A child in a Pune classroom recites it without blinking: Shivaji was a great Indian Hindu hero of Maharashtra. Four words, three of them labels, and each one feels like bedrock. Indian. Hindu. Maharashtrian. You could build a flag out of them. You could build a riot out of them, and people have.
Push on any of the three and it goes soft. "Maharashtra" had no fixed borders until 1960.1 Before that it was a slice of the Bombay Presidency, and before that a name that drifted across a succession of Hindu and Islamic empires.2 "Hindu" in the seventeenth century was not a bloc you belonged to — it was a contested sign, a word people fought over the meaning of.3 And "India" is the most nakedly anachronistic of the three: Shivaji's slogan was "Hindavi Swaraj," a Perso-Sanskrit phrase, and reading "Hindavi" as "Indian citizen" smuggles a modern nation-state into a world that had no such thing.4
This is the move James Laine makes at the front of his book. He takes the three categories we use to file Shivaji and refuses to assume they were already there, already solid, already his. He holds them "in suspense."5 Not to deny that Shivaji belonged to anything — but to ask, precisely, in what sense he belonged, and in what sense the belonging is something we built afterward and shipped backward in time.
The page you are reading is about that suspension. It is the gate the rest of the Laine material walks through.
The "three anachronistic identities" are Maharashtrian, Hindu, and Indian — the three memberships routinely ascribed to Shivaji as if they were primordial, objective, and therefore obvious.6 Laine's first analytic act is to interrogate the categories before interrogating the man. If Shivaji was a Maharashtrian, a Hindu, and an Indian, in what sense did he accept membership in these clubs? In what sense is it anachronistic to ascribe such memberships to him, and in what sense not?7
That double question — anachronistic in what sense, and in what sense NOT — is the whole point. Laine is not saying Shivaji had no regional, religious, or proto-political loyalties. He is saying the loyalties did not arrive pre-sorted into the three boxes we now use. The boxes themselves got their hard edges later, through processes Laine wants to name rather than inherit.8
"Anachronistic" here means a specific thing. A category is used anachronistically when you take its modern shape — Maharashtra with 1960 borders, Hinduism as a bounded world religion, India as a nation-state of equal citizens — and project that shape onto a past that did not hold it. The error is not in noticing that Shivaji spoke Marathi, worshipped a Shaiva goddess, or used the word "Hindavi." The error is in assuming those facts add up to the modern container, as if the container were already waiting to be filled.
And the deepest move is this. Shivaji and, even more, the people who later celebrated his heritage, DID claim a Maharashtrian and a Hindu identity. But Shivaji made those claims inside a live debate — or at least a real uncertainty — about where the boundaries of those categories even fell.9 He was an actor in the argument, not an inhabitant of its settled conclusion. Laine calls his context "different from but analogous to similar debates today."10 The labels were contested in his time. They are contested now. The mistake is to treat the contest as already over.
Take them one at a time, the way Laine does.
Maharashtra. The state has had clear boundaries only since 1960.11 What binds it as a cultural region is language — Marathi, the southernmost Indo-Aryan tongue, carried by the saint-poets from Jnaneshvar onward.12 But even the language frontier was hazy until the twentieth century: the deity at Pandharpur, the would-be religious center, is hailed by a Kannada name, Vithoba, in a town that probably spoke Kannada in the medieval period.13 The earliest ballad celebrating Shivaji is written in a Marathi so Persianized that almost no modern Maharashtrian can read it.14 And the sacred map of Maharashtra is not one map. It is many overlapping ones: the Varkari pilgrimage to Vithoba at Pandharpur, Shivaji's own Shaiva goddess Bhavani at Tuljapur, Ramdas's devotion to Rama and Hanuman, the cult of Dattatreya, the Ganesha sites, the Mahanubhav places, protective goddesses.15 There are reasons to name Bhavani, Ganesha, Jnaneshvar, Ramdas, and Shivaji in a history of Maharashtra. There are "no obvious reasons to link them in a directly linear narrative."16 The seamless regional heritage is stitched after the fact.
