Picture the road to Pandharpur. Barefoot devotees, the Varkaris, walking the same path their grandparents walked, singing the names of God, indifferent to who is Brahman and who is Shudra on the road. To most eyes this is piety. To Justice M.G. Ranade it was something else: the founding of a nation.
In Rise of the Maratha Power, published in 1901 just before his death, Ranade did something audacious. He took the bhakti saints — the singers, the poets, the pilgrims of the heart — and recast them as the social reformers who built the swaraj of Shivaji.1 Not the generals. The saints. The argument is that Shivaji's "independent nation" was not won by a sword that overthrew Muslim rule. It was won because "a whole people, inspired by a kind of religious reformation preached by the Pandharpur pilgrims, became a united people."2
So the master metaphor is this: devotion as soil. The bhakti movement is the ground out of which a nation grows. Pull up the swaraj and you find roots that run back to Jnaneshvar, not to a battlefield. Ranade is the Chitpavan reformer who looked at four centuries of Marathi religious song and saw, underneath it, the seedbed of a modern state. That is the move. Everything else in this page is the unpacking of it.
And he paid for the company he kept. Ranade ran the real risk of excommunication from his own Chitpavan caste over his views on widow remarriage and the social reforms he pressed — reforms set squarely against Tilak's neotraditional stance.3 The man arguing that devotion softens a nation was himself a softener of his own people's hardest customs, and they nearly cast him out for it.
Strip it down. "Bhakti as the ground of nationalism" is the claim that a devotional movement — folk religion, the religion of the heart — is the actual foundation of national unity and the precondition for self-rule.
Ranade's version runs like this. The bhakti movement of Maharashtra, traced from Jnaneshvar to the end of the eighteenth century, did concrete social work. It raised the Shudra classes "to a position of spiritual power and social importance, almost equal to that of the Brahmans." It "raised the status of woman." It made the nation "more humane" and "more prone to hold together by mutual toleration." It even "suggested and partly carried out a plan of reconciliation with the Mahomedans."4 Each of these is a social reform. Ranade reads them as the slow construction of a people capable of governing itself.
The hinge is that bhakti is not treated here as private salvation. It is treated as public infrastructure. The saints subordinated "rites and ceremonies, and of pilgrimages and fasts, and of learning and contemplation, to the higher excellence of worship by means of love and faith."5 In Ranade's hands this becomes a civic fact: a people taught to value the heart over the priest is a people ready for egalitarian patriotism.
The thesis is durable precisely because it is total. The Maratha swaraj, Ranade says, was the result of "religious and social reform, as well as the military and political leadership of Shivaji."6 The military piece is there, but it is secondary. The center of gravity sits with the saints. And this is also an early "one nation" theory — it stands flatly opposed to the idea that South Asia is "necessarily and primordially split between its Hindu and Muslim populations."7 India, on this reading, was never two peoples. It was one people that religion had already begun to knit together before any politician arrived to claim it.
Watch the chain. It only has four links, and they only run one way.
First link: devotion. The Vaishnava devotees of Maharashtra "proclaimed all equal before God and disparaged the role of orthodox priests."8 The heart over the ceremony. The name of God over the ritual fee.
Second link: social reform. Because equality before God is preached, the Shudra rises, the woman rises, the priest's monopoly is circumscribed, polytheism's excesses are checked.9 Devotion does not stay in the temple. It leaks into the social order and rearranges it.
Third link: a united people. A nation reformed this way is "more humane," "more prone to hold together by mutual toleration," reaching even toward reconciliation with Muslims.10 The reforms produce cohesion. The people become one people.
Fourth link: self-rule. A people thus prepared was ready, "in a way no other nation in India was prepared, to take the lead in re-establishing a united native power in the place of foreign domination."11 Devotion has become, by the end of the chain, a charter for independence.
Now the sharp observation Laine makes about this. What Ranade gives us is "not so much a history of Maharashtra from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries as a blueprint for the future nation that claimed independence from Britain."12 The chain does not describe a past. It prescribes a future. Read it as history and it is suspiciously tidy. Read it as a blueprint and it is exactly as tidy as a blueprint should be.
And note the register the blueprint is written in. Ranade describes this religious reform "in terms palatable to a liberal British protestant."13 He twice called the bhakti movement "puritan."14 The religion of the heart taking precedence over empty ceremonialism — Hindus, Laine glosses with an exclamation point, as Quakers.15 Just as the British state overcame its own religious divisions through a policy of toleration, Shivaji's nation is built on a "Maharashtra Dharma" of tolerance "that could even absorb Muslims."16 The internal logic is real. But it is also dressed, deliberately, in clothes a Protestant reformer in London would recognize and applaud.
