Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India

Rating:
Summary: Revelations of a Hindu Basher, in Engineered SIMIan Alliance
Review: More like a pagan-hating idol-smasher, takes the proverbial inquisitorial hatchet to one of the most-enduring, most-loved anti-colonialist icons of medieval Indian history. Consider following despicable but author's original allusions, obviously the result of insufficient scholarship and total lack of sensitivity, resulting in gross abuse of a host culture: Bhavani as a low caste, non-vegetarian deity (55, 94, 95). Shivaji as Shaiva, and hence no connection with 'Vaishnavs'like Ramdas & the Varkaris(???, 35). Shivajis granddaughters married to Mughals (48, etc.). Shivaji, the conquering plunderer (95), concerned with amassing wealth, power and glory (98). Confusion over saffron robes of sannyasi while escaping from Agra, and fakir's disguise in raid on Shahistakan (51). Saraswats are a marginal caste(71), and supercilious dismissal of Rajwade and the serious historians of the Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal as the 'Pune brahmin club' (78-79). Slight offered to Sayajirao Gaekwad --"another Maratha King, with even more questionable bloodlines and progressive instincts" (81). Insane attribution of low caste status of the King, citing Phule, who in fact made that allusion in the historic context of referring to a Brahmin bias, and not as his own assertion! The latter caste spelt in 'low case' throughout the book, as brahmin. Questions Shivaji's setting up of a modern navy under the Angres (85) without justification, only on the basis of loose and sarcastic speculation for the benefit of western readers. The 'cracks in the narrative' claimed by author as his original discovery, are common knowledge in every Marathi household, without the motivated slant given by Laine. The latter is not hagiographer, no, more like a character assassin and a mercenary! Has no understanding of Hindu religion or culture, and the book is more like a half-baked and undigested vomit of an India-baiter, upset with the Indian and immigrant websites on the Great Man. While shedding crocodile tears about the plight of Muslims -- more like an insane effort to wipe out the history of Islamic plunder -- he could have tried to understand why Muslims like Shahir Amar Sheikh or A R Antulay themselves adore Shivaji (without imputing sick rationalizations out of his putrid imagination). The author has made an exhibition of himself, and is now seeking more underhand ploys to cover his malice by saying that people are unfair or downright illiterate about their objections to a very sick excercise, the kind that should have no place in any civilized cross-cultural discourse. Shame on Oxford University Press for uncritically publishing the book and then trying to make a fast buck in a very tolerant India. Of course the book deserves to be banned.

Rating:
Summary: Mr. James Laine Should Say Sorry to Prime Minister
Review: Mr. james Laine is good author, no doubt. But Mr. James Laine had should think about the person on whom he wrote. The Shivaji Raje is not only our king but he was our godfather in right way.

Mr James Laine I really proud of you that you wrote on Shivaji but sorry to say hearted us so much.

Therfore thers is my realy pure & pure request to you please, please and please say sorry to our Prime minister and Shivsena Prmukh Mr. Balashaebh Thakeray who taken very clam step against you.

Your one sorry will be increase respects of you

Please Please say sorry,

Wating for positive reply
Yours faithfully

Bharat R. (Rao) Rane
Jai Hind Jai Maharashtra

Rating:
Summary: Mr. Laine SERIOUSLY needs HELP!
Review: My Suggestion DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT BUYING THIS BOOK IF YOU DONT LIKE LIES and DISTORTED FICTIONAL MADE UP STORIES!
Readers, i belong to the country of the topic of this book and let me tell you INDIA was never and is still not an Islamic nation in the 17-18th century and still today ........How could the tile of the book be such a BIG LIE!! blah blah....ISLAMIC INDIA!! WRONG Mr. Laine.........PLEASE CLEAR YOUR FACTS BEFORE YOU START EVEN WRITING A BOOK! Leave alone the contents of the book........becoz i pity your subject knowledge...
Readers please refer to the following link for details to know about this fake book and its fake contents! The link explains the myths that the book tries to portray as facts.

