Sadgun Vikruti: A Civilisational Malady and the Cure of Chhatrapati
For the better part of a thousand years, this civilisation has mistaken its weaknesses for its virtues, and it has paid for the error in blood, in territory, and in centuries of subjection. We were not conquered because we were frail. We were conquered because we were good in the most self-defeating manner imaginable, and we mistook that failing for holiness.
Savarkar gave the failing a name, and I have yet to encounter a more precise one; Sadgun Vikruti, the perversion of virtue. A good quality practised without discrimination and extended to those who neither share it nor return it, curdles into the instrument of one's own destruction. Mercy shown to a man who has come to annihilate you is not mercy, it is negligence in the dress of a principle. Chivalry offered to an enemy who reads restraint as an opening is not honour, it is a failure of one's duty to all who depend on one's vigilance. Strip a virtue of judgment, and it turns upon the hand that holds it. That is the substance of this disease, and we have suffered from it for centuries.
The familiar illustration will serve. Prithviraj spares Ghori, twice, because his civilisational moral code holds that a defeated enemy who pleads must be pardoned. Ghori observes no such code, he returns, he prevails, and he shows no mercy in his turn. The particulars may be debated but the lesson cannot. One side treated with magnanimity as a binding law, the other as a weakness to be exploited. The good king was undone not by any lack of courage, but because his goodness was directed at a man who should never have received it.
Extend that single error across the medieval centuries and one arrives at a tragedy endlessly repeated. Kingdom after kingdom preserved the courtesies of war against adversaries who honoured none of them and interpreted every courtesy as an invitation. These realms did not lack brave men or good steel, but what lacked was the resolve to face one difficult truth; that the laws of honourable war are a contract, and a contract the other party openly refuses to sign cannot bind one to walk into one's own grave.
Nor may we file this comfortably under ancient history. The temperament survives intact. It returns whenever a people, anxious to appear high minded, extends unconditional goodwill to those who have openly declared their hostility, and then congratulates itself on its breadth of spirit. It returns when we mistake our own hesitation for strength, when we reason an adversary's moderation into being because we would prefer that it existed, when we insist upon treating a drawn blade as a misunderstanding. A people that cannot distinguish a neighbour from a predator, and offers the same open hand to each, will continue to pay the oldest debt there is, and continue to be astonished by its size.
But there was a
bright light that stood as an exception, teaching this civilisation how it
needs to be, to survive and thrive. Here is why I see Chhatrapati Shivaji
Maharaj, and why I believe every Indian weary of that debt ought to study him
with the seriousness we reserve for our most important texts. The deeper one
goes into the record of his campaigns, the more consistently a single pattern
emerges, and it is precisely the pattern that answers Sadgun Vikruti, the open
hand extended first; the decisive blow when the hand was struck away; a
scrupulous distinction, maintained even in the heat of war, between the
treacherous enemy and the honourable one; and never, at any point, the
confusion of a community with an enemy.
Javali, 1656: the offer, the insult, and the door that had to be opened.
The valley of Javali was not merely territory; it commanded the passes into the Konkan, and whoever held it held the gateway to any future Maratha state. It was held by Chandrarao More, a chieftain owing allegiance to Bijapur, and the record shows that Shivaji's first instruments were words, not weapons. Letters and emissaries were sent to Javali, inviting More to join the Hindavi Swarajya. For a time, relations were civil. Then, reportedly at the urging of his ambitious diwan Hanmantrao More, Chandrarao's tone turned haughty. He treated Shivaji's envoy, Raghunath Ballal, with disdain, refused to recognise Shivaji's claim to authority, and answered the invitation with the taunt that has come down to us, "You call yourself a king because you choose to; finish your meal and come to Javali, and we shall fight." Nor did he stop at words. More's forces attacked families loyal to Shivaji, the Gaekwads and Wadkars among them, raided his territories, and sheltered a man accused of crimes in Shivaji's lands. This was not a neutral neighbour minding his valley. It was a hostile power, backed by Bijapur, actively probing the state's flanks.
