He was speaking at the launch of The Wild Warfront, a book on Chhatrapati Shivaji written by Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Marathi author Vishwas Patil and translated into English by Nadeem Khan ...

Centuries before Bal Thackeray formed a political party in Shivaji’s name, Jyotiba Phule wrote a powada (traditional Marathi ballad) casting the king as “a Shudra protector of his people”.