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

the history of this period, appears even to me as the most stimulating, most searching and teeming with the national spirit imbued with Hindutwa. Ranade forever closed the mouths of the foreign as well as our own historians, which derided the Maratha history of the times of Chhatrapati Rajaram as the anarchy of the rabble, and called it the Maratha War of Independence. 1012. But the all-India war, which the Maratha fought for nearly a century subsequent to the times of Rajaram, was not merely a Maratha War of Independence, it was an all-India war of Hindu Independence. My book ‘Hindu Padpadshahi’, is really the golden temple of the survey and appraisal of that great war—an enthralling piece of sculpture in colour and solidity, of the Goddess of that great war, like any in the Caves of Ajantha. 1013. And still every paragraph in that book is based on solid evidence not because extracts from the writings of other renowned historians of acknowledged authority have been freely used therein, but because the very sentences uttered by the heroes who actually fought on the various battlefields and by those who actually played the political and diplomatic game are cited. Extracts from the letters fresh from their hands, written just after the events have been profusely used. As such, the book is as authoritative, as it is interesting to read. The genius of the historians, Rajwade, does not seem to have altogether missed this all-India character of this Maratha history. But in his writings, it did not receive the all-round treatment it deserved. Perhaps his writing itself was so extensive and varied as to preclude even the vast intellectual capacities of the man from grasping its full significance and import. His incidental and desultory discourses on the subject appear, by the very nature of their topics, incomplete and inconsistent. About the English, the Muslim and other historians, we had better not say anything. Under such circumstances, therefore, my book Hindu Padpadshahi estimating this great Hindu-Muslim War through the Hindu national angle of vision is the only one of its kind. That is why I recommend it whole-heartedly to every Hindu nationalist. 1014. That is why, again and because of my failing health, I do not propose to go in for that review of the war in these pages. The curious readers might advisedly read it from those pages. It is only necessary here in these pages of the ‘Six Glorious Epochs of Hindu Victories over the Aggressors’ to display the golden chain of events that led ultimately to the