The clincher is what Shivaji did when he wanted to be crowned a Hindu king. He did not reach for regional symbols. He recruited Maharashtrian brahmins from Benares — Gaga Bhatta and Paramananda — to run an orthodox coronation and compose a Sanskrit epic, the Sivabharata, in his honor.17 That epic praises him as a Hindu king and "makes no mention of Maharashtra or Marathas as such."18 When the stakes were highest, Shivaji used classical, pan-Indian symbols, not regional ones.19
Hindu. Just as "Maharashtra" must be held in suspense, "Hindu" must be treated as a fluid sign without primordial meaning.20 Laine sketches a scholarly fight here. On one side, anticommunalist scholars argue Hindu-versus-Muslim identity is a modern, largely British invention, and they point to the deeply shared social worlds of premodern South Asia — Shivaji's own grandfather Maloji served a Deccani sultan, prayed to a Sufi saint for sons, and named those sons Shah and Sharif.21 On the other side, scholars like Pollock, Dumont, and Robinson argue the two communities held genuinely different visions "deep down."22 Laine's path between them is to insist that "Hindu" and "Islam" were CONTESTED categories — that a descriptive account must leave room for "bad Hindus" and "bad Muslims," for subalterns to whom the distinction "would have seemed meaningless," and for rising military chiefs who used Hindu tropes of demonization less to defend Hinduism than to grab kshatriya legitimacy and manufacture a noble past.23 The category was a tool people reached for, not a tribe they were born into.
India. The least interesting term to deconstruct, Laine says, because it is the most obvious candidate for anachronism.24 Nehru saw in Shivaji a symbol of "love of country," and the school textbook glosses "Hindavi Swaraj" as a dream open to anyone living in Hindusthan, of any community or religion.25 But was Hindusthan "India"? Did anyone ever use "Hindavi" the way we use "Indian" — to name a citizen of a nation-state transcending caste and region?26 The seam shows hardest in one fact: Shivaji's pursuit of royal power meant his fellow Hindus and fellow Indians were, "often as not, military opponents."27 The Nimbalkars, the Ghorpades, the Mores — Maratha sardars all — opposed him.28 Branding them "collaborators" assumes a clean Hindu-versus-foreigner choice that would have been alien to landed nobles whose blood ran bluer than his.29 Even the Jedhe family, among his staunchest allies, collaborated with the Mughals within four years of his death.30
What this page gives the vault is not one fact about one king. It is a reusable procedure. Take any identity that presents itself as eternal — a nation, a religion, a people, a heritage — and run Laine's three-step suspension on it.
Step one: find the date the borders hardened. For Maharashtra it is 1960.31 Every "ancient" container has a moment when it acquired the edges it now pretends it always had. The date is usually embarrassingly recent. Finding it does not dissolve the thing; it relocates it, from nature into history.
Step two: count the sacred maps. A single seamless identity almost always turns out to be a creative selection from a messy menu of competing options — here, the Varkari, the Shaiva, the Ramaite, the Ganesha, the Dattatreya cults, with "no obvious reasons" to braid them into one line.32 The seamlessness is the artifact. Someone chose.
Step three: check whether the in-group fought each other. Nothing punctures a primordial story faster than discovering that the supposed brothers were enemies — Shivaji's fellow Hindus as his military opponents, his allies defecting to the Mughals within four years of his death.33 If the bond were primordial, the betrayals would be unthinkable. They were routine.
The vault can point this template at anything. It is the working engine behind the Laine cluster, and it generalizes. Any time a source treats a collective identity as a given rather than a construction, this page is the gate to run it through.
Lay out the religious map of "Maharashtra" and the single heritage falls apart in your hands.
Start with the Varkari claim, because it is the strongest. The anthropologist Iravati Karve offered a definition so clean it sounds final: "I have found a new definition of Maharashtra: the land whose people go to Pandharpur for pilgrimage."34 The Varkaris are vegetarian Vaishnavas of all castes who walk to Vithoba's shrine, and the nationalist argument pairs their bhakti devotionalism with Shivaji's kingdom as "twin pillars of the same edifice" — a casteless devotional community making a nation possible.35 One language, one pilgrimage, one people. It is a beautiful story.
