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Shahu strove not only to make the legal systems but the entire
paraphernalia of the social religious and administrative
systems “ less like a bastion of privilege and more like
defender of ” all the commonally.That was the secret of his
enlightened crusade which places him in the true Platonic
tradition of Philosopher King as outlined by me at the outlet.
Shahu became a ruler by adoption but he was at the same time a
militant social reformer by temperament and choice because he
was a proletarian at heart. Aove all, Shahu was born fighter
and fought many battles not on the actual battlefield as his
fore-fathers had done but on intellectual, social , religious
and political, because he believed that “In the twentieth
century it had been an acknowledged principle of the world
that the way of progress and prosperity is not bloodshed and
revolution but a peaceful revolution” addressing the third All
India Conference of the Untouchables of February 19,1922
at Delhi.
If Shahu was a royal revolutionary, the great merit of the
revolution wrought by him was that it was peaceful and unique
because it was achieved in the straitjacket of colonial
framwork and vehement social and religious opposition. What
Shahu sought to accomplish was no less than an upheaval of the
obscurantist social and religious institution entrenched and
nurtured for centuries.
It is the brief candle that burn the brightest , and looking
to Shahu Chhatrapati’s
tenure as the ruler of the erstwhile Kolhapur State in the
last decade of the 19th century and first two decades to the
twentieth, one can see that not only did he burn brightest but
it at both ends by his ceaseless quest for the amelioration of
the despised classes, in his all too brief span of life of
just 48 years.
He was a man, take him for all in all
I shall not look upon his like again.
Hamlet, Act I , Sc. ii
________________________________________________________
Article Published in Chhatrapati Shahu The Pillar of Social
Democracy
(Education Department, Govt. of Maharashtra, 1994)
Bal Patil is Secretary General, All India Jain
Minority Forum, New Delhi,
Ex-Member, Maharashtra State Minorities Commission, Govt. of
Maharashtra,
Ex-Member, Media Expert Committee, Govt. of India,
Ex-President, National Society for Prevention of Heart Disease
& Rehabilitation,
Co-Author: JAINISM (Macmillan Co. 1980) with Colette Caillat,
Membre, Institut de France, Paris, & A.N. Upadhye,
Ex-President, All India Oriental Conference,
Author: SUPREME COURT’S volte face CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT,
published by Govt. of Maharashtra (1980)
Email: balpatil@globaljains.com
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