શિવાજીનું હાલરડું

Meghani composed this halardu (lullaby) around 1930, at the height of the freedom struggle, and gathered it into his collection Killol of children's songs; it is also anthologized in his patriotic volume Yugvandana (1935). The setting is domestic and ancient — a moon has risen in the sky, and to Jijabai a child has come, the infant Shivaji likened to that very moon (આભમાં ઊગેલ ચાંદલો, ને જીજાબાઇને આવ્યાં બાળ રે). Yet from the first breath the poem inverts the form it borrows. A lullaby exists to bring sleep, but here the refrain insists શિવાજીને નીંદરું ના'વે — "sleep will not come to Shivaji." It is, in the phrase that has followed it ever since, the one cradle song written not to put a child to sleep but to wake a nation; behind the mother's rocking, the mountains themselves rumble in reply (ધણણણ ડુંગરા બોલે), an onomatopoeia that fuses the sway of the cradle with the reverberation of coming war.

The poem's genius is a sustained double structure: every tender image of infancy is twinned with its violent future echo. The soft silk baby-clothes of yellow, red and turquoise (પીળાં-લાલ-પીરોજી ચીર) foreshadow a body bathed in blood and shielded only by armour (ઢાંકણ તે દી ઢાલનું થાશે). The baby's rattle, feeding-bottle and toy parrot-stick (ઘૂઘરા, ધાવણી, પોપટ-લાકડી) will be exchanged for the blood-red sword of the goddess Bhavani (રાતી બંબોળ ભવાની). The mother's kisses on both cheeks prefigure smoke-belching cannon aimed at his face (ધૂંવાધાર તોપ મંડાશે); the pillow of her lap becomes a pillow of arrows and guns (મેલાશે તીર-બંધૂકા); the bed of tender flowers becomes a hero's death-bed spread by the twenty-armed goddess (પાથરશે વીશભુજાળી). Jijabai does not shield her son from this destiny — she rehearses it over the cradle, and in doing so becomes the archetype of the mother who raises her child for the nation rather than for herself.

Though its hero is a Maratha king, the poem is wholly a Gujarati classic, and it travelled through the twentieth century as song. Its most iconic setting is by the Charan folk-singer Hemu Gadhvi, whose recording carried it into school assemblies, Independence Day stages and Shivaji Jayanti celebrations across Gujarat, and it has since been recorded by many others. The coded resistance is unmistakable — Meghani's Sindhudo (1930) was banned by the British as seditious, and this lullaby breathes the same air. Its closing plea seals the transformation: જાગી વ્હેલો આવજે, વીરા ! ટીલું માના લોહીનું લેવા — "wake and come quickly, brave one, to take the tilak of your mother's blood" — turning the auspicious mark of blessing pressed on a warrior's brow into a consecration written in blood, the private tenderness of a cradle opening straight onto the public dream of freedom.