The Ranade thesis does not stand alone. It is one of three competing visions of what Shivaji's nation was for, and it locks into the others by opposition.
Set Ranade beside Tilak. Both make Shivaji the father of the nation. Both build the modern Maratha identity on his back. But where Ranade builds it on bhakti and social reform, Tilak builds it on supra-moral violence — Shivaji's killing of Afzal Khan reframed as action beyond conventional morality. The same hero, two opposite foundations: one devotional and inclusive, one martial and exclusive. The handshake is that they need each other to be legible. Ranade is the moderate only because Tilak is the radical standing next to him.
Set Ranade beside the inclusivist trap. His "Maharashtra Dharma" that "could even absorb Muslims" sounds generous.17 But Laine notes the cost: this confident humanity of "Hindu inclusivism as the only reasonable charter for a unified nation" hands the Muslim only two roles — "inflexible bigot, or antinomian (Hinduized) universalist."18 Aurangzeb plays the first. Akbar plays the second. The handshake here is a dark one: the most tolerant of the three visions still cannot grant the Muslim a third position, a self on his own terms. Inclusivism absorbs or it rejects. There is no door marked "remain, as you are."
And set Ranade beside the school textbook. The blueprint did not stay in 1901. Leap forward a hundred years and "these are the very elements that Maharashtrian school children are to learn in their patriotic lessons about Shivaji's life, following a program deeply indebted to Ranade's legacy."19 The handshake is reproduction. A reformer's argument became a curriculum. The blueprint became the building.
The whole thesis lives in one paragraph. Ranade closes his chapter "The Saints and Prophets of Maharashtra" with a passage Laine says deserves to be quoted in full, and it rewards reading as a single artifact.20
It opens like a ledger. "We have thus noticed all the principal features of the religious movement, which, commencing with Dnyandev can be traced to the end of the last century as a steady growth in spiritual virtues."21 Note the verb: traced. A steady growth. Ranade has set the bhakti movement up as a continuous, four-century line, not a scatter of saints. Continuity is the first thing a nation needs, and he supplies it in the first sentence.
Then the accomplishments, stacked. It gave a literature in the vernacular. It raised the Shudra "almost equal to that of the Brahmans." It "gave sanctity to family relations, and raised the status of woman." It made the nation "more humane" and "more prone to hold together by mutual toleration." It "suggested and partly carried out a plan of reconciliation with the Mahomedans."22 Read that list as a checklist for a modern liberal state: vernacular high culture, caste mobility, women's status, civic cohesion, religious reconciliation. Every line is a plank in a national platform. Ranade has written the founding document of a nation and disguised it as a summary of medieval religion.
The third movement subordinates the old religion to the new. The saints put "rites and ceremonies, and of pilgrimages and fasts, and of learning and contemplation" beneath "the higher excellence of worship by means of love and faith," and "checked the excesses of polytheism."23 This is the Protestant key being struck hard. The heart over the rite. Faith over ceremony. He even diminishes pilgrimage — striking, given that the Varkaris he is praising are by definition pilgrims.24 The internal contradiction does not slow him, because the rhetorical goal is to make Maharashtrian bhakti audible as a Reformation.
The close is the payoff, and it is pure blueprint. All of this "prepared it, in a way no other nation in India was prepared, to take the lead in re-establishing a united native power in the place of foreign domination."25 And then the authorizing voice: this is the faith Ramdas "had in view when he advised Shivaji's son to follow in his father's footsteps, and propagate this faith, at once tolerant and catholic, deeply spiritual and yet not iconoclastic."26 The passage has walked from Jnaneshvar in the fourteenth century to the demand for independence from Britain in the twentieth, and made it feel like one unbroken sentence. That is the case study: a paragraph that is a nation's constitution in the costume of a chapter conclusion.
It is 1900 in Bombay. The riots are recent — Hindu-Muslim blood in the streets only a few years back.27 An aging Chitpavan judge sits with the Marathi devotional literature of Mahipati and Chitnis open in front of him, and he is not reading it as a believer. He is reading it as a builder.
Here is the move he makes, and you can watch it happen. He takes Tukaram, the poet-saint, and folds him into a single continuous "movement" running from Jnaneshvar onward — homogenizing the diversity, emphasizing the unifying force, giving each saint a place in one growing line.28 A scatter of mystics becomes a single institution. He takes the equality-before-God of the pilgrim road and renames it egalitarian patriotism. He takes the heart-over-ceremony of the bhajan and renames it a Reformation. He takes "Maharashtra Dharma" and stretches it until it can "even absorb Muslims."29 Each renaming is quiet. Nothing is invented. Everything is reframed.
The before-and-after is the whole workflow:
| Before Ranade | After Ranade |
|---|---|
| Bhakti is private devotion — the soul's love of God | Bhakti is national foundation — the people's preparation for self-rule |
| The saint is a holy singer on the road to Pandharpur | The saint is a social reformer who raised the Shudra and the woman |
| Shivaji's swaraj is won by the sword | Shivaji's swaraj is won by four centuries of religious reform |
| Maharashtra is a region of castes and creeds | Maharashtra is one nation bound by religion, language, and culture |
| The Varkari is a pilgrim | The pilgrim is a citizen-in-waiting |
By the time he closes the book, the conversion is complete. The devotee has become a founder, and almost no one will notice the seam.
The blueprint has a fault line, and you can spot it by its symptoms.
First sign: the Muslim has only two seats. When a vision is this confident about "the basic humanity of Hindu inclusivism as the only reasonable charter for a unified nation," watch what it does to the people it claims to include.30 Ranade's inclusivism allows the Muslim exactly two roles — "inflexible bigot, or antinomian (Hinduized) universalist."31 There is no third chair. If you find yourself praising a nation's openness and can only imagine the outsider as either a fanatic or a convert-in-spirit, the inclusivism has already failed; it is absorption wearing tolerance as a mask.
Second sign: the foreigner you are absorbing. Ranade portrays the Muslims as "foreigners" even as he praises "the Maharashtrian capacity for absorption."32 The two cannot both be fully true. You cannot absorb someone you have already defined as foreign without first dissolving them. The diagnostic: when a tolerant nationalism keeps calling part of its population "foreign," the tolerance is conditional on surrender.
Third sign: the reconciliation that is too complete. Ranade writes that by Shivaji's time "this reconciliation seems to have been almost complete" — a near-total mutual recognition of "the essential unity of Alla with Rama."33 These words were written only a few short years after major Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay.34 When the historical claim of harmony is most serene exactly when the present is most violent, you are reading aspiration dressed as fact. The serenity is the symptom.
Fourth sign: the brahmin's hand still on the wheel. Ranade argues the national movement "drew on the talents and loyalty of all classes," yet insists on the critical importance of the brahmins Ramdas and Dadaji Konddev — without the brahmin Dadaji's "guiding hand to regulate and curb his wildness," Shivaji's success "would not have been so certain and permanent."35 Marathas make fierce warriors; brahmins supply the prudence. The egalitarian blueprint keeps the old hierarchy in the steering position. When the reform that "raised the Shudra" still cannot run without the brahmin's hand, the reform has a floor it will not cross.
The evidence is the book itself and its afterlife. Rise of the Maratha Power (1901) is the artifact; Laine reads it as the durable neo-Hindu charter whose elements survive, a hundred years on, in the patriotic lessons of Maharashtrian schoolchildren.36 The thesis endured because, as Laine puts it, Ranade "is no controversialist, and the sweet reasonableness" of the book gave it continuing influence.37 Sweet reasonableness is itself a kind of evidence — it is what made the blueprint stick.
The tensions are internal and load-bearing, and they should not be smoothed. Ranade diminishes pilgrimage while praising pilgrims.38 He calls Muslims foreigners while praising the capacity to absorb them.39 He preaches all-class equality while reserving the steering role for brahmins.40 He dates a near-complete Hindu-Muslim reconciliation to Shivaji's day while writing in the smoke of fresh Bombay riots.41 These contradictions are not flaws in the blueprint. They are the blueprint — the seams where aspiration was welded onto history.
The open question is the one Laine leaves open, and it should stay open. Who was Ranade writing for? Three answers, none of them settled.
Was he writing for his British employers — to convince them they ruled a nation that, like their own, had passed through a Reformation and an enlightenment, with a vernacular language, a tolerant national religion, and a patriotism that crossed class lines?42
Was he writing for his fellow Indian reformers — committed to the idea that the colonial period was a school in which Indians would learn the fundamentals of nation-building: religious tolerance, enlightened reform, egalitarian patriotism?43
Or was he writing for none of these living audiences at all, but for "a sort of internalized external audience, the British interlocutor now deeply lodged in his double consciousness"?44
Laine does not resolve it, and neither will this page. The third possibility is the most haunting, because it means the most influential blueprint for the Maratha nation may have been addressed, in part, to a colonizer who had taken up permanent residence inside the colonized reformer's own head. Leave the door open.
Stand inside the year 1900 and look at the two men building the same hero. Ranade the moderate reformer and Tilak the neotraditionalist are both reaching for Shivaji. Both want him as father of the nation. From a distance they look like allies in a single project.
