MAHARASHTRA : Vila Ashok Kothwade has become a star of sorts in the Solapur region of Maharashtra ever since the OBC quota movement spearheaded by activist Manoj Jarange Patil took roots. However, Kothwade is not an activist involved in the movement. Instead, he has taken it upon himself to help Maratha youth get the benefit of educational and job quota. Kothwade works as a peon at Vittalrao Shinde Junior and Senior College in Solapur district. His job entails looking after the college office, but he developed an interest in medieval Marathi, which was the official language of the Maratha empire. He showed an interest in learning to read and write in the Modi script, in which Marathi was written before Devanagari became popular.
He attributes his interest in medieval Marathi to his father and grandfather. Kothwade says that the whole region is Marathi speaking, but in his village, or even in the nearby towns, one can count people on fingertips who can understand the Modi script.
From the 12th century till the start of the British raj, Marathi was the official language of correspondence and education of the empire. In this long period, hundreds of thousands of revenue and other official records were written in medieval Marathi in the Modi script. These records have not only survived to the present times, they are still used in government offices for establishing property titles and caste genealogies.
The Modi script is different from the Devanagari script that is the basis of the modern Marathi. On the other hand, Modi is closer to southern Indian scripts, making it difficult for the modern Marathi speakers to decipher. Kothwade says that one needs to obtain training to master this script now.
He says that though his work profile as a peon makes no demand on him to know the medieval script, his keen interest in it encouraged him to undertake a 15-day course and a month-long archive study at Shivaji University in Kolhapur. “When I enrolled in the course for the Modi script, everyone was surprised. People would say that was the time to learn Marathi, English, and foreign languages, not the medieval Modi, which had already died.
From my place, I was the only student who enrolled for the course. My father and grandfather were my inspirations to learn this script,” Kothwade said. He says that after finishing the courses, he was constantly on the lookout for books and papers that were written in the Modi script. “I used to visit town and old offices even to get a piece of paper that was written in the Modi script.
I was happy that I had learned something different, even though it may not be very useful currently. I was sure that learning the Modi script will not go waste,” he says. While it is not easy to find Modi scholars, or even practitioners, in Maharashtra today, it has its everyday uses. The most important use case is to be able to read old official records to obtain the correct caste certificates and avail government schemes and political rights.
The absence of Modireading people in the region is forcing common people to face difficulties in getting proper caste, birth, and death certificates and establish official associations with older generations. Patil’s OBC quota movement has created a peculiar problem for people who are tasked to decipher old official records. Kothwade says that old Marathi records show Marathas as Kunbi, which is part of OBC.
The Maharashtra government appointed retired justice Sandeep Shinde as head of a commission to study the old records, including the ones in Hyderabad, as for many years Marathwada was part of the Nizam’s state. The Shinde committee started visiting government offices to check old records of the Maratha community, where Kunbi was mentioned as a category of people.
The commission issued an appeal that those who could read the Modi script should come forward and help the commission find records. Kothwade’s skills, which were hitherto an extension of personal interest, rose in demand, mostly for a social cause. He says, “I was happy that the script I learned started helping people.
Due to my efforts, more than 20,000 Maratha people got the OBC benefits, because their old records showed Kunbi as their caste, and not Maratha, and that was written in the medieval Marathi script.”
He says many Maratha students who were considered part of the general category, were able to obtain OBC certificates because he could help them read old government records.
As a result, they were able to get admission in medical and engineering colleges, and many of them even became civil service officers. Kothwade brought accessibility to the people of Solapur, for which they had to find someone in Pune earlier.
And he does not ask for money for his services, but his social capital draws remunerations. “Now, people do pay some amount for my service to help them translate their old Modi records,” he says.