Now put Shivaji himself on the map and the pillars stop matching. Shivaji was a Shaiva. His patron deity was the goddess Bhavani of Tuljapur — a deity the Varkari hagiographer Mahipati explicitly declared INFERIOR.36 His grandfather patronized Shambhu Mahadev at Shingnapur; his soldiers reportedly charged with the Shaiva war-cry "Har Har, Mahadev"; on his last southern campaign he detoured to a Shaiva shrine in Andhra.37 In no early text is Shivaji clearly tied to Vaishnavism or to the Pandharpur tradition at all.38 The man at the center of the regional myth worshipped at a shrine the regional myth ranks below its own.
Add Ramdas, the seventeenth-century saint who coined the very phrase "Maharashtra Dharma" and who is sometimes claimed as the spiritual engine of Shivaji's rising.39 Ramdas was a devotee of Rama and Hanuman, only tangentially related to the Pandharpur faith, and adopted by the Varkari tradition only later.40 So the three figures everyone wants in the same sentence — the Varkari saints, Shivaji, Ramdas — point at three different gods. And behind them stand more maps still: the Mahanubhav sect's places, Paul Courtright's Ganesha sites, the Dattatreya cult, the protective goddesses, Parashurama.41 Overlapping, not nested. A menu, not a hierarchy.
Here is where the construction becomes visible as construction. Laine quotes Bernard Cohn: anyone forging a regional identity "must creatively select from a wide range of available symbols."42 Watch Tilak do exactly that. The nationalist Lokmanya Tilak, calling for celebrations of Shivaji's life, did NOT champion the Varkari tradition or the goddess Bhavani — the two things actually attached to Shivaji. He built a popular festival around Ganesha, "a god in no particular way associated with Shivaji."43 A modern political operator, assembling a regional-national feeling, reached past the historically connected symbols and chose a more useful one. The "seamless" heritage of Maharashtra is a curated exhibit. Tilak is caught in the act of curating it.
You are holding a tourist map of Maharashtra's holy sites. The caption across the top promises "The Sacred Heart of a Single People." You believe it for a second.
Then you start tracing the routes, and the single heart splits.
| The inherited label | What dissolves the moment you press on it |
|---|---|
| "Maharashtra, an ancient land" | Clear borders only since 1960; before that a slice of Bombay Presidency, before that a name drifting across rival empires.44 |
| "One people, one faith" | At least five sacred maps — Varkari Vithoba, Shaiva Bhavani, Ramdas's Rama, Ganesha, Dattatreya — with "no obvious reasons" to link them in one line.45 |
| "Shivaji, son of this devotional soil" | A Shaiva whose goddess the Varkari hagiographer ranked inferior; tied in no early text to Pandharpur at all.46 |
| "Bound by the mother tongue" | Marathi's frontiers hazy until the 1900s; Pandharpur itself probably Kannada-speaking in the medieval period; the first Shivaji ballad unreadably Persianized.47 |
| "His dream was Hindavi Swaraj, freedom for the nation" | "Hindavi" is Perso-Sanskrit; reading it as modern "Indian citizen" is the most obvious anachronism of the three.48 |
| "He fought for his Hindu brothers" | His fellow Hindus were "often as not, military opponents"; his closest allies joined the Mughals within four years of his death.49 |
Your finger sits on Tuljapur. Your finger sits on Pandharpur. Your finger sits on Shingnapur. They do not point at the same god, the same caste rule, or the same story. The map's caption was written by someone who needed a single people and selected the symbols to manufacture one. You set the map down. The territory underneath it was never as smooth as the paper said.
The sharpest way to misuse this page is to over-read it. Someone learns that Maharashtra, Hindu, and India were constructed categories and concludes they are therefore fake — unreal, illusory, not worth taking seriously. That is a mistake, and Laine guards against it.
