तुकाराम : "रात्रंदिन आम्हा युद्धाचा प्रसंग। अंतर्बाह्य जग आणि मन।"
Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M.Smith
"Writing early in 1643 some friends of the count-duke of Olivares, the disgraced chief minister of Philip IV of Spain, noted a global context for the failures of their hero in the apologetic tract, Nicandro: All the north in commotion… England, Ireland and Scotland aflame with Civil War… The Ottomans tearing each other to pieces… China invaded by the Tartars, Ethiopia by the Turks, and the Indian kings who live scattered through the region between the Ganges and the Indus all at each other’s throats."
('The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century', 1978)
रा भा पाटणकर :
"शिवाजीने रयतेच्या भल्यासाठी केलेल्या गोष्टी सर्वश्रुत आहेत. पण तरीही तेथील सामान्य रयत सुखात होती असे म्हणता येणार नाही ."
(पृष्ठ 56, 'अपूर्ण क्रांती', 1999)
JOHANN HARI :
"You and I and everyone we
know are always living only a few weeks of food away from famine psychosis.
Here’s how it goes. Deprived of meals, your body starts to consume itself. It
uses up the glucose stored in your liver and body fats. It uses up the proteins
in its own muscles and cells. Rapidly, your body starts to mock you: your belly
swells as if you are becoming fat, because the breakdown of muscle causes the
remaining fat to bunch there.
And then your personality is
consumed. As Thomas Keneally puts it in “Three Famines”:
“The victim becomes a new person. The fastidious become slovenly; the kindly
become aggressive; the moral are caught up in the great amorality of famine.
Fraternity and love wither. Judgment vanishes, and a hyperactive anxiety seizes
the mind.” You are gripped by psychotic delusions. Sometimes you will eat your
own children. You will become so insane you don’t even recognize food when it
is put in front of you; rescued famine victims often howl for sustenance long
after it is offered to them. And then you die..."
In Maharashtra, I have now seen a number of motor vehicles (and even other structures) that carry Shivaji's (1630-1680) picture with an appeal.
The appeal in Marathi reads something like this: "राजे तुम्ही परत जन्माला या." (King you be borne again.)
I believe people are so fed up with the current state of administration
in Maharashtra that they long for what they perceive as the good administration: Shivaji's rule.
A commercially successful film '
Mee Shivajiraje Bhosale Boltoy' (
मी शिवाजीराजे भोसले बोलतोय), 2009 had the theme of return of Shivaji to the current times to address the so-called woes of middle-class Marathi speaking people in
Mumbai.
I too wish Shivaji returned to rule Maharashtra with a small rider: He doesn't bring back 17th century along with him!
Why?
I recently read a review of
Geoffrey Parker's book "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century". Review is done by Christopher Booker for The Spectator, UK. (The following words are based extensively on that review.)
All around the globe except in a few countries like
Japan, 17th century was peculiarly cruel time to be alive.
"It marked the depths of
that ‘
Little Ice Age’ which saw global temperatures lower than at any
time since the end of the last glaciation 13,000 years ago."
This change of climate would play a decisive role the way 17th century shaped.
When we read popular history of 17th century Maharashtra, this fact seldom comes across.
Not just that but I don't recall even
D G Godse (द ग गोडसे) or
T S Shejwalkar (त्र्यं शं शेजवलकर) or
Setu Madhavrao Pagdi (सेतु माधवराव पगडी) mentioning it- little ice age- in any of their great essays on
Maratha history and culture.
It is a big miss because of what that huge climate change did to people of India.
"Everywhere
from
China and
India to
Britain and
Ireland, droughts, floods, cold
summers and freezing winters caused massive crop failures and economic
breakdown, not only leading to widespread famines but making it
impossible for impoverished and starving populations to meet those
ever-rising tax demands."
Anthony Reid writes: "In
India as a whole the worst years were 1630 and 1631, representing
‘almost certainly the most destructive Indian famine of the early modern
era’, which killed about 3,000,000 people in Gujerat alone...In 1660–61
another appalling drought struck South India, and particularly Tanjore,
where ‘famine has so increased that whole villages, towns and hamlets
have been depopulated, and hardly anyone remains, the dead lying in
dried-up tanks’."
('THE CRISIS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA')
Poet-saint
Tukaram (1598 ? - 1650) was very much alive during 1630-31. His life too like most others was wrecked by the recurring droughts and famines of 17th century.
Since self-rule started in 1947, the rain-gods have generally been kind to Maharashtra, planet earth has not seen anything like a little ice age and yet we have this huge water crisis in the summer of 2013.
How lucky we are that we don't live in 17th century and how lucky 17th century people were that they didn't have 21st century rulers!
Natives Waiting for Relief at Bangalore
The Great Famine of 1876–78, the worst famine of the century, which claimed perhaps 5.5 million lives in the Deccan and the south
Artist:
Unknown, The Illustrated London News , October 20 1877
courtesy:
Wikimedia Commons.
"It has long been familiar that the 17th century was also a time of
extraordinary political turmoil right across
Europe and
Asia, from the
Thirty Years War which laid waste vast tracts of
Germany to the
overthrow of the
Ming dynasty in China; from the murderous civil wars
and revolutions which rocked Britain and
France to the disintegration of
the
Spanish empire. As early as 1643 a Spaniard observed that it was
‘one of the epochs when every nation is turned upside down’.
Voltaire
noted, a century later, how many rulers had been murdered or executed,
from the
Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim in 1648 and
Charles I in 1649 to the
Mogul emperor Shah Jehan in 1658, calling it ‘a period of usurpations
almost from one end of the world to another’.
Again and again we see similar patterns, as empires and kingdoms
became drawn into a plethora of wars, requiring their rulers to raise
ever larger sums of money in taxes. But again and again, as countries
and whole regions were thrown into chaos by war, made worse by epidemics
of disease, such as smallpox and the last recrudescence of that plague
which had wracked Europe since the
Black Death, we see how extreme
weather events intervened to make the situation much worse.
It is no accident that it was right in the middle of the 17th century that
Thomas Hobbes included his heartcry in
Leviathan
that the life of man is ‘
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.
Reading Parker’s painful accounts of how the general crisis tore apart
one country after another, from Ireland to China, one can only think how
fortunate we are not to live in a time as desperate as any in human
history.
In
Szechuan alone, in the chaos surrounding the downfall of the
200-year old Ming dynasty, more than a million died. Vast areas of
Europe in the chaos of the Thirty Years War lost up to a third or more
of their population. The
French civil war between 1649 and 1653, the
Fronde, caused a million deaths. In Britain the various civil wars
between 1638 and 1660 led to the deaths of seven per cent of the
population,
far greater than the two per cent who died in the first
world war. In
Ireland this rose to a fifth.
By adding the vagaries of the weather to the overall equation, Parker
is not suggesting that these were the cause of the general catastrophe.
But what he does show for the first time, with his wealth of evidence
drawn from thousands of sources, is how the climate seriously aggravated
the effects of all those wars and other disorders which made the 17th
century such a peculiarly cruel time to be alive... "
That is why I appeal to Shivaji: King you be borne again, leaving behind your century! (राजे तुम्ही परत जन्माला या, तुमचे शतक मागे ठेवून!)
