Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Biography in Marathi: The Life and Works of Maharshi Vitthal Ramji Shinde (1873-1944)

Maharshi Vitthal Ramji Shindé (1873-1944) was one of the greatest Indian reformers who made an invaluable contribution to the social, religious and cultural transformation of India during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Brahmo by faith, he studied Comparative Religion at Oxford (1901-1903). While working as a religious missionary for the Mumbai Prarthana Samaj, in 1906 he founded the Depressed Classes Mission Society of India and worked nationwide for eradication of untouchability and general liberation and progress of the downtrodden. Because of his initiative and effort, at its Calcutta Session (1917) the National Congress passed the historic resolution for removal of untouchability. Maharshi Shindé was also a substantial writer and a sound scholar. His book The Problem of Untouchability in India (1932) in Marathi is the first substantial thesis on the subject.

G. M. Pawar is a well-known critic and research scholar of long standing. Besides his contribution to the field of literary criticism with such works as Theory of Humour, he has carried out extensive research on the life, times and achievements of Maharshi Shindé. He has travelled widely in India and Europe to obtain source material for the present comprehensive biography of Maharshi Shindé which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2007. To his credit are eight books including monographs and edited works on various aspects of Maharshi Shinde's life and work.

Sudhakar Marathé has taught English language and literature for 44 years. He began translating in 1978 with an English rendering of 27 poems of B. S. Mardhekar. Besides numerous poems, essays and stories, he has translated Bhalchandra Nemade's novel Kosla (Cocoon) and R. R. Boradé's novel Pachola (Fall) and the brief Sahitya Akademi biography of Mahatma Jotiba Phulé into English. His English translations of many pioneering country stories of Vyankatesh Madgulkar entitled Sweet Water and Other Stories has recently been published jointly by CIIL and Sahitya Akademi.

MAHARSHI Vitthal Ramji Shindé was an unusual man. It is indeed astonishing that there has been no full length biography of this man for all these years. Prof Pawar's has been a pioneering effort. Pawar who retired as a Professor of Marathi from Shivaji University (Kolhapur, Maharashtra) has been a Shinde scholar for some time now. I should perhaps mention here that for the past hundred years or so Professors of Marathi have been major chroniclers and theoreticians of the modernist movement in Maharashtra. Our teachers of social sciences barring a very few and that too over the last fifty years or so have not shown much interest in this enterprise. G. B. Sardar, P. G. Sahasrabuddhe, Mate and others, all professors of Marathi, are notable people in this regard. In this context one should also mention the late R N Chavan a free lancer scholar writing on the history of modernism in Maharashtra and especially on the Marathas. He can be described as one who was in many ways an intellectual of what could be called a Phule-Shinde school, their differing perspectives in many questions notwithstanding. Pawar thus has joined a very distinguished company. Be that as it may, he put his comprehensive Marathi biography of Shinde together in 2004. The present volume is based on that massive and then rather well-received book in Marathi. There was a need of Shinde's biography in English. To my way of reckoning the project of the history of "Indian Modernity has remained unfinished mainly because it has had very few, if at all, inputs from the debates and ideas in the Indian vernaculars. May be, not unlike their British predecessors, the Indian Bhadralok also had little use for "native" ideas. Further such ideas as have entered the debate are all upper. caste ideas. (One must add here that this is true as much of any other part of India as it is of Maharashtra.) The history of modernism in India has in a way become the history of the modernism of the Bhadra Lok or the upper castes. It is a story of their emergence as a class. As such that history has been legitimate. But it has been an incomplete history. This history therefore is for that reason essentially tantamount to the history of the ideas of the upper caste and upper class theoreticians of modernism in different nationalities of India. Under the circumstances it is small wonder that Savarkar has got lot more attention than either Phule or Shinde. I have seen at least one account which seems to labour under the impression that Maharashtra produced only one thinker with intellectual pretensions and that was Savarkar! To be sure the reference there was not very flattering to Savarkanian modernism. But then that was all the more reason to regret that modern Indian history has been a pathetically circumscribed and limited narrative. It was time we moved away from a certain "Ekdeshik" (one sided) character of our explorations. Agarkar, himself a high caste social radical, used that term as a critique of his own positions. (He must be the only one among the galaxy of the moderns to have actually attempted self criticism.) It is not my contention that the ideas produced by the upper caste reformers and thinkers have had no impact on the modernity and modernism in Maharashtra. Indeed it would be wrong to dismiss them out of hand as some caste-radicals are doing presently. But nevertheless it is regrettable that the history of modernism in western India has largely remained an ignored, if not forgotten, part of the story of the emergence of Indian modernity. Phule and Shinde have been the most notable and unfortunate omissions in this important narrative.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages