The chisel hits stone with a metallic ring that echoes through the morning mist of the Sahyadri mountains. If you stand on the precipice of Raigad Fort, the world drops away into a dizzying expanse of emerald valleys and jagged basalt cliffs. The air up here smells of wet earth, crushed grass, and centuries of dried blood.
Down in the valleys, in the roaring, traffic-choked arteries of Mumbai and Pune, a different kind of carving is taking place.
Politicians are reshaping a ghost.
He was born Shivaji Bhonsle in 1630. Today, he is widely revered as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the legendary warrior king who dared to defy the mighty Mughal Empire. For centuries, his legacy belonged to the folk singers, the peasants, and the regional identity of Maharashtra. But history is never static. It is a resource, mined and refined to power the political engines of the present. Right now, India’s Hindu nationalist movement is refashioning this 17th-century king into something entirely new: the ultimate icon of a muscular, modern Hindu state.
To understand why a king who died nearly 350 years ago dominates the billboards, rallies, and political speeches of modern India, you have to leave the academic libraries behind. You have to look at the dust.
The Weight of the Stone
Consider a young man named Amit. He is a hypothetical composite of the thousands of young men who flock to historical forts every weekend, but his passion is entirely real. Amit works a grueling six-day week at a digital marketing firm in Pune. He spends his days staring at spreadsheets, feeling small, squeezed by inflation and the anonymous pressure of a globalized economy.
But on Sunday mornings, Amit climbs Raigad.
When he touches the rough, weathered black stone of the gateway, something shifts inside him. He is no longer just another face in a nation of 1.4 billion people struggling to find a job. He is part of a lineage. He belongs to an empire that stood up to tyrants.
This emotional anchor is what the political landscape thrives upon. For decades after India gained independence in 1947, the national narrative was dominated by a secular, Delhi-centric elite. The history taught in textbooks focused heavily on the grand architecture of the Mughals and the non-violent struggle of Mahatma Gandhi. It was a narrative that sought to bind a deeply fractured, multi-religious country together through shared institutions and secular tolerance.
But secularism can feel cold. It can feel abstract.
A warrior king on a rearing horse, sword raised against an invading army? That makes the blood pump.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), recognized this potent emotional energy. They saw that millions of citizens felt their cultural identity had been marginalized by the secular state. By elevating Shivaji from a regional hero of western India to a national savior of Hinduism, the political right found a perfect symbol for their vision of Hindutva—the idea that Indian culture is fundamentally Hindu culture.
Rewriting the Script of the Past
The transformation requires a delicate piece of historical surgery. The real Shivaji was a complex, pragmatic ruler navigating a shifting web of alliances. Historical records show that his army included significant numbers of Muslim soldiers. His trusted foreign secretary was a Muslim named Qazi Haider. When Shivaji raided territories, his strict code of conduct explicitly forbade the desecration of mosques or the mistreatment of women, regardless of their faith. He was a king fighting for Swarajya—self-rule—against a predatory imperial system, not a religious crusader out to eliminate Islam.
But complexity makes for poor political slogans.
In the simplified narrative favored by the Hindu right, the nuances are rubbed away. The multi-layered geopolitics of the 17th century are flattened into a binary, timeless conflict: Hindu resistance versus Muslim oppression. Shivaji is cast not merely as a brilliant strategist who used guerrilla warfare to outmaneuver larger armies, but as a divinely ordained protector of the faith who liberated the land from foreign invaders.
The power of this narrative is immense because it speaks directly to historical wounds. For centuries, subcontinental history was written by the victors—first the Mughals, then the British. The psychological scars of conquest run deep. By reclaiming Shivaji as a fierce, uncompromising Hindu hero, the modern movement offers its followers a sense of historical retributive justice. It tells them: You were conquered, you were humiliated, but you fought back, and you can win again.
The Battle of the Statues
Walk through any major Indian city today, and you will see the physical manifestation of this ideological shift. The scale of commemoration has reached titanic proportions.
Consider the mid-sea memorial project off the coast of Mumbai. The proposed Shiv Smarak statue is designed to tower over the Arabian Sea, a colossal bronze figure of the king atop a horse, designed to dwarf the Statue of Liberty. The project has faced intense debates over its staggering financial cost and environmental impact on local fishing communities.
Yet, to criticize the statue is to risk being labeled anti-national. The monument is not just art; it is a political statement set in bronze. It says to the world, and to the domestic electorate, that the old era of secular modesty is over. The new India is proud, assertive, and explicitly Hindu.
This phenomenon is not unique to India, of course. Countries across the globe routinely weaponize history to serve contemporary agendas. Think of how the myth of the American Wild West was manufactured to justify continental expansion, or how modern European nations invoke medieval kings to bolster nationalist fervor during economic crises. History is the clay; the present is the sculptor.
But in India, the stakes feel raw because the past is not dead. It isn't even past. The historical arguments over what Shivaji did or did not do in 1665 directly influence who feels safe walking down the street in 2026.
The True Radicalism of the King
The tragedy of reducing Shivaji to a single-dimensional religious icon is that it obscures his most radical, genuinely transformative achievements.
He was an administrative genius. In an era dominated by feudal lords who bled the peasantry dry through predatory tax farming, Shivaji abolished the system. He instituted a direct taxation model that protected farmers from extortion. He built a disciplined navy from scratch, recognizing long before others the threat posed by European colonial powers arriving by sea. He promoted the use of Marathi and Sanskrit in his court, challenging the cultural hegemony of Persian, the language of the Mughal elite.
He created a state that felt, to the ordinary peasant, worth defending. That was his real magic. It was not just that he was a Hindu king; it was that he was a just king.
When you strip away the political banners, the deafening loudspeakers at rallies, and the social media warfare, you are left with the quiet reality of the people who still live in the shadow of his forts.
Step into a small village at the base of Sinhagad Fort. An elderly woman sits outside her mud-walled home, sorting lentils in a wicker basket. If you ask her about Shivaji, her eyes do not fill with political anger. They soften with a strange, maternal pride. She speaks of him as if he were a grandfather who passed away just last week, a protector who ensured that the local women could harvest the fields without fear of marauding armies.
To her, Shivaji is not a weapon to be wielded against a neighbor. He is a shield.
The sun begins to dip below the horizon at Raigad, painting the sky in violent shades of crimson and burnt orange. The tourists and the political activists begin their long descent back to the plains, their voices fading into the evening wind. The great stone gateways grow dark.
The king remains up here, caught between the truth of what he built and the myth of what they need him to be. The chisel will keep hitting the stone. The statues will grow larger. But the real battle is not for the land he conquered; it is for the mind of the nation that claims his name.
