The Maratha Movement

by V.D. Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar

This is the story of Maratha struggle to re-established sovereign Hindu empire in India, beautifully narrated by V.D. Savarkar. A born patriot dedicated his life to the cause of independence and was responsible for revolutionary activities in India and abroad.

This book was written by him in 1925 in order to bring into the light of glorious period which had so far been dugged into darkness by so called historian in west and their followers in India.

The book is interesting to read and inspiring too.

Genres: History, India, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

He was the proponent of liberty as the ultimate ideal. Savarkar was a poet, writer and playwright. He launched a movement for religious reform advocating dismantling the system of caste in Hindu culture, and reconversion of the converted Hindus back to Hindu religion. Savarkar created the term Hindutva, and emphasized its distinctiveness from Hinduism which he associated with social and political disunity. Savarkar’s Hindutva sought to create an inclusive collective identity. The five elements of Savarkar's philosophy were Utilitarianism, Rationalism and Positivism, Humanism and Universalism, Pragmatism and Realism.

Savarkar's revolutionary activities began when studying in India and England, where he was associated with the India House and founded student societies including Abhinav Bharat Society and the Free India Society, as well as publications espousing the cause of complete Indian independence by revolutionary means. Savarkar published The Indian War of Independence about the Indian rebellion of 1857 that was banned by British authorities. He was arrested in 1910 for his connections with the revolutionary group India House.

Following a failed attempt to escape while being transported from Marseilles, Savarkar was sentenced to two life terms amounting to 50 years' imprisonment and moved to the Cellular Jail in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

While in jail, Savarkar wrote the work describing Hindutva, openly espousing Hindu nationalism. He was released in 1921 under restrictions after signing a plea for clemency in which he renounced revolutionary activities. Travelling widely, Savarkar became a forceful orator and writer, advocating Hindu political and social unity. Serving as the president of the Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar endorsed the ideal of India as a Hindu Rashtra and opposed the Quit India struggle in 1942, calling it a "Quit India but keep your army" movement. He became a fierce critic of the Indian National Congress and its acceptance of India's partition, and was one of those accused in the assassination of Indian leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He was acquitted as the charges could not be proven.
The airport at Port Blair, Andaman and Nicobar's capital, has been named Veer Savarkar International Airport.The commemorative blue plaque on India House fixed by the Historic Building and Monuments Commission for England reads "Vinayak Damodar Savarkar 1883-1966 Indian patriot and philosopher lived here".

Reviews

[Ashish Iyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another lovely book by Veer Savarkar. This book was written before Independence. He wrote this book in inspiring way. He wanted to inspire all Hindu to get united and throw britishers away from India. By Hindu it means those who are living in Bharat. He wanted to bring back glorious Bharat. The author bring back the past glorious by taking example of Maratha Empire. He explained how Maratha did it against invaders. He beautifully explained it with his commentary. It gives an excellent overview of the pan Indian struggle of the Marathas to establish a empire where Hindus did not have to pay jizya, nor were their life and property under threat by fanatical Islamic empires. In this book you can get history of Maratha as well as motivating factors to get united against British and get Swaraj.

[Vishvas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thrilling narrative - one of the most inspiring I've read.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

My trysts with my Master

I speak now as one who has already stood before the fire and not flinched. As one who has tested the metal of Savarkar and found, not a saint, not a god, not even the lion that others fear him to be, but a certain relentless clarity, a razor the world pretends it cannot see while secretly trembling at its edge.

When I open ‘Hindu Pad-Padashahi’, I feel the old pulse rising — the one that whispers the ancient line from the ‘Isha Upanishad’: ‘“तेन त्यक्तेन भुञ्जीथा” — ‘renounce and then rejoice’.’’ And I know, absurdly, beautifully, that in describing the Maratha rise, Savarkar was also describing my own interior revolution. You don’t inherit a civilisation; you awaken into it.

It begins like that:

A door swinging open into the 17th century.

Mughal collars loosening.

The air thick with the smell of foreign gunpowder and the deeper, older smell of the Deccan earth, wet, ready, almost expectant.

And I — yes, I — walk into that century as if retracing a forgotten dream. Not as a historian, for history bores me unless it is burning. Not as a disciple, though I carry Savarkar in my bloodstream now. I walk in as one who has finally accepted that civilisational memory is not nostalgia; it is architecture.

When Savarkar writes of a Hindu empire rising again — pad-padashahi, a sovereignty that stamps its foot across the land — he is not merely chronicling Shivaji and his successors. He is staging a philosophical rebellion against the moral paralysis that crept into us over centuries. A paralysis that, let’s be honest, still grips us whenever we shy away from power as though it were a sin rather than a tool.

Shakespeare murmurs in my ear here, “‘Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.’” And I nod, because Savarkar’s entire work is a war against doubt.