Then you watch what each one's hand actually does. Ranade reaches for the bhakti saints — he wants the nation founded on devotion, social reform, the raising of the Shudra and the woman, the absorption of even the Muslim into a tolerant Maharashtra Dharma.45 Tilak reaches for the sword — he wants the nation founded on Shivaji's supra-moral violence, the killing of Afzal Khan as an act beyond conventional morality, a Hindu revival with a hard edge. The convergence was on the hero. The tension is on the foundation. One man builds the nation on the love that holds people together; the other builds it on the killing that a true founder is licensed to commit.
And here is what the split reveals from the inside. Ranade ran the risk of excommunication from his own caste for his reforms, set in explicit opposition to Tilak's neotraditional stance.46 So the tension is not abstract. It cost him. The moderate who wanted the nation founded on tolerance was, in his own life, the one his people nearly cast out — while the neotraditionalist who wanted it founded on righteous violence kept his standing. The lesson the two of them teach together, standing back to back over the same Shivaji, is that a nation can be founded on devotion or on violence, and the men who choose devotion are often the ones who pay. Laine keeps both visions live; so must we.
Ranade's blueprint reaches into other rooms in the vault, and the connections are not decorative — each one shows the bhakti-as-nation thesis doing work no single frame catches alone.
Start with Religious Tolerance as Political Philosophy. Ranade's "Maharashtra Dharma" of tolerance is built on an explicit borrowing: just as the British overcame their own religious divisions "by a state policy of toleration," Shivaji's nation is built on religious tolerance.47 The parallel is clean — toleration as statecraft, the engineering of unity out of difference. But the tension is where the insight lives. In the European story, toleration lets distinct faiths coexist as distinct. In Ranade's story, toleration is the solvent that "absorbs" the Muslim into a Hindu inclusivism, leaving him only the bigot's seat or the convert's.48 The insight neither domain produces alone: the same word, "tolerance," can name a politics of coexistence or a politics of dissolution, and only by laying the two side by side do you see that Ranade's tolerance is the second kind wearing the costume of the first. Tolerance is not one thing. It is a verb that points in two directions, and the direction depends on whether the tolerated party gets to remain itself.
Now Founding Myth Construction. Laine names Ranade's book a "blueprint for the future nation" rather than a history.49 That is myth-construction caught in the act — a past assembled to authorize a future, the saints recruited as founders, the four-century line drawn from Jnaneshvar to the demand for independence.50 The structural parallel to every founding myth is exact: continuity supplied where there was scatter, intention supplied where there was accident, a usable origin manufactured from real materials. The tension specific to Ranade is that his myth is built not from battles but from devotion — most founding myths reach for the sword (and Tilak's does), while Ranade reaches for the bhajan. The insight: a founding myth's choice of raw material — violence or devotion — pre-decides who the nation will be able to include, because a nation founded on holy war and a nation founded on holy song extend different invitations to the stranger. The myth's content is its future politics in seed.
Finally, briefly, Action vs Contemplation — the Hero. Ranade's saints subordinate "learning and contemplation" to "worship by means of love and faith," and that devotional energy is then converted into national action — self-rule.51 The handshake is the conversion itself: contemplation routed into politics, the pilgrim turned into a citizen-in-waiting. The insight that neither frame catches alone is that Ranade collapses the old action/contemplation split entirely — in his blueprint, devotion is action, the bhajan is nation-building, and the contemplative is reclassified as the most effective patriot of all. The hero need not choose between the temple and the field; Ranade makes the temple the field.
Sharpest implication. The most influential foundation for the Maratha nation may have been built, in part, for an audience the builder could not see — a British interlocutor lodged so deep in Ranade's double consciousness that the blueprint for an independent India was written, partly, to win the approval of the colonizer it was meant to expel.52 If that is true, then anti-colonial nationalism can carry the colonizer's gaze inside its own founding document. The cage gets rebuilt in the blueprint for the escape.
Generative questions.
When a colonized reformer writes his nation's origin story in a register his colonizer will applaud — Reformation, puritan, Quaker, toleration — is that strategy, surrender, or a double consciousness in which the two have become impossible to separate?
Ranade's blueprint became the schoolchild's lesson a century on.53 What does it do to a nation when its founding myth is one a reformer designed to be palatable to outsiders — does the outsider's taste stay embedded in the self-image forever?
Every founding myth chooses violence or devotion as its raw material. Ranade chose devotion and still could not grant the Muslim a third seat.54 If even the gentlest foundation cannot make room for the stranger, is the failure in the choice of material, or in the act of founding itself?