The situation is like 'either you write something praiseworthy about our idols or do not write at all'. Quoting Writer Shanta Gokhale "Today, it is impossible for anyone to say or write anything about Shivaji. It’s almost like 10 people or so have a monopoly over the man [King Shivaji]." (http://bit.ly/9veoRP).
I found following reviews of the book on Amazon (http://amzn.to/bIAtMp) useful and am pasting them here.
Nothing to get too excited about - Written by - Pankaj Saxena
This is not so much a review of the book as my take on the controversy surrounding it and some of the comments in the other reviews on Amazon. Yes, I've read the book. Yes, it's silly in parts. But nothing to get so upset about....
I read with dismay about the ban on this book and the vandalism at BORI, with the loss of so many irreplaceable historical documents and treasures. This is Indian history that was lost forever through senseless destruction, and Indians are the poorer for it. It's a shame that a democracy has to resort to book banning; and so readily produces mindless mobs who wantonly destroy priceless history. Democracy can't exist without the freedom of speech, including speech you consider to be wrong or contrary to your beliefs.
That said, this book is an ill-assorted compendium of half-digested facts and speculation, without any attempt at rigorous scholarship. I know the author has since explicitly stated that it is not meant to be historical; it is in fact a collection of stories about Shivaji -- some historical and documented, others that he heard from his buddies over a cup of tea in Pune. The trouble is that most people *do* see it as a factual account (with authority conferred by the credentials of the author and the Oxford University Press). To some extent, it is the fault of the author for not being sufficiently explicit to begin with, but then again, he probably did not expect such scrutiny from the public.
No one knows the truth except the author himself, but I really do not think he set out deliberately to demean Hinduism or to defend Islam. The hints of cultural smugness, his confidence in the interpretations of Western rather than Indian scholars, and the discussion (funny and inept though it may be) of why Indian scholars might be biased in their accounts, are probably also not deliberate. It is common practice to assume that someone who has nothing invested emotionally in the culture or religion under study is more impartial. This viewpoint ignores any biases that the scholar may bring with him from his own culture, but the assumption is not inherently demeaning or mischievous.
I see more prosaic explanations. First, there is this trend in the West to introduce ambiguity into *all* history. All history was written by humans, who no doubt had their own biases and motives -- so all history is suspect. All history, that is, except physical, archeological evidence. But that doesn't really tell us who the heroes were, and who the villains. I'm sure a healthy skepticism is good for research. Sometimes though, and this book comes across as an example, it is carried to an extreme, resulting in a very flexible history where one man's speculations are as good as another's documented facts; and who cares about the difference anyway so long as you tell a good story.
That brings me to the second reason. Aside from getting brownie points from fellow scholars for being fashionably ambiguous, it also opens up a popular mass-market for your books. Many of the scholarly books that score big with the lay public do so not because of their originality or scholarship, but because they tell a lurid and exciting tale. And anyone who thinks that "scholarly" authors like James Laine didn't have this market in mind is kidding himself. They check their Amazon sales rank as often as any newbie novelist.
The book indeed shows no sensitivity towards Hindu beliefs or culture, but why is that so strange. It was written by a Christian, who at the very least, must believe that Hindus are deluded and must be brought into the fold. By the nature of Christianity (or Islam, for that matter), you do people a favor when you chip into their heathen beliefs and soften them up to accept your God. This is hard for Hindus to understand on an emotional level, since Hindus are typically born into Hinduism, not converted. They have no experience of the missionary-conversion zeal, except as it was done to them by Muslims and Christians.
My suggestion is, get used to it. As India modernizes and becomes part of the global economy, more world attention will be focused on it. You will see much more of this kind of attention, and banning books or destroying manuscripts only gets bad press. Indian historians and intellectuals have their own accounts to give. These are valuable accounts, largely unknown to the West. A century's worth of respectability and authenticity has attached itself to the interpretations of dead white colonial men. It can't be dislodged in a day, and surely never by book bans and mob violence.
Victim of a Massive Misinformation and Censorship Campaign - Written by - Unknown
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 access 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 exemplar 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 preoccupations, 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 coronated [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 responsible for this, as for the effects of their "veneration".
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