When The New York Times Came Looking for Shivaji

Image: Indian Express

New York Times Came Looking for Shivaji: There is a moment in the New York Times's recent piece on Shivaji that stops you cold.

A man named Gopi Kishan, who had waited three years for government paperwork that never came, organises a midnight convoy — two motorcycles leading, two bringing up the rear — drives to an intersection in the South Indian town of Bodhan, and raises a fibreglass king onto an iron plinth in under ten minutes. Then he takes selfies. Then he goes to jail for a few days. Then he comes home. The statue is still standing.

That single sequence — compressed, precise, almost cinematic — is what separates serious foreign correspondence from the kind of desk-bound analysis that passes for international reporting in much of the Western press today. Anupreeta Das and Suhasini Raj were there. They found the man. They got him to talk. And they rendered him on the page with enough specificity that you can feel the dark road, the ropes, the ten minutes, the pride.

The piece, published May 31, 2026, is their account of a phenomenon that is reshaping the physical and cultural landscape of contemporary India: the extraordinary proliferation of statues, monuments, military symbols, state budgets, theme parks, and popular devotion dedicated to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj — the 17th-century Maratha king who fought the Mughal empire, built a navy, and died at fifty having founded one of the subcontinent's great dynasties. It is a substantial piece of reporting, ambitious in geographic scope, generous in human detail, and illustrated with photography by Atul Loke that is, in places, genuinely stunning. It deserves a wide Indian readership, and a careful one.

What the piece covers, and how

The reporters begin where the phenomenon is most vivid — on the ground, with people. The Bodhan statue story opens the piece because it earns its place: it is the distilled version of a much larger national impulse, and Gopi Kishan is a character rather than a type. A member of the Bajrang Dal, a Hindu militant organisation, he is presented not as a cartoon but as a man with a specific grievance — three years of bureaucratic deferral — and a specific conviction: that without Shivaji's resistance to the Mughals, the word Hindu would not exist today. The reader is free to agree or disagree. The piece does not make that choice for you.

From Bodhan, the reporters move to Maharashtra — the heartland of Maratha identity and the core of Shivaji's empire. Here the piece opens up into genuine cultural history. We learn that Shivaji was born in 1630 into a lower caste, that he is often called the father of the Indian Navy, that he employed guerrilla warfare against the Mughal army under Aurangzeb with innovative weaponry including metal claws worn over knuckles, and that his political shrewdness has been the subject of both scholarly research and popular legend for four centuries. The Maharashtra community — roughly a third of the state — has maintained this reverence continuously, long before any contemporary political movement adopted it.

The Sindhudurg Fort sequence is among the piece's finest passages. The fort rises above the Arabian Sea in the town of Malvan, accessible by a short boat ride from shore. The reporters describe its 30-foot stone walls, its hidden entryway, its multiple lookout points from which Shivaji's soldiers once scanned the horizon for Portuguese, Dutch, and other enemy ships competing for trade routes. Inside the fort, there are footprints and handprints on stone said to be Shivaji's own. Small boatloads of tourists arrive chanting — Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj ki jai — and in the distance, a 91-foot statue of the king is visible at the nearby Rajkot Fort. The reporters note, with an eye for the telling detail, that the original statue inaugurated in 2023 by Prime Minister Modi collapsed due to shoddy construction and was rebuilt almost three times as high.

The piece then tracks how Shivaji's martial legacy has been adopted by India's modern military institutions. The Indian Navy, to mark the country's 75th year of independence in 2022, unfurled a new flag incorporating Shivaji's royal seal as a tribute to his maritime vision. The Indian Army has said it will study his guerrilla warfare tactics for contemporary battlefield strategy. An Army regiment has erected Shivaji statues in towns close to the country's borders with China and Pakistan. One statue stands at Pangong Tso — the lake in eastern Ladakh where twenty Indian soldiers died in a border skirmish with Chinese forces six years ago. It faces China, sword raised, as if ready to charge. The image is remarkable and the reporters understand that.

They are equally attentive to the political economy of the Shivaji phenomenon. Several states governed by Prime Minister Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh — have committed funds to Shivaji statues and memorials. The Maharashtra government has set aside approximately five million dollars in its latest budget to build a Shivaji memorial in Agra, once a Mughal stronghold from which Shivaji made a famous daring escape. Shivaji theme parks have been built or earmarked. There is merchandise — T-shirts, wristwatches — for sale online. The reporters take all of this seriously as evidence of a cultural moment that is simultaneously organic and orchestrated.

Two other characters anchor the piece's human dimension. Chandhrashekharr Chavan, a 51-year-old self-described devotee of Shivaji based in Hyderabad, has spent more than three years campaigning to make the king's birthday a national holiday. His petition has gathered 152,000 signatures. He speaks with the unselfconscious fervour of someone for whom admiration has become vocation — "whenever we take his name, goose bumps we always get" — and the reporters render him without condescension, which requires a certain editorial generosity. Then there is the Renjal village teacher, mentioned more briefly, who installed a Shivaji statue with donations from both Muslim and Hindu residents. It is a detail that quietly complicates any simple reading of the phenomenon.

The historical and scholarly dimension is handled with care. The piece draws on Ananya Vajpeyi of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Audrey Truschke of Rutgers to contextualise the ways Shivaji's legacy has always been adapted — by independence leaders, by balladeers, by successive political movements across centuries. The observation that Shivaji left few conventional markers of empire — no palaces, few temples, only forts — is key to understanding why he remains available to reinterpretation: he spent his life moving, fighting, surviving, and the absence of fixed monuments makes his meaning permanently negotiable.

Where the piece could have gone further

All of this is accomplished, substantive journalism. If there is a place where the piece leaves the reader wanting more, it is in the space between its two strongest elements — the political analysis and the field reporting. That space is occupied by ordinary Indians who appear briefly but are not quite given the room to explain themselves on their own terms.

The schoolchildren chanting at Sindhudurg Fort, the tourists arriving by boat, the woman at the market stall with a Shivaji wristwatch — these figures illustrate the piece rather than inhabit it. A few more exchanges with any one of them — what they know of the king's actual history, whether they think of their devotion as political, what the chant means to them personally — would have added a layer of texture that no amount of expert commentary can replicate.

The Renjal village teacher, whose community raised money across religious lines for a shared statue, is the piece's most intriguing minor character. That story, told in full, would have been extraordinary — a direct complication of the communal narrative the piece otherwise foregrounds. It is the detail that points toward the larger, more generous story that was possible alongside the one that was written.

These are not failures. They are the inevitable limits of ambitious journalism conducted across a continent, on deadline, in a country the size of a civilisation. Das and Raj and Loke produced something substantial. The piece is worth reading, worth discussing, and worth taking seriously as an account of a genuine and consequential cultural moment in contemporary India.

The best longform journalism makes you want to get on a plane. This one comes close.