MUMBAI, July 31: Thirteen letters of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj written in ancient modi script and stolen from the department of archives have been recovered.

The director of the Archives, P S Bhogal, disclosed today that the letters bearing the signatures and seals of the Maratha warrior king were recovered after an inquiry which found four staffers, including two assistant directors of the archives department, guilty of stealing the historical letters.

Bhogal said that the letters were stolen by the four high ranking staffers by opening the department on a holiday after producing a forged letter to the watchman on duty.

The letters were written in modi script, an ancient language used mainly for correspondence purpose.

The script is the usual Marathi written in running hand with a long single line as its headgear and certain alphabets manipulated from the usual script to enable faster hand writing.

The letters, that were collected from Pune, Dhule and Kolhapur for the publication of a book on the occasion of the silver jubilee year of Maharashtra, were missing since 1988 when the publication came out.

The department, however, found out about the missing letters only in 1995 when a historian requested to see the letters in their original form for the purpose of his research.

When Bhogal probed, he found that another thirteen letters of the Peshwas and an unpublished letter of Major General Arthur Wellesley, who fought a battle against the Marathas in Marathwada region in 1803, were also recovered from one of the four accused. A case has been filed against them.

Bhogal said that he took a strong note of the stealing of the original letters of Shivaji Maharaj which were returned to the department by post by an anonymous samaritan on November four, 1995 after he had submitted his preliminary report to the Maharashtra government charging the four staffers.

The letters were found missing when the historian Prof G B Mehendale from Pune had requested access to the letters in March 1995 for his book `Shiva Chhatrapatiche Patrache Pratiroop Darshan', which was published recently.

Bhogal had then asked for an immediate government inquiry into the case.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.