What followed was a campaign, and a hard one. The Jedhe chronology, the spare family record that historians trust for its indifference to drama, has Shivaji summoning Kanhoji Jedhe and the Deshmukhs of the Maval, the Bandals and Silimkars among them, and descending upon Javali; the fighting it records runs from the winter of 1655 into the spring of 1656, some five months, ending with Chandrarao's capitulation between mid-April and mid-May. One bakhar account carries an ultimatum to Chandrarao, and the army descends from Mahabaleshwar via the Pass of the Stairs to lay siege.
Another tradition, preserved in the Sabhasad Bakhar (Sabhasad Bakhar is a biography of Shivaji written in Marathi by Krishnaji Anant Sabhasad in 1697, about seventeen years after Shivaji's death), has that the campaign was opened by a stratagem: envoys sent under the pretext of negotiating a marriage between the houses, who recce the drunken chief's defences and struck from within. Both chronicles are in the same sequence: the offer came first, the insult and the raids answered it, and only then came the war. Hanmantrao More, the diwan whose counsel had turned Javali hostile, was killed in the fighting at Jor. Chandrarao, captured and imprisoned, attempted escape and was executed with one son; another escaped to Bijapur.
And then comes the detail that gives the whole episode its meaning, the detail the debunkers never quote. Among the officers who had fought hardest against Shivaji at Javali was Murarbaji Deshpande, a soldier in Chandrarao's service. Shivaji, by every account, was so struck by the man's bravery in the enemy's cause that after the valley fell, he took him into his own service and in time entrusted him with the fort of Purandar, where in 1665 Murarbaji died one of the most celebrated deaths in Maratha history, refusing Diler Khan's offers and defending the fort against the Mughals to his last breath. Reflect on what this means. The king who executed the treacherous Chandrarao elevated Chandrarao's own bravest officer. The enmity was never toward the men of Javali; it was toward the treachery of their master. Punishment for the faithless, honour for the brave, in the same campaign, from the same hand. That is not ruthlessness. That is discrimination, exercised with a precision our medieval history rarely shows.
From Javali flowed
the resources of a state: the forts of Raigad, Rohida, Tikona, Lohgad and
Rajmachi came into Shivaji's orbit in the aftermath, and upon a hill in the
conquered valley Moropant Pingale raised the new fort of Pratapgad, where three
years later Afzal Khan would learn what the open hand becomes when it is forced
to close.
Mudhol and Kudal, 1664: two enemies, two treatments, one lesson.
Baji Ghorpade of Mudhol was Shivaji's relative; both houses descended from the same Sisodia stock, the Ghorpades the elder branch and the Bhosales the younger. He was also the man who, in 1648, had seized Shivaji's father, Shahaji, for Bijapur, by the Maratha accounts, falling upon him in betrayal of trust and clapping him in irons. Shahaji never forgot it, and the record has him writing to his son to settle the account. The sentimental voice knows its line here: he is blood; one does not raise a hand against one's own. That voice is Sadgun Vikruti speaking, and Shivaji was the exception that declined to heed it.
The occasion arose in 1664, and the sequence is documented almost month by month. Shahaji died in January of that year. Bijapur, pressing to recover the Konkan, sent Aziz Khan against Kudal, Shivaji's resident withdrew to Rajapur in May, Aziz Khan died unexpectedly in July; and Adil Shah replaced him with Khawas Khan, son of the former wazir and son-in-law of Rustam-e-Zaman, who marched in deliberate haste down through Belagavi and Gadahinglaj (present day kolhapur) and over the ghats into the Konkan, precisely so that word would not reach Shivaji in time to block the passes. Baji Ghorpade was ordered to join him, and there lay the fatal gap: Khawas Khan was already encamped near Kudal, but Baji had not yet marched from Mudhol. Two jaws of a pincer, not yet closed. Shivaji struck the hinge. In October 1664 he descended upon Mudhol without warning, and Baji was killed; the accounts differ on whether he fell in open battle, sword in hand, or in a night assault upon his camp, but they do not differ on the outcome. Mudhol was burned, Baji's line all but extinguished, his two young sons surviving only because their mother had taken them to her father's house. The Maratha chronicle calls the day Shahaji's true shraddha, his real funeral rite. Vengeance and strategy had converged on a single point, and Shivaji did not miss it.
