Author:

Aditya Sriastava

Independent Scholar
B.A.Programme
Dyal Singh College (Morning)
New Delhi,India

Email: adityarubyji@gmail.com

Abstract: This paper examines how Shivaji’s historical persona as a strategic thinker, administrator, and state-builder was reinterpreted across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to generate nationalist consciousness, culminating in his contemporary portrayal as a unified “Hero of India.” The paper foregrounds Shivaji’s role as the architect of indigenous naval power along the western coast, demonstrating how maritime forts and coastal fleets posed an enduring challenge to European, particularly British, maritime dominance, later reframed within anti-colonial nationalist historiography. Beyond military strategy, the study highlights Shivaji’s social and economic reforms, including agrarian regulation, peasant welfare, ecological resource management, and ethical governance, complicating martial and communal readings of his rule. A key intervention of this paper lies in tracing how nineteenth-century reformers expanded Shivaji’s image beyond Maratha regionalism, while twentieth-century nationalist and revivalist discourses increasingly recast him within a homogenized Hindu nationalist framework. By examining historiography, folk memory, and cinematic representations together, the paper distinguishes between Shivaji as a historical actor and Shivaji as a symbolic figure mobilized in modern political imagination, contributing to broader debates on memory, nationalism, and historical representation in India.

Key Words: Hindavi Swaraj, Iconographical Nationalism, Shivaji Maharaj, Statecraft etc.