''Shri-Shiva-Digvijaya'' (

IAST The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during ...

: ''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 In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English ...

. The text is an anonymous work, but L. K. Dandekar and P. R. Nandurbarkar - who edited it in 1895 - attributed its authorship to

Khando Ballal Khanderao Ballal , popularly known as ‘Khando Ballal’, was a diplomat in Maharashtra during the late 17th century and the early 18th century. He was also the personal Assistant of Rajaram and Shahu. He is remembered for his support of Rajara ...

(1718), the son of Shivaji's secretary Balaji Avji. Historians such as Jadunath Sarkar and Surendra Nath Sen reject this attribution, and consider the text to be a modern forgery. Astronomer S. B. Dixit dated the text to 1818 - a century later than the year that Dandekar and Nandurbarkar date it to. Sarkar theorizes that the text was forged by a writer of Kayastha Prabhu caste to glorify the

Kayastha Kayastha (also referred to as Kayasth) denotes a cluster of disparate Indian communities broadly categorised by the regions of the Indian subcontinent in which they were traditionally locatedthe Chitraguptavanshi Kayasthas of North India, the C ...

s as Shivaji's greatest and most loyal supporters. According to him, the text published by Dandekar and Nandurbarkar is a modern work, although its core portion may have been a

lost work A lost work is a document, literary work, or piece of multimedia produced some time in the past, of which no surviving copies are known to exist. It can only be known through reference. This term most commonly applies to works from the classical ...

composed during 1760-1775.

References

Shivaji 19th-century Indian books Bakhars Biographies about royalty {{royal-bio-book-stub