Back in 2017, Ariel Sophia Bardi, a journalist once based in New Delhi, wrote the following for Aeon magazine-
'How ‘Hindutva’ recast multi-faith India as the Hindu homeland''Hindutva,’ explained Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
who had previously been a revolutionary of an agnostic type
in 1923, is ‘not a word, but a history.’ It was introduced in a lengthy pamphlet, Essentials of Hindutva, which Savarkar wrote on the walls of his prison cell, and re-published in 1928 under the new title Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?
Savarkar and the Maharashtrian revolutionaries were influenced by Herbert Spencer and other Left leaning Sociologists and Economists. He was seeking to make a comeback into politics. Congress shunned him because of his previous involvement with revolutionary violence. But he was a great hero to the young and the Hindu Mahasabha was happy to be associated with him so as to gain favour with the younger generation. Thus he became its President in 1937 till he retired in 1943.
‘A Hindu,’ Savarkar declared, ‘means a person who regards this land of Bharat Varsha’– a name for ancient India used in the Puranas, a set of foundational Hindu texts – ‘as his Fatherland as well as his Holy-Land, that is the cradle land of his religion.’
The term ‘Hindutva’, which Savarkar coined
He didn't coin it. Ariel is simply ignorant.
by adding the Sanskrit suffix ‘-tva’ (equivalent to the English ‘-ness’) to the adjective ‘Hindu’, rebranded Hinduism – ‘Hindu-ness’ – as a nationalist ideology, a political groundswell formulated along ethnic lines.
This had happened before Savarkar was born with the publication of 'Anand Math' by Bankim. Incidentally, it was Bankim who got Chandranath to switch to writing in Bengali.
Savarkar wrote: ‘The Hindus are not merely the citizens of the Indian state because they are united not only by the bonds of the love they bear to a common motherland but also by the bonds of a common blood. They are not only a Nation but also a race (jati).’ ‘Hindutva’ recast multi-faith India as the Hindu homeland, giving Hindus a unique claim to the country.
There's a good reason why Bengal took the lead in the creation of a Hindutva ideology. The Hindus there wanted to dominate the entire province though they were a minority in the East. Vivekananda and Aurobindo had one foot in the revolutionary camp and the other foot in monastic religion. Interestingly, there was also a Christian revolutionary- Brahmobandhav Upadhyay- who wrote in 1898, "Are we Hindus?", "By birth, we are Hindu and shall remain Hindu till death. .. We are Hindus so far as our physical and mental constitution is concerned, but in regard to our immortal souls we are Catholic. We are Hindu Catholic.' However, he reconverted to Hinduism a short time before his death in 1907. Something similar was the case with his hero Keshab Chandra Sen. A Hindu might say 'Christ is my Ishtadeva'- my personal God and Saviour- but I also perform rites associated with my 'kuladevam'- of family deity. This would be frowned on by the Church.
As a 20-something law student living in England, Savarkar was charged with plotting against the British monarchy after aiding in the assassination of a British civil servant. Extradited back to India in 1911, Savarkar received two life terms. Through a series of confinements – beginning in the Andaman Islands, home to a brutal penal colony, then in a port city prison near the Arabian Sea in Maharashtra – Savarkar plotted his political manifesto.
He was reacting to the Khilafat movement. The fact is, Congress Hindus were hypocritical in their support of it. They did not really believe that the Caliph should rule the world. The question was whether the Hindu Mahasabha could become a rival to Congress. The answer was no. Congress was the muscular arm of the Hindus. They could enforce 'hartals' on Muslim shopkeepers even if this led to riots in which the minority suffered disproportionately. Also, Gandhi was genuinely religious. Savarkar wasn't. He wouldn't even perform traditional Hindu funeral rites- unlike the Nehru dynasty.
It is difficult to imagine that the pain of colonial incarceration did not shape the fervour of his tract, which laid out a long, historically fanciful rationale for Hindu supremacy.
By then, it was obvious that Hindus would be supreme where they were the majority. The question was whether Congress would monopolize the Hindu vote. The answer was- yes. Congress kicked ass. Nehru was ruthless. In 1937 he appointed only Hindu Chief Ministers and refused to ally with Fazl ul Haq in Bengal. In other words, others talked but only Nehru delivered. In 1947, as Prime Minister, he presided over the ethnic cleansing of Delhi. The Muslim share of the population fell from one third to five percent. He passed a law preventing those who had fled in panic from returning to reclaim their property.
Hindutva represented a hardline form of Hindu nationalism, in which Muslims appeared as bellicose invaders.
That was how the Muslims saw themselves- unless, like the Ismailis, they had themselves been persecuted by Sunni Sultans and had to flee to Gujarat. But the Aga Khan, their Spiritual leader, was a strong supporter of the Muslim League and the Pakistan project.
‘Nations and civilisations fell in heaps before the sword of Islam of Peace!!’ writes Savarkar. ‘But here India alone had to face Arabs, Persians, Pathans, Baluchis, Tartars, Turks, Moguls – a veritable human Sahara whirling and columning up bodily in a furious world storm!’
Prior to the Treaty of Lausanne, most people though Nationalism would be linguistic rather than religious. But once Greek speaking Muslims were sent to Turkey and Turkish speaking Christians moved to Greece, it became obvious that religion was more important. Lebanon was created for the Christians. Would an Israel be created for the Jews? That was in fact the outcome.
As anti-colonial movements gained ground during the last decades of British rule in India, Hindu nationalism became the default expression of reclaimed political power.
There was no need to call itself that. After independence, Shyam Prasad Mukherji quit the Hindu Mahasabha because it wouldn't change its name. He founded the Jan Sangh with the help of the RSS. The Sangh turned into the BJP which is currently in power at the centre.
Indian Muslims, who made up a third of the country before the creation of Pakistan in 1947, saw themselves as sidelined
by Nehru in 1937 who refused to share power in the Provinces. Congress was a Hindu party devoted to things which only Hindus cared about. Also, the Mahatma was an utter crackpot. You can't blame Muslims from wanting to get away from his idiocy.
from independence movements, leading to the 1906 creation of the Muslim League, a separate political party that would later advocate for an independent Muslim state.
In 1916 it made Jinnah, a Congressman, its President. He did a deal with Congress. The problem was that everybody understood that any concessions it offered in the short-run would be snatched away the moment it got control of the Army and thus became omnipotent.
Unlike future leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, who