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

Then Who is Who, Pray? While cursorily glancing over the papers, our eye caught a heap of capitals, which, scanning a little closer, revealed a list of names of Pratap, Shivaji, Govind singh and others. Out of respect for these heroic representatives of our race, we naturally read a sentence or two of the article wherein those occurred, when to our surprise, we found ourselves face to face with the ghost of that hackneyed lie which had been killed and buried a dozen times over in the past and which asserted that the Hindus could not be said to be a race and could not, therefore, claim to inherit the blood of Pratap and Shivaji and Govind. We were just on the point of sweeping aside this statement as a contemptuous vapouring of foreign malice or ignorance, when somewhere about the sentence, the eye caught another familiar name. It was of Mahatma Gandhi. Without going further in the article, we instinctively felt that he must have been the author of that statement. It was worthy of no one else in India. From what other source can such profound shallowness flow than from the perennial fountain of ‘Himalayan mistakes!’ To level down to dust at a single non-violent stroke, the cherished love and pride and exalted emotions of a whole race that fondly felt in its vein the blood of a Shivaji and a Shankaracharya or a Pratap or a Chhatrasal or a Chaitanya flow—only a Mahatmaic audacity can accomplish that! Let the silly and unscientific Hindus disown forthwith the superstitious belief that after all, they were the sons of those sires who fought at Haldighat and were martyred at Sarhind and won at Udgir and ruled at Delhi! Gandhiji tells us we cannot be said to inherit the blood of Pratap and Shivaji and Govind. But then do we inherit any one’s blood at all? We are born in Maharashtra—can we claim to inherit the blood of Shivaji at least? The caste system that prevails amongst the Hindus and the consequent absence of the custom of intermarriages amongst them, which seems to be the reason, which prevents a Gujarati from owning the blood of a Rajput Pratap or a Maratha Shivaji in his veins, ought to, if true and sound a reason in the first case, prevent us also from claiming to inherit the blood of Shivaji. For, Brahmins in Maharashtra married not with the Bhonsle and other Kshatriya castes. Taking a step further, not only the Brahmins but also the Vaishyas and Shudras and Atishudras, the Prabhus and Saraswats— almost all of those crores of Hindus who go by the name of Maharashtrians, cannot look upon Shivaji as one of their forefathers any more than a