century forgot the past record of Muslim persecution; the social grades turned against each other. The Brahmans living east of the Sahyadri range despised those living west, the men of the hills
despised their brethren of the plains, because they could now do so with impunity. The head of the State, though a Brahman, was despised by his other Brahman servants, — because the first Peshwa's great-
grandfather's great-grandfather had once been lower in society than the Desh Brahmans' great- grandfathers' great-grandfathers ! While the Chitpavan Brahmans were waging social war with the Deshastha Brahmans, a bitter jealousy raged between the Brahman ministers and governors and the Kayastha secretaries. We have unmistakable traces of it as early as the reign of Shivaji. "Caste grows by fission." It is antagonistic to national union. In proportion as Shivaji's ideal of a Hindu swaraj was based on orthodoxy, it contained within itself the seed of its own death. As Rabindranath Tagore remarks:
"A temporary enthusiasm sweeps over the country and we imagine that it has been united; but the rents and holes in our body-social do their work secretly; we cannot retain any noble idea long.
"Shivaji aimed at preserving the rents; he wished to save from Mughal attack a Hindu society to which ceremonial distinctions and isolation of castes are the very breath of life. He wanted to make this heterogeneous society triumphant over all
