The Hindu : National / Elections 2004 : Another book, another row

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 21, 2004

National

National - Elections 2004

Another book, another row

Mahesh Vijapurkar

MUMBAI

The Nationalist Congress Party's Maharashtra unit chief, R. R. Patil, has been asked by the party bosses to do what could be almost impossible: wriggle himself and the party out of the spot he walked them into by insisting a book which carried derogatory references to Chhatrapati Shivaji's mother was the handiwork of Brahmins. The party is desperate to avert a Brahmin-Maratha divide in the State.

The book in question is the Marathyanche Prashasan Vyavastha, a Marathi translation of Surendranath Sen's The Administrative System of the Marathas. Mr. Patil recently said that the books was withdrawn in February this year only to avert a Brahmin vs non-Brahmin controversy, and listed the names of the people involved - all happened to be Brahmins. The import was not lost on the media or the politicians.

The new controversy coincidentally surfaced the same day another came to an end. Lawyers for James Laine, author of Shivaji: Hindu King of Islamic India, told the High Court that he would apologise for the alleged derogatory references to the Maratha icon, and the publishers, Oxford University Press, would delete them from future editions. The Maharashtra Government, which banned the Laine book, was asked to "work out an amicable solution."

Mr. Patil could hardly have foreseen the controversy he was going to rake up when he called a press conference to discuss Mr. Sen's book. Dr. Ratnakar Mahajan, the NCP spokesperson, was so outraged that he issued a "personal statement" saying that inter-caste rows "of the previous century" were now "irrelevant" but "leaders sin by raising them at poll time. This has to stop."

Mr. Patil had pointed out that those involved in bringing out Mr. Sen's book were Brahmins: the then Chief Minister, Manohar Joshi, the chief of the State Literary and Cultural Board, the late Vidhyadhar Gokhale, his successor D. M. Mirasdar, the translator, Vijaya Kulkarni and the expert, Arvind Deshpande. Mr. Patil appears to have bared what was never in the public domain.

The book carried a derogatory reference to Shivaji's mother, citing a Portuguese writer. However, the author himself rejected the reference in a subsequent page. He book was approved by the Shiv Sena - BJP Government, and it was subsequently published by the present Democratic Front Government in April 2003. However, in the wake of the controversy over the Laine book and the attack on the Bhandarkar Institute in Pune, the Government thought it prudent to withdraw the Kulkarni translation of Sen's work in February. The Sena maintains that it had nothing to do with the publication of the book, which it says was done by the Sushilkumar Shinde Government.

It appears that the Government was apprehensive of a possible strain in relations between the Brahmins and the Marathas and instructed Mr. Patil to limit the damage.

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