Now attend to what happened next, for it is here that the record delivers its most striking testimony. With Baji destroyed, Shivaji turned at once upon Khawas Khan at Kudal. He found him encamped, unsuspecting, in terrain so difficult that, as the Maratha account has it, he could have been crushed within the hour, trapped, in the chronicle's own phrase, like a rat in a corner. And Shivaji, the account continues, judged that so renowned a commander ought not to be destroyed in a trap without the opportunity to reconsider, and gave him warning of the attack before delivering it. Khawas Khan's position collapsed; by December he had fled, and his allied commanders, Lakham Sawant, Keshav Naik, Keshav Prabhu of Pedhne, Khalu Shenvi of Dicholi, scattered into Portuguese Goa.
Hold the two halves of that campaign side by side, because together they are the thesis of this essay in miniature. Baji Ghorpade, the relative and proven traitor, received no warning and no quarter. Khawas Khan, the open enemy commander, caught helpless, was warned before he was struck. The same man, in the same month, on the same campaign, was merciless to treachery and chivalrous to honour, and he never once confused the two. What the record shows is a moral intelligence of almost surgical exactness, the precise faculty, vivek, whose absence Savarkar diagnosed as the ruin of our history.
The Sawants of Konkan: the disease caught, and cured.
If Javali and Mudhol show the judgment, the long affair of the Sawants of Sawantwadi shows something rarer and, for our purposes, more valuable still: it shows restraint operating upon Shivaji, what it cost him, and how he learned. In March 1659, through their emissary Pitambar Shenvi, the Sawants of Sawantwadi swore loyalty to Shivaji and the cause of Swaraj. Within months, when the Marathas moved into the southern Konkan after Afzal Khan's fall, the Sawant had aligned instead with the Bijapuri commander and barred their way.
A second treaty followed, dividing the revenues and binding Lakham Sawant to garrison the forts and keep three thousand infantry ready in Shivaji's service. Repenting of the bargain, he returned his allegiance to Bijapur. During the 1660 siege of Panhala, the Sawants raided Shivaji's borders at Bijapur's instruction. In 1662, Shivaji again defeated Lakham outright, overran Wadi, and held him entirely at his mercy.
The Gazetteer
records that, for political reasons, because the Sawants were Bhonsles like
himself, he reinstated the man on condition that he live at Kudal, build or
repair no forts, and keep no large body of troops. Every condition was broken.
By 1663, Shivaji had to storm Kudal again and drive him out with six hundred
men; by 1664, Lakham was fighting beside Khawas Khan; by December of that year,
he had fled into Goa, and from there his circle of fugitive Desais continued to
raid the territory they had lost.
(The Desais were the hereditary revenue
chiefs of the southern Konkan, and the Sawants of Sawantwadi were the foremost
among them. Lakham Sawant held the office of Sardesai of Kudal, so "the
Desais" and "the Sawant circle" refer to the same men under two
names.)
Bardez, 1667: the pursuit, the persecution, and the legend.
The Sawant affair did not end at the border, and neither did Shivaji's reach. The fugitive Desai’s sheltering in Portuguese Bardez did not sit quietly, account records that they returned repeatedly to terrorise the population of Shivaji's adjoining territory, and that on the fifteenth of September 1667 one of them, Narba Sawant, Lakham's own nephew, crossed to Vengurla with Portuguese men in his company, raised a riot, and assaulted the Dutch factory, whose merchants protested to the Portuguese and, in all likelihood, to Shivaji as well. Six days later, on the twenty-first of September, the Portuguese Viceroy issued his notorious notification: every Hindu was to quit the limits of Bardez within two months. The persecution was neither new nor incidental; it stood upon more than a century of temple destruction, prohibition of Hindu rites, and forced conversion in the Old Conquests.
On the nineteenth and twentieth of November, days before the Viceroy's deadline expired, Shivaji dispatched a thousand horse and five thousand infantry into Bardez, to seize the fugitives and to punish the power that had harboured them. For three days his troops swept the territory; the Portuguese resisted, using the Ranes of the border villages as their instruments, and hundreds were arrested in the sweep; two priests, Father Manoel de San Bernardino, Rector of Colvale, and Father Joao das Neves, a guest in his church, were killed. Then the army withdrew to Bicholim, and in December, with the point made, Shivaji signed a treaty with the Portuguese; three years later, in February 1670, a formal pact of friendship followed. By 1667 the Viceroy, the Conde de São Vicente, was writing to Lisbon in plain alarm of Shivaji's growing navy: I am afraid of his ships; we did not take sufficient preventive steps; he has built many a fort upon the Konkan coast. The raid, in short, sat within a larger and entirely coherent policy: punish the sheltering of traitors, deter the persecutor, and then, the lesson delivered, make terms, for the Portuguese were a power to be managed, not a population to be destroyed.
