CHAPTER V.
POONA AND KOLHAPUR.
It is not, after all, in British India (i.e., in that part of India which we directly administer) that the Brahmanical and reactionary character of Indian unrest, at any rate in the Deccan, can best be studied.

There it can always be disguised under the "patriotic" aspects of a revolt against alien rule.

To appreciate its real tendencies we must go to a Native State of the Deccan about 100 miles south of Poona.
Kolhapur is the most important of the Native States under the charge of the Bombay Government, and its ruler is the only ruling Mahratta chief who can claim direct descent from the great Shivaji, the "Shivaji-Maharaj" whose cult Tilak made one of the central features of his political propaganda.

He is the "Chhatrapati Maharajah," and is acknowledged to be as such the head of the Mahratta Princes of India.
One would have thought that such a lineage would have sufficed in itself to invest the Maharajah of Kolhapur with a certain measure of sanctity in the eyes of Tilak and his followers.

Far from it.