Hold "in suspense" does not mean "deny." Laine is explicit that for seventeenth- or eighteenth-century people in the heartland of today's Maharashtra, "Maharashtrian" and "Hindu" may have been meaningful markers of their identities.50 The categories did real work. They organized loyalty, legitimacy, and war. The point of suspending them is to watch that work happen, not to wave it away as nothing.
So the diagnostic signs of the failure are these. You are over-reading if you start saying the seventeenth century had "no Hindus" — Laine never says that; he says Hindu was a contested, fluid sign, which is the opposite of saying it was empty.51 You are over-reading if you treat Shivaji's swaraj as pure retrospective invention — Shivaji DID seek royal legitimation, DID use pan-Indian Sanskritic symbols, DID act inside a real argument about boundaries.52 And you are over-reading if you flip Laine into a tool for denying any continuity at all between Shivaji and modern Maharashtra. The honest finding is narrower and harder: the categories are real AND constructed AND contested, all at once, and the modern narrative that welds them into one seamless line is the anachronism — not the categories themselves.
A constructed thing can still cut you. A border drawn in 1960 is a real border. The failure is not in seeing the construction; it is in confusing "made" with "make-believe."
The contradictions here are load-bearing and must stay open.
Laine sits against the anticommunalist scholars without fully joining the other side. The anticommunalists show that Hindus and Muslims shared social worlds — Maloji's Sufi saint, the Varkari Muslim devotee Sheikh Muhammad with "Govinda in his heart," sultans allied with rajas, mixed armies — and they marshal this against the two-nation theory.53 Pollock, Dumont, and Robinson push back, arguing the communities held different visions "deep down" that "smoldered" beneath a shared surface.54 Laine does not resolve this. He reframes it: the categories were contested, so a fair description must hold both the shared worlds and the real frictions at once. The tension is the finding, not a problem to be cleared.
The hardest internal tension is this. Shivaji DID use "swaraj," DID recruit Benares brahmins, DID stage an orthodox Hindu coronation, DID deploy pan-Indian classical symbols.55 He was not identity-neutral. So the page must say two things that strain against each other: no clean "Maharashtrian nation" or "Hindu nation" or "Indian nation" existed for him to belong to, AND he actively made claims drawn from religious and royal vocabularies that look like the raw material of exactly those later nations. He is a player in the argument whose later resolution gets read back onto him. Both halves are true. Collapsing either one falsifies him.
Open questions. Did Shivaji see himself as a liberator of Maharashtra, with patriotic attachment to its soil — or was "Maratha polity" a regional state only in retrospect, given that he and his successors pushed power well past the Marathi-speaking region?56 When Tilak chose Ganesha over Bhavani, what does the choice of an unconnected symbol reveal about how regional identity actually gets engineered?57 And if Hindavi Swaraj was genuinely open to "anyone who lives in Hindusthan, no matter to what community or religion," how do we square that inclusive gloss with the relentlessly intra-Hindu character of his wars?58
Laine reaches for Benedict Anderson, and the two thinkers meet on solid common ground before they part. Anderson's Imagined Communities gave the field its working picture of how a nation gets made: not discovered but imagined, assembled through print and narrative until strangers feel like brothers. Laine's textbook does the imagining out loud — the pledge "India is my country, all Indians are my brothers" is exactly the sentence Anderson taught us to read as construction-in-progress, a vast horizontal fraternity conjured by a school primer.59 Both men treat the nation as an effect of stories rather than a fact of nature. On that they converge completely.
Then the angle of attack diverges, and the divergence is what makes Laine worth reading next to Anderson. Anderson works at altitude. He gives you the general mechanism — print capitalism, the novel and the newspaper, the imagined simultaneity that lets a Filipino and a Mexican feel co-national without ever meeting. The mechanism is powerful precisely because it abstracts away from any single case. Laine does the opposite. He drops into one regional case and shows you the actual seams — the specific gods that do not line up, the specific allies who defected within four years, the specific date the borders hardened, the specific festival Tilak chose to invent.60 Where Anderson tells you THAT nations are imagined, Laine shows you the imagining mid-stitch, with the needle still in the cloth.