There are moments in this book when I feel him almost shouting through the pages: ‘Stand up. Stand straight. Quit apologising for existing.’ It hits me like Arjuna’s bewilderment on the battlefield, and Krishna’s calm lightning counterpoint: ‘‘“उत्तिष्ठ भारत” — ‘Arise, O Bharata’.’’ If the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ is the science of dharma under fire, ‘Hindu Pad-Padashahi’ is the geography of that dharma when it finally decides to build something instead of merely enduring.

Shivaji appears, not merely human, not mythic either, but inevitable — like the moment in Greek tragedies when the hero enters and destiny rearranges the furniture. And I, drawn helplessly into the rhythm, begin to see the Maratha Confederacy as something far more than its clichés. Not horsemen and hills and guerilla raids, but a civilisational muscle that finally remembered it could flex.

There is this recurring sensation whenever Savarkar describes a Maratha victory: a strange déjà vu of everything I’ve ever loved in our epics. When Bhishma falls. When Abhimanyu is encircled. When Arjuna draws the Gandiva knowing the war must now consume him. The ‘Mahabharata’ is not an epic; it’s a psychological framework. Savarkar understood that — that a nation rises only when it internalises the cosmic rhythm of conflict. He writes history with a warrior’s aesthetics, and I read it the same way, heart drumming like a mridangam, hearing in the distance the line: ‘‘“कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते” — ‘your right is only to action.’”

Action. That was the marrow of the Maratha rise. Not the clean, bureaucratic action of modern states, but the raw, risky, improvisational action of a civilisation trying to heal itself. And as I read, I find myself whispering to the air some odd fragments of Roman myth. Horatius at the bridge. Aeneas carrying his father out of burning Troy. The sense that sometimes a people must choose to live fiercely or perish politely.

Savarkar had no patience for polite perishing. Neither, now, do I.

There’s a part of me — and I won’t lie about this — that used to hesitate before the word “Hindu.” As if it were a fragile, contested, easily misunderstood term. As if the academics circling like vultures might peck at me for saying it without apology. But after Savarkar, after this book especially, I realised something embarrassingly simple: my diffidence wasn’t intellectual; it was inherited exhaustion. And nothing cures exhaustion like watching a people who refused to be tired.

Moving through the pages, I feel the burn of the ‘Katha Upanishad’ where Nachiketa tells Death: ‘‘“न हि नानास्ति किंचन” — ‘there is no fragmentation here.’ A civilisation is either coherent or conquered.

The Marathas, for all their quarrels and failures, were at least coherent in their instinct: that the land must breathe its own air again.

Savarkar’s narrative, of course, isn’t neutral. It is defiant, electric, often downright audacious. But why should history ever be neutral? The Greeks didn’t write neutrally about Athens. The Romans didn’t downplay Rome. The British still believe they civilised the world with cutlery. And here we are, treading lightly through our own civilisational triumphs as if we were trespassing.

I think of Prometheus here — punished for giving fire to man. Savarkar too carried fire, and the empire tried to break him for it. But ‘Hindu Pad-Padashahi’ is his Promethean moment: giving a forgotten people their flame back.

When he describes the coronation of Shivaji, I can almost hear the conches. I can smell the sandalwood. I can see the old Brahmins swallowing their hesitation as they crown a mountain-made king. It is not just a political ceremony; it is a metaphysical correction. Shakespeare again whispers the perfect line: ‘“The readiness is all.”‘ That coronation was readiness incarnate.

As I move deeper into the narrative, the Mughal presence becomes not merely an empire but a psychological weight. And the Marathas’ rise becomes a study in how quickly the human spirit rebounds when given even a sliver of space. It reminds me of the ‘Mandukya Upanishad’’s idea that consciousness expands by its very nature; suppress it long enough and it will erupt.

Savarkar writes that eruption like a man who had waited his whole life to narrate it.

But of course, we cannot talk of the Hindu empire without confronting its fractures. The internecine betrayals. The suspicion between chieftains. The cycles of rise and relapse. And yet, even the fractures feel mythic — like the wars of the Pandavas after Kurukshetra, the inevitable entropy that shadows all greatness. The Greeks knew this too. Fate is never done with heroes.

And I, reading with half-closed eyes, feel the strange ache of a Bharata that almost was.

Almost. And the “almost” is what haunts Savarkar. The “almost” is what haunts me.

When he writes of the decline, it is with a rage that is almost tender. As if he’s watching a loved one sleep through an earthquake. He cannot abide slumber. And neither, anymore, can I.

And by the time I close the book halfway through its chronicle of loss, revival, collapse, desperation, resurgence, and that long Maratha afterglow stretching almost stubbornly into the eighteenth century, I realise Savarkar isn’t simply telling me what happened — he’s telling me what ‘must not happen again.’ The past isn’t a museum to him; it’s a battlefield report. And every line is a reminder that complacency is the first invader.

