'Shetakanyachi Raje Shivaji' by Sharad Joshi

Summary

This is the Marathi-language essay ‘Shetakaryancha Raja Shivaji: Ek Tipan’ (‘The Farmers’ King Shivaji: A Note’), one of four pieces collected in Indrajit Bhalerao’s 2010 volume Madhyatil Angar (Aurangabad: Janshakti Vachak Chalwal). Bhalerao, a poet from the Marathwada countryside long associated with the Shetkari Sanghatana milieu, uses the essay to evaluate Sharad Joshi’s book Shetakaryancha Raja Shivaji ani Itar Lekh, the collection in which Joshi reread the Maratha king from an agrarian-economics standpoint. Bhalerao treats Joshi’s book as a slim but unusually serious cluster of four pamphlets — the title essay, ‘Shetakaryancha Asud: Shatakacha Mujra’ (Joshi’s centenary engagement with Phule’s Shetakaryancha Asud), ‘Shetkari Kamgar Paksha: Ek Avalokan,’ and ‘Jativadacha Bhasmasur’ — written between 1984 and 1990 and now twenty-five years old.

The essay’s core argument is that Joshi reads all of Indian history through a single lens: the exploitation of the cultivator. From that vantage, Bhalerao argues, Shivaji is not the religious or kshatra hero of conventional Maharashtrian memory but a peasants’ king — a ruler whose decisions, including the much-debated submission to Mirza Raja Jai Singh, become legible as choices made for an agrarian polity. Bhalerao notes Joshi’s flat rejection of the Dadoji Konddev formative-influence thesis (twenty years before that became mainstream), his thoroughgoing endorsement of Jotirao Phule’s reading of the last five thousand years, and his sharp distinction between Phule’s framework and the Marxist ‘Shetkari Kamgar Paksha’ line. He praises Joshi’s open rebuke to caste-baiting farmers during the 1987 Nanded by-election speech for Prakash Ambedkar as a ‘masterpiece.’

Bhalerao closes by placing Joshi inside a wider intellectual ecology — Phule, Vivekananda, Tagore, Vinoba, Yashwantrao Chavan, Obama — and lamenting that Marathi literary culture has ignored Joshi the prose stylist as completely as it has ignored the Shetkari Sanghatana movement itself. The piece doubles as a publisher’s note: Shrikant Umrikar of Janshakti is reissuing Joshi’s out-of-print works, and Bhalerao is contributing the critical apparatus.

Key points

• The piece is one essay in Indrajit Bhalerao’s 2010 book Madhyatil Angar, a collection of four prose meditations on Sharad Joshi and the Shetkari Sanghatana published by Janshakti Vachak Chalwal, Aurangabad.
• Bhalerao reviews Joshi’s Shetakaryancha Raja Shivaji ani Itar Lekh, a bundle of four short pamphlets written 1984-1990 that read Shivaji, Phule’s Shetakaryancha Asud, the Shetkari Kamgar Paksha, and caste politics through an agrarian-exploitation lens.
• Joshi’s central claim, as Bhalerao restates it, is that Indian history must be reread from the standpoint of the cultivator — Shivaji becomes a ‘farmers’ king’ rather than a religious or kshatra icon.
• Joshi rejects the standard view that Dadoji Konddev shaped Shivaji’s outlook — a position Bhalerao notes was taken twenty years before it gained wider acceptance.
• Joshi endorses Phule’s reading of five thousand years of Indian history and explicitly separates Phule’s framework from the Marxist line of the Shetkari Kamgar Paksha.
• Bhalerao highlights Joshi’s February 1987 Nanded by-election speech for Prakash Ambedkar — a refusal to let farmers be drawn into casteist mobilisation — as the rhetorical high point of the corpus.
• The essay laments that Marathi literary culture has ignored Joshi’s prose just as it ignored the Shetkari Sanghatana movement, and frames the Janshakti reissue project (led by Shrikant Umrikar) as a corrective.
• Bhalerao situates Joshi alongside Phule, Vivekananda, Tagore, Vinoba Bhave, Yashwantrao Chavan and Barack Obama as thinkers whose writings deserve sustained Marathi readership.