http://www.hvk.org/articles/0104/84.html

Rating:
Summary: Stars and Stripes for Texas Cowboy
Review: Right buddy, too funny for words. Cowboy Jim writes mediocre tome: History? Literature? Come again. Why Americans have this juvenile urge to poke a finger in every pie around the globe, and then point grubby fingers at critters who man distant lands. Okay, this bunch of supercilious academics are otherwise protected by 2 oceans from the hurly-burly of the real multi-colored, multi-textured, enticing world in a sanitized coop of their own. Specialised, compartmetalized, and wimpish-civilized living, defended by a techno-army of black and hispanic men. Oh how comic. To get this civilized, they had to bomb Japan first right? Or pox the native Americans? No land left to conquer, how about nuke-Aiyyran? Cowboy's prevaricating... even about his period of stay in India. Half-a-year here, seven months there... that's all. Two visits. Make BORI his second home??? Six year old daughter wanning to go to Pune? When his last visit there was in 1991? Wants to tear his hair out when he hears of the natives wishing to bring home a Shivaji pageant, elephants-'n-all on the Mall in Washington, DC? (Yes, it's in the bk, I almost fell off the chair laughing). Think all the jabbering Indologists may relax in their hives, nest, lair, treetops, or whatever. Nothing serious here. No offence meant. Just expressing a different world view; plenty of room for all. This Laineman's not saying how some of those he thanked in that book, written several years later, slammed him hard after they'd read the book, in plain disgust. No, he could've made some cracks on the story and got away with it, if done it honestly, with facts at hand, and done a good job of it. All he's done is gone and had some fun in India with the travel grants he commandeered, came home and wrote a stupid, snide and underhanded book many-many years later, and given a massive propaganda handle to all Hindu-bashers, including the Khalistani terrorists with blood on their hands, who even visited his office in sympathy!

Rating:
Summary: Fiction not History
Review: Some of the remarks made by James Laine in this book, seem more like willful, calculated sensationalism than honest scholarship. Despite his apology which as of now he has practically retracted , there are certain issues that need both examination and comment. ..

Rating:
Summary: A distressful account of vandalism, and biased analysis.
Review: Submitted on behalf of Dr. P.V. Pathak, 12850 Whittington Dr. #104, Houston Tx 77077 USA , <[e-mail]>

"If JL had real intentions to write an unbiased and objective assessment of Shivaji's life, he would have focused on the achievements of the great hero who never lost a battle, who was a great social reformer; who had technological foresight, who gave impetus to Hindu nationalism and instilled confidence that even in the face of Muslim brutalities, a Hindu king to be coroneted with full rites. Taking inspiration from him, young Chhatrasal established his kingdom in very heart of Mughal Empire in Bundelkhand."

Rating:
Summary: Trash and malicious gossip passed off as scholarship
Review: The author has publicly acknowledged to a leading Indian daily that this book is NOT a work of history. Enough said.

Rating:
Summary: Victim of a Massive Misinformation and Censorship Campaign
Review: The first thing to said in a review of this book is that most of the other reviwers are not responding to its contents at all. Indeed, one must doubt whether most of them ever bothered to read it. So, I will begin by assuring the readers of this review that I have in fact read the book and have done so as an educated layman, which is to say, in one of the ways that the author intended and foresaw.
This book is in fact a work of scholarship, which is not to say that it is a documentary history of the reign of Shivaji or a biography of that great Maharashtrian king. Rather, the work is, simply stated, a literary analysis of the texts that have, over a three hundred year span narrated and re-narrated the life and legend of Shivaji. The author is a Sanskritist by training and also knows Marathi. Accordingly he has acess to and has actually read the various entextualizations extending from the time of Shivaji's own life through the 18th century hagiographers of the Maharashtrian poet saints to the works of nationalists such as Lala Rajput Rai and Justice Ranade. This reading distinguishes him from most of the reviewers here, who, one seriously suspects, have no such familiarity with the materials in question (though one reviewer implies otherwise). The book itself is, in truth, an unobjectionable, if somewhat naive and at times spotty, work of discourse analysis in a now long familiar mode. This fact is wholly ignored by the reviewers here, who, if they have in fact read the book, are incapable of making the distinction between such a mode of scholarship, which is fundamentally preoccupied with the ideological preoccupations of source material and/or of historiography, and is not itself an instance of history writing per se. Thus the charge that this is not history is beside the point entirely, as is the reference to Laine's "thesis" which is supposed to be, we can only assume, the "claim" that Shivaji's parentage is in question. No such claim is ever made in this book. Rather, the claim is made that the ideological construction of Shivaji as the examplar of various virtues according to the predilections of the particular text precludes the possibility of those texts analyzing the reasons for Shivaji's father not being his political or military ally, not being present for much of his youth, and not designating him his heir. (For these latter claims, Laine does provide substantial historical corroboration established through the usual historicist methods of sifting the sources, privileging those most contemporaneous when there is no obvious reason not to do so, seeking corroboration from sources arising from other institutional locations with differing ideological preocupations, etc.). It is in this regard, and clearly and explicitly so, that Laine retells a joke (most likely told by a Sadavshivpethi brahman, though Laine does not say so) which does in fact cast aspersion on Shivaji's mother's mother by claiming her son to have been conceived out of wedlock. As for the contemporary "veneration" of Shivaji's mother, etc. by (some of) the Maratha community, a veneration said to have been insulted by Laine's work, such matters cannot ultimately guide any scholarly enterprise, any more than a serious scholarly analysis of early Christian writings or the Vedas or the Koran and hadith can be guided by any such concerns. If people believe that scholarship writing on this subject should confine itself to "the achievements of the great hero who never lost a battle, who was a great social reformer; [sic] who had technological foresight, who gave impetus [sic] to Hindu nationalism and instilled confidence that even in the face of Muslim brutalities [such as?], a Hindu king to be coroneted [sic] with full rites" then such people don't know what scholarship is and ought instead to confine themselves to historical novels designed to reinforce their sense of identity. In short, then, Laine's book is just another book, one that makes an able, if flawed, contribution by undertaking a detailed ideological analysis of a single theme within Indian literary practice. The controversy that has arisen around the book, which has resulted in considerable vandalism, assaults, censorship, and unconstrained intimidation of persons in Pune has also had as one of its many deleterious effects, the spoliation of Dr. Laine's career, who, one expects, will not be undertaking further research in Maharashtra anytime soon. People such as those who have written many of the reviews here are respojnsible for this, as for the effects of their "veneration".

