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

Gujarati can. Even amongst those who are Kshatriyas of Shivaji’s caste, all cannot claim him as their ancestor; for many—nay, the majority of their families had no blood connection with the Bhonsles or the Jadhavas. Leaving aside the question of Shivaji, we cannot positively succeed in proving that we possess the blood of even the Peshavas in our veins unless and until our genealogy reveals a marriage connection with the Bhats and other families relating to the Peshavas. All Brahmins also cannot claim common blood, for they all do not intermarry. So, then taking the last case of Maharashtra, not only does a Gujarati or a Bengali or a Madrasi or a Punjabi Hindu fail to establish his superstitious belief that claims Bajirao and Shivaji and Ramdas and Nana and Bhau and the hundred other heroic figures that fought for, died for and won the cause of Hindu-patpadashahi in the past as his glorious forefathers, but even a Maratha, a Maharashtrian, must disown them unless indeed, any one of them can produce a genealogy establishing an individual blood relation through inter-marriage. Nor can all Rajputs claim Pratap for their ancestor, nor the Sikhs Guru Govind for theirs. In such an anomalous situation, all that one can state is that Sambahji alone inherited the blood of Shivaji or following the more unobjectionable style of Satyakama Jabali of old, assert that any given person can claim the blood of his mother alone—and of no one else. So, then, the poor Hindu is no racial entity at all. Shri Ram and Shri Krishna are mere persons to him, with whom he has nothing more in common either in blood or ancestry than he has with the citizens of Timbuctoo or with the man in the moon! Thus, he who used to live and breathe and had his being in a sublime conviction of his consanguinity and affinity with the seers and heroes and warriors, with Ram and Krishna and Shivaji, find the stream of his lifeblood suddenly choked and dried up, lost in bogs and sands of Mahatma Sahara of absurdity, and stand alone, a unity by himself, no one in the world whom he can call his kith or kin outside the scrap of his family-genealogical chart. But then, the Hindu suffers not alone. He has to undergo the pangs of bereavement in company with almost all the world. If a Hindu cannot be said to possess the blood of a Pratap or a Shivaji, as Englishman too cannot by the same analogy, be said to be positively entitled to inherit the blood of a Cromwell or a Shakespeare. For, in spite of a general custom of intermarriages amongst the English people, no one can assert that every English individual has affinity with all other English people or has entered