When the English factory at Rajapur ended up tangled with Shivaji and a handful of their men were taken prisoner, the temptation is to read the episode as the opening shot of a long story — Shivaji, alone among Indian rulers, seeing the European trading companies for the colonial threat they would become. Purandare won't allow it. He flags the move as "reading history backwards": crediting a seventeenth-century king with foreseeing an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century outcome, because we already know how the story ends. Shivaji dealt with the English as one more troublesome merchant-power on his coast, not as the British Empire in embryo. The prophecy is ours, projected onto him.
Joins The Rajapur Factory Affair and the English Prisoners (the deed, kept to its real scale) with The Double Anachronism (Laine's name for the construction-side version of the same mistake). The pairing is the spine: anachronism is policed by the deeds wing and the construction wing from opposite directions, and they agree.
Open question: Is "reading history backwards" a single error with two faces — the deeds-historian's foresight-inflation and the myth-maker's identity-projection — or are these distinct failures that only look alike? If they're one mechanism, the three-warrant hub has a built-in anachronism detector, because deeds and construction cross-check each other automatically.
[ ] The deeds/construction anachronism parallel holds under a third example [ ] Locates whether Purandare himself ever slips into the backward-reading he warns against [ ] Has a falsifiable core claim