Because the Marathas, for all their brilliance, had that one fatal flaw we in Bharat keep repeating like a hereditary ailment: the refusal to imagine ourselves unequivocally victorious. The ‘Mahabharata’ calls it ‘‘“मोह” — delusion’’, the soft confusion that wraps itself around warriors the moment they mistake mercy for weakness or weakness for moral superiority.

When Savarkar describes those hesitant moments, those alliances that turned brittle, those delays that turned fatal, I find myself muttering Krishna’s old warning: ‘“क्लैब्यं मा स्म गमः पार्थ” — ‘yield not to unmanliness, O Partha.’

And yet, yield we did. Again and again. Not because we lacked swords, but because we lacked psychological certainty. That is the tragedy Savarkar will not allow me to unsee. The Marathas could shake the subcontinent, but they could not yet imagine ruling it entirely. Their victories were cosmic, but their confidence mortal.

Savarkar writes the story like a man smashing the glass over a sleeping civilisation’s face. I sometimes feel him gripping my collar across time, saying: ‘Look. Learn. For God’s sake, don’t repeat this.’ Shakespeare echoes the sentiment in that line I can never escape: ‘“What’s past is prologue.”‘ And yes — with Savarkar it feels less like literature and more like prophecy.

The sweep of his narrative moves like a thunderstorm across the Deccan plateau. I follow it instinctively now, the way one follows a familiar trail in the hills: the Bhosales rising, the Mughals flinching, Aurangzeb exhausting himself to the point of absurdity.

The empire that once believed itself ordained by heaven now digging its own grave in the ghats, hillfort by hillfort. This is where Savarkar’s gift shines — he takes what we were taught to call “regional history” and reframes it as the final, flaring stand of a civilisation refusing to be embalmed.

But oh, the irony. For just when the Marathas seemed on the verge of rewriting the subcontinental script, the old ghosts returned. Not foreign ones — internal ones. Jealousy, distrust, politics masquerading as prudence. The ancient curse of the Bharata race: too many crowns, too many councils, too many egos pretending to be dharma. The ‘Upanishads’ warn of this: ‘‘“द्वितीयाद् वै भयम् भवति” — ‘from duality comes fear.’”‘‘ And the Marathas, unified only in their hunger for glory, fragmented in their strategies for keeping it.

Still, I cannot judge them harshly. For how different are we now?

Authority still makes us suspicious.

Power still makes us apologetic.

Savarkar himself warned that a culture afraid of power is a culture ripe for conquest. Reading ‘Hindu Pad-Padashahi’, I sometimes feel like I am watching a cosmic loop — the same pattern repeating every few centuries, until someone breaks it. Maybe that is why I embraced him — not because he was flawless, but because he was ‘frighteningly aware’ of our civilisational weakness.

And the book shifts again, effortlessly, into the age of Peshwas, those administrators who became accidental emperors. Bajirao gallops in like a comet across the sky, and I can’t help but feel the thrill Savarkar intends. Here is a man who actually understood strategy as destiny — a man who knew what Caesar meant when he said ‘audentes fortuna iuvat’, fortune favours the bold.

Had Bajirao lived longer, who knows? Perhaps the map of India today would bear the stamp of saffron decades before the British ever sharpened their knives.

To this day, Bajirao reminds me of Achilles, fire-bright and doomed by time. A force of nature compressed into a few years, proof that sometimes history requires a single incandescent individual to alter the arc of a civilisation. Savarkar writes him with a reverence that is almost surgical — precise, unsentimental, and yet pulsing with admiration.

And I, the reader, feel that shiver of “What if?” that haunts every Indian who has ever studied the eighteenth century seriously.

But time spares no hero. Death took Bajirao, and hesitation took the Confederacy. Panipat appears on the horizon, heavy as an eclipse, and I feel my throat tighten even before Savarkar guides me into that battlefield. The Third Battle of Panipat — our civilisational heartbreak, our Iliad, our night that lasted centuries. If Kurukshetra was dharma’s pivot, Panipat was its warning.

Savarkar does not weep over it. He refuses to sentimentalise. He analyses it like a surgeon holding a ruined organ. Who failed? Why? What moral sickness seeped into decision-making? What fatal slowness overtook the Maratha will? The man has no patience for self-pity. And as I read, I find I no longer have patience for it either.

‘‘Because Panipat, in Savarkar’s telling, wasn’t a tragedy — it was a preventable tragedy.’’

Which makes it infinitely worse.

He invokes no divine injustice, no cruel fate. The gods did not abandon the Marathas; the Marathas abandoned themselves. The Greeks knew that hubris kills, but Savarkar suggests something subtler killed the Maratha dream: ‘timidity masquerading as diplomacy.’ The refusal to finish what one has started. The inability to recognise that destiny punishes the half-committed.

