Page:Shivaji and His Times.djvu/458

438 was rapidly and safely conveyed home without any loss. His inborn military genius is proved by his instinctively adopting that system of warfare which was most suited to the racial character of his soldiers, the nature of the country, the weapons of the age, and the internal condition of his enemies. His light cavalry, stiffened with swift-footed infantry, was irresistible in the age of Aurangzib. More than a century after his death, his blind imitator Daulat Rao Sindhia continued the same tactics when the English had galloper guns for field action and most of the Deccan towns were walled round* and provided with defensive artillery, and he therefore failed ignominiously.

Did Shivaji merely found a Krieg-staat, i.e., a Government that lives and grows only by war? Was he merely an entrepreneur of rapine, a Hindu edition of Alauddin Khilji or Timur?

I think it would not be fair to take this view. For one thing, he never had peace to work out his political ideal. The whole of his short life was one struggle with enemies, a period of preparation and not of fruition. All his attention was necessarily devoted to meeting daily dangers with daily expedients and he had not the chance of peacefully building up a well-planned political edifice. His