The reveal, felt from inside the reading: Anderson makes the construction thesis believable; Laine makes it unbearable to forget. After Anderson you can still hold the nation at arm's length as theory. After Laine's catalogue of mismatched shrines and turncoat sardars, the seamless story of "Indian Hindu Maharashtra" can never re-seal itself, because you have seen the exact places where the seams run. The general claim teaches you the move. The particular case ruins your ability to un-see it.
This page connects outward wherever identity gets manufactured and sold as ancestral.
The first handshake is with Founding Myth Construction. The structural parallel is exact: a founding myth takes a contingent, messy origin and retrofits it as destiny, and Laine catches Maharashtra's regional myth doing precisely that — selecting from a wide menu of symbols, linking figures who have "no obvious reasons" to be linked, welding Pandharpur to Shivaji after the fact.61 But Laine adds a tension the general founding-myth frame tends to smooth over. Most founding-myth analysis assumes the founder is at least a willing protagonist of his own myth. Laine shows a founder whose actual devotional life (Shaiva Bhavani) contradicts the myth built around him (Varkari Vaishnavism), and whose own slogan (Hindavi Swaraj) gets a meaning he could not have held.62 The insight neither generates alone: founding myths can be constructed not just AROUND a founder's silence but AGAINST a founder's documented practice — the myth-makers override the founder, not merely fill his gaps.
The second handshake is with Regional Goddess as Political Identity. Here the connection is almost forensic. Shivaji's Bhavani of Tuljapur is a regional goddess fused to political power — the patron deity of a king, war-cry of his soldiers.63 That page treats the goddess-as-polity fusion as a coherent engine of identity. Laine complicates the engine by showing the goddess was contested even within her own region: the Varkari hagiographer Mahipati declared Bhavani INFERIOR to Vithoba, and Tilak, building modern Maharashtrian feeling, skipped Bhavani entirely for Ganesha.64 The insight the pairing produces: a regional goddess can anchor political identity AND be demoted or bypassed by rival devotional and nationalist projects in the same territory — the "goddess of the people" is itself a contested seat, not a settled throne. Political identity does not get one goddess; it gets a fight over which goddess counts.
The third handshake is with Ethnic Nationalism within Marxist Universalism. The parallel runs through Cynthia Talbot's rising chiefs, who used Hindu demonization tropes "not so much in order to defend Hinduism or attack Islam as to gain legitimacy" — forging regional-linguistic ethnicities and writing themselves noble pasts.65 That is identity instrumentalized: a universal-sounding religious frame deployed to manufacture a particular ethnic claim. The other page tracks the inverse pressure — particular ethnic feeling surviving inside a universalist ideology. Read together, they show the two-way traffic between universal frames and ethnic projects: the universal can be a costume for the particular (Talbot's chiefs) just as the particular can be a stowaway in the universal. The insight: "religious" and "ethnic" identity claims are frequently legitimacy-engineering operations wearing the mask of primordial belonging, and the mask works in both directions.
The Sharpest Implication. If "Hindu," "Maharashtrian," and "Indian" were not stable containers for Shivaji — if he made his claims inside a live argument about where those boundaries fell rather than from inside settled membership — then every modern campaign to "reclaim Shivaji's authentic identity" is projecting a present category onto a past that never held it.66 The reclaimer is not recovering Shivaji. The reclaimer is conscripting him, dressing a seventeenth-century king in a twentieth-century uniform and calling the costume his true skin. This cuts every direction at once: the secularist who wants an inclusive Shivaji and the Hindu-nationalist who wants a Hindu-warrior Shivaji are both retrofitting. Laine's suspension does not hand the prize to either side. It takes the prize off the table and says: the thing you are fighting to own did not exist yet in the form you are claiming.
Generative Questions.