Shiva Digvijaya | |
Author: | Anonymous; attributed to Khando Ballal Chitnis by 19th-century editors |
Title Orig: | Shri-Shiva-Digvijaya |
Orig Lang Code: | mr |
Country: | India |
Language: | Marathi |
Subject: | Biography of Shivaji |
Genre: | Bakhar |
Shri-Shiva-Digvijaya (IAST: Śrī-Śiva-Digvijaya) is a Marathi language biography of Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha Empire. The title of the text is also transliterated as Shiva-digvijay and Shiv-digvijay because of schwa deletion.
The text is an anonymous work,[1] but L. K. Dandekar and P. R. Nandurbarkar - who edited it in 1895 - attributed its authorship to Khando Ballal (1718), the son of Shivaji's secretary Balaji Avji.[2] Historians such as Jadunath Sarkar and Surendra Nath Sen reject this attribution, and consider the text to be a modern forgery.[3] Astronomer S. B. Dixit dated the text to 1818 - a century later than the year that Dandekar and Nandurbarkar date it to.[4]
Sarkar theorizes that the text was forged by a writer of Kayastha Prabhu caste to glorify the Kayasthas as Shivaji's greatest and most loyal supporters.[5] According to him, the text published by Dandekar and Nandurbarkar is a modern work, although its core portion may have been a lost work composed during 1760-1775.[6]