And I, reading with modern eyes but an ancient pulse, feel a surge of shame mingled with resolve. Gandhi once called suffering our strength; Savarkar called that mindset an infection. After reading this book, I cannot help but agree.

Still, even after Panipat, the Hindu empire did not die — it staggered, but did not collapse. That’s the part school textbooks never quite taught with any conviction. The Marathas returned, regrouped, even dominated Delhi again. But the fracture lines had already been carved. And the British, like the clever vultures they were, waited just long enough for our internal incoherence to ripen.

Savarkar narrates the British rise not as a triumph of imperial genius but as a triumph of Indian disunity. The East India Company, in his telling, is not Rome; it is a parasite that got lucky.

And for the first time, I understand why Savarkar dismissed the moral romanticism of “nonviolence.” The world does not reward harmlessness; it rewards coherence. That is the law of nature, the law the ‘Taittiriya Upanishad’ hints at when it whispers ‘‘“राष्ट्रं मे ददे” — ‘may I be granted a nation.’”‘‘ A nation is not granted to the meek; it is seized by the willing.

His prose sharpens when he describes the final fall of the Marathas, as though he is cutting into a tumour. I sense his frustration, his longing, his fury that a people who once shook an empire could not unite long enough to build one. And I sense, too, his hope — not misplaced, not naïve, but almost eerie — that the Hindu empire may have fallen in form, but not in spirit.

And that is the hinge of the entire book.

That is the moment I realised why ‘Hindu Pad-Padashahi’ still matters.

It is not nostalgia.

It is blueprint.

What Savarkar is really saying — beneath the history, beneath the rhetoric, beneath the ideological armour — is that the Hindu mind must re-learn ambition.

Not the material ambition of wealth and conquest, but the civilisational ambition of coherence and self-respect. Without that, the future will always be a repetition of the past.

I feel a strange calm when I think this. Almost like standing inside a storm that has finally begun to explain itself. The ‘Brihadaranyaka Upanishad’ comes to me quietly: ‘‘“असतो मा सद्गमय” — ‘from the unreal lead me to the real.’”‘‘ Savarkar’s history is a march toward that real — the realisation that dignity without strength is decoration.

By the time I reach the end, I feel transformed but also challenged. The book is not gentle. It does not soothe. It does not hold my hand. It throws me into the furnace of our past and demands that I emerge with a spine. And I do.

For in the final pages, Savarkar does something breathtaking. He refuses despair. He refuses defeat. He almost scolds the reader for assuming the Maratha decline was final.

Civilisations, he insists, do not die — they sleep, they wait, they gather dust and dreams — until someone wakes them up. The line from the ‘Shanti Parva’ comes roaring back: ‘‘“उत्तिष्ठत जाग्रत” — ‘Arise, awake.’”‘‘

And I, who once hesitated before calling myself Hindu without qualification, now say it with the steadiness of someone who has traversed centuries in a single sitting. A steadiness I owe, in no small measure, to Savarkar.

Because ‘Hindu Pad-Padashahi’ is not merely history.

It is a mirror.

It is a warning.

It is a prophecy.

And it is an invitation — to finish the story that was interrupted in the eighteenth century.

When I close the book, I feel the old world receding but the fire remaining.

And inside the quiet of my room, with the weight of centuries settling into my bones, I whisper the one line that feels adequate:

‘‘“चरैवेति — keep moving.”‘‘

For Savarkar moved.

For the Marathas moved.

For Bharat must move.

And now, finally, so do we.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very well authored, motivating handbook of Hindu past glory and glamour, for a reader with a revolutionary Hindu nationalist mindset.

If you are a rationalist, this book is more about Maratha wins and tribulations than Hindu glory per say, written at a time when the author and his Hindu Mahasabha brethren were desperately seeking collective Hindu support against Gandhian secularism. The reflections of the same ideology are evident in current day ‘changing goalposts’ of Maharashtrian politics, right from alienation of Hindu migrants to disdain for backward castes and religious minorities, all in the name of the ‘ever suffering’ Marathi-manus.

If one reads between the lines, shall notice the constant infighting and bickering amongst the Indian princely states, that lead to the rise of the ‘divide and rule’ British policy and 175 years of slavery. It’s up to the reader to decide if the British Raj brought Indians together or pulled them apart.

[Aditya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only a very inspiring work written in such powerful language, but also a great introspective work on the struggle of the Marathas for reestablishing a Hindu Empire in India. The first part of the book is a historical sketch of the Maratha struggle after Chhatrapati Shivaji's death till around early 19th century. The second part of the book comprises an examination of various aspects of the Maratha struggle - this is particularly very thoughtful, informative and full of lessons to take.

[Mangesh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much controversial writing. Defaming Chhatrapati Sambhaji....and praising Peshwas