resolved.
On one side: Jijabai's formative role in Shivaji's life may have been entirely real. The vault's existing accounts of her — drawn from sources like Purandare — treat her as a genuine and decisive shaping force, the mother who held the household and the mission together while Shahji was away.29 Nothing in Laine requires us to say she was unimportant.
On the other side: that real importance is exactly what makes her strategically useful. Keluskar selects her because she is unchallengeable, and the selection demotes the brahmin mentors he wanted gone.30 A figure can be both genuinely formative and politically deployed. The deployment does not prove she was unimportant; the importance does not prove the deployment was innocent. Both are true at once, and Laine's reading lives precisely in that doubleness — he does not deny Jijabai mattered, he points out what Keluskar does with the fact that she mattered.31
Open questions. Did Keluskar believe his own elevation, or know it was a move? (Probably both — sincerity and strategy are not exclusive.) Would the maneuver have worked outside the specific caste-politics of 1900s Maharashtra, or does it depend on that exact configuration of contested kshatriya status and Chitpavan dominance? And how far down does the selective casting go — if the mother and the martyrs are caste-selected, what about the villains, the betrayers, the minor saints? The vault does not resolve these. It holds them.
Stand inside the fight and you can feel the three writers pulling on the same body.
Keluskar reaches for Jijabai and pulls the credit toward the mother — and, underneath, toward the Marathas and the marginal castes whose hero he is defending. Rajwade reaches for Dadaji and pulls the credit toward the brahmin steward, lodging the swaraj dream in a brahmin's tutoring.32 Ranade reaches for the Pandharpur bhakti movement and pulls the credit toward brahmin-led religious reform as the ground of the whole national awakening.33 Three hands, one Shivaji, and each hand is also a caste.
The convergence first: all three agree Shivaji's greatness has a source outside himself that the historian's job is to name. None of them treats the king as self-made. They are arguing about the location of the engine, not its existence.
Then the tension sharpens into a caste-line. Rajwade and Ranade — and Tilak behind them — are Chitpavans, and their sources keep the credit in brahmin hands.34 Keluskar is a Saraswat allied with CKPs and Marathas, and his source moves the credit to the mother and, through her, to the non-brahmin coalition.35 The mother-versus-mentor fight is not really about Jijabai or Dadaji. It is about whether the brahmins or the Marathas own the founding.
And here is what the fight reveals: the question "who influenced Shivaji?" is unanswerable as history because it was never being asked as history. It was a proxy. Each writer's answer is a self-portrait of his caste's claim on the national hero. Keluskar's genius is to have found the one answer — the mother — that his opponents could not contest without breaking a taboo. He did not win the argument. He made the argument unwinnable for the other side.
The plain point is this: the same move shows up wherever a story is being built to serve a claim, and seeing it in another domain sharpens what Keluskar is doing.
Start with Founding Myth Construction. A founding myth is never a neutral record; it is assembled to legitimate a present arrangement, and the assembly always involves choosing who gets to be the origin. Keluskar's elevation of Jijabai is founding-myth construction at the level of a single biography — he is deciding, for the Maratha claim, where the founding began. The handshake produces a sharp insight the history page alone does not generate: founding myths can be contested not by rewriting the facts but by relocating the credit to an unchallengeable figure. You do not have to deny that Dadaji existed. You only have to make the mother the source, and the founding quietly changes owners. The myth's real battleground is not "what happened" but "who counts as the beginning" — and the safest place to put the beginning is behind a figure the culture forbids you to question. That is a generalizable mechanism: every founding myth has an unattackable square on its board, and whoever reaches it first sets the lineage.
Now bring in Mother-Warrior Synthesis. That page treats the mother-of-the-warrior as a recurring structural figure — the woman who forges the fighter, who stands behind the hero as the source of his fire. Keluskar is exploiting exactly that figure's cultural charge. But the handshake exposes a tension the synthesis page does not, on its own, surface: the mother-warrior bond is not only a psychological reality, it is a rhetorical resource. Because the figure is so charged, so unattackable, it can be picked up and used to do political work that has nothing to do with the bond itself. Keluskar weaponizes the reverence. The insight the pairing forces: the very sacredness that makes the mother-warrior figure powerful as experience is what makes her dangerous as argument — you cannot trust an appeal to the warrior's mother to be only about the mother, because the appeal is shielded from challenge by design. The more unchallengeable the figure, the more suspect any heavy reliance on her. Sanctity and manipulability are the same property seen from two sides.
A third, lighter handshake runs to Father Absence and the Search. Shahji, Shivaji's father, was largely absent — away in the Deccan service — which is part of what makes the mother-elevation historically plausible in the first place; the household was hers to run.36 The page on father-absence concerns the psychic search a missing father sets in motion. The structural echo here is at the level of the legend rather than the psyche: an absent father leaves an open slot at the origin of the story, and Keluskar fills it with the mother. The insight the connection yields: absence does not only shape a child, it shapes a narrative — the empty paternal slot is precisely the room a biographer needs to install the figure he wants. Where the father is missing, the mother's claim to be the source meets no rival, and the historian's strategic elevation becomes that much easier to make stick.
Sharpest implication. The casting of a national legend is a caste audit. Whose mother becomes its engine, whose martyrs become its saints, whose mentors get quietly written out — every one of those choices is a position in a status fight, dressed as reverence or patriotism. Keluskar's ode to the mother is the cleanest specimen: the safest, most unattackable emotion in the culture, picked up and used as a blade against the brahmin claim on Shivaji. When you find an unchallengeable figure carrying the whole weight of a legend, you have found where the real fight is buried.
Generative questions.