भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

by the British Government, I could not think of writing such a big volume without the aid of reference books! The Hindu Nation 1010. Just as a man lost in a dense forest on a dark night can see everything in its true perspective, in its form and colour, as soon as he throws around him a flashlight from the electric torch in his travelling kit, and in that enlightened state of his mind can very easily find his way out, similarly very early in my college days, when I threw the electric searchlight of the Hindu national point of view on the then extensive but chaotic mass of details about the history of the Marathas, my mind, too, became suddenly enlightened. Viewed in that brilliant light of the national Hindu outlook, that whole incoherent, loose and chaotic mass of historical details regarding the Marathas' enterprise appeared to me absolutely consistent and well-defined. Then alone was it that its essential greatness and unique character became apparent to me. The import and essence of Maratha history is most certainly not as it appeared to most of the historians, including Jadunath Sarkar, who read it simply as the history of the Marathas and found it self-centred, self-seeking, marauding, bellicose and mediocre. On the contrary, I could well see in it the grand manifestations of a Maharashtra (a great nation), which had singly accepted with a grave determination, the onerous responsibility of meeting and beating down the challenge for the supremacy over our country, thrown by all the foreign powers in the three continents of Asia, Europe and Africa—i.e. the whole of the then known world—by the non-Hindu aggressors who had attacked our great Hindu Nation. Especially, when even after continuously fighting, although not unitedly, severally, yet grimly enough, with these aggressors, for over ten centuries, no other Hindu state nor any other Hindu community seemed to win that epic war, annihilating the enemy completely, it is significant that Maharashtra should do it. The Hindu War of Independence 1011. It is, therefore, as a sacred national duty, that I earnestly request every loyal Hindu, setting aside all false humility to read the above- mentioned book of mine, viz. 'Hindu Padpadshahi', which surveys the Hindu War of Independence, carried on by the Marathas from the seventeenth century, from the Hindu national standpoint. For looking at it, as impersonally as it is possible to do so, this one of all the extant books on