Rating:
Summary: Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India
Review: The fundamental confusion is synthesized in the sub-title. James W. Laine attests to a cultural crossroads in India where two cultures were grappling wirh one another in terms of being at times comprehensive and at times confrontational.

Generally. looking in on a situation from the outside, without being part of it, or being within it, is not conducive to an understanding of human relationships since humans in a time/place frame have their own rationales and it is questionable that "objectifying" them is going to make them any more accessible. Only conceptual arrogance can convince otherwise: We cannot oblige everyone to think the way we do. In other words, our terms are not the only ones to think in. "Our" traditions and "our" rationales, talking of the U.S.A., could easily become the laughing stock of the world. In Studies in Classic American Literature, apparently suppressed in 1923, the year of its publication, D.H. Lawrence does a good job of it. He argues that hypocrisy, ably portrayed in the works of Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and others, will be the seed of our destruction.

I believe that the purpose of Laine's thesis crumbles when he confuses the thesis of historical perfection with human frailty. The imperfection of human beings is all too well known. Lain recurs to his youthful miscomprehension of Davy Crockett as a regional or national hero seen as a villian, he assures us, in the eyes of Mexican status quo. And evidently the scenario does present confrontational issues that, however, cannot be resolved in terms of pseudo terminology brought into existence by contemporary situations, e.g. "Anglos as Illegal immigrants," (pp.89-90). -- Both of which terms belong in the XXth and XXIst centuries and can only be applied retoactively to create conceptual inaccuracy.

Riots? Destruction? have to be seen as an indispensable reaction to intrusive arrogance. (Look at what happened in Los Angeles in 1992 when the wrongdoers were whitewashed.)

The really muddy part of Laine's presentation becomes quagmire when he talks about being allowed "to entertain certain unthinkable thoughts." (p.90,2nd paragraph).

Shivaji appears to have risen above personal limitations to represent a non personal ambition of unity for his people and shouldered the responsibility of guiding and governing them by their own ideals and princibles. In spite of his recurrent cynicism Laine provides the answer he is seeking in his quote from Sivabharata (p.98):

all men formerly fearful
now reached their goals

Certainly that would not have occurred had Shivaji not liberated the nation.

A more complete rating would be:
Content- 4 stars, Style- 2 stars, Viewpoint- 0 stars.



Rating:
Summary: Imperialist Impertinence
Review: This book is an affront to post-colonial Indology, being a prime example of imperialist-colonial impertinence. A significant omission in the snide review of literature on Shivaji is that of the Dalit savant Babasaheb Ambedkar, most probably because the latter's civil and learned opinion would not suit the author's insidious designs to drive a wedge in the native population on the basis of caste. Ever wondered why this visionary man did not lead the Dalits to convert to either Christianity or Islam? Better if the James William Laine had first paid sufficient attention to papering over the cracks in his shoddy account, than pointing fingers at those who are not in a position to defend themselves against his 'below-the-belt' polemics.