It is upon this documented foundation that the celebrated legend stands: that Shivaji, learning of the conversions being forced through under the Viceroy's edict, seized the priests who had driven them and offered them the very choice they had imposed upon others, and upon their refusal had them beheaded and their heads sent to the Viceroy as his answer, but observe what the legend does, for it is the same thing every Shivaji legend does: it reaches for the image of the persecutor made to taste his own coercion.
This, then, is the inheritance, and the expanded record only deepens it. It has nothing to do with cruelty and everything to do with clear sight. The same king who executed Chandrarao raised Chandrarao's bravest soldier to command a fort and to a hero's immortality. The same month that destroyed the traitor Baji without warning spared the Khawas Khan the indignity of a rat's death. The same hand that pardoned Lakham Sawant past all prudence finally learned to close, and the same army that burned Bardez made treaty with Lisbon's men within the month.
At every turn the discrimination holds: terrible to the treacherous, honourable to the honourable, gentle to the powerless, and never once confused about which was which. Hindavi Swarajya was never merely the recovery of ground. It was the recovery of a way of seeing, dharma wedded to vivek, moral seriousness joined to the unsentimental judgment that allows moral seriousness to survive contact with a hard world. A people that perfects mercy and never learns its limits will continue to be conquered by its own better nature, precisely as it has been before. A people that learns to govern its virtues, to extend the open hand first and to close it without apology the moment it is struck away, retains both its soul and its freedom.
Chatrapati was something more, the proof that a man may be genuinely good and genuinely clear sighted at once, and may build something free and lasting from the union of the two.
Savarkar diagnosed
and named the disease. Shivaji, long before the name existed, lived the cure,
case by case. The clarity has waited all this while for a people awake enough
to claim it. Claiming begins the moment we cease flattering our weaknesses by
calling them virtues and learn once more to tell the difference.
References
- Savarkar, V. D.
(1971). Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History (English translation; original
Marathi, Saha Soneri Pane, 1963). See Ch. 8, "Perverted Conception of
Virtues." Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/6-glorious-epochs-of-indian-history
- Takakhav, N. S., &
Sardesai, G. S. (1921). The Life of Shivaji Maharaj, Ch. 10, "The Capture
of Javli and Other Events (1654-58)" — comparative analysis of the
Sabhasad, Chitnis, Jedhe and Shedgaokar accounts. https://openhistorytelling.wordpress.com/2014/11/28/chapter-10-the-capture-of-javli-and-other-events-1654-58/
- History of the Rulers
of Sawantwadi (reproducing the Gazetteer text on the Sawant treaties of 1650,
1659 and 1662, with Grant Duff citations). https://vijaynjoshi.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/history-of-rulers-of-sawantwadi/
- NDHistories. (2022,
February 13). Baji Ghorpade. https://ndhistories.wordpress.com/2022/02/13/baji-ghorpade/
- NDHistories. (2022,
February 14). Khawas Khan. https://ndhistories.wordpress.com/2022/02/14/khawas-khan/
- The Goan EveryDay.
(2022, February 18). Shivaji Maharaj’s relations with Christians in Goa
(quoting Pissurlencar on the Bardez correspondence and the Viceroy’s
notification of 21 September 1667). https://www.thegoan.net/tg-life/shivaji-maharaj%E2%80%99s-relations-with-christians-in-goa/80579.html
- NewsClick. Goa: Who
Fears the Truth? (quoting Pissurlencar on Narba Sawant, the fugitive Desais,
and the November 1667 Bardez expedition). https://www.newsclick.in/goa-who-fears-truth
- ThePrint. (2025, March
25). Chhatrapati Shivaji is a new inflection point in Goan politics. And all
nuance is lost. https://theprint.in/opinion/a-shivaji-isation-of-goa-is-underway-and-nuance-is-being-lost/2552013/
- Forts of Maharashtra. Murarbaji Deshpande (Killedar, Purandar). http://durgavaibhav.blogspot.com/1999/01/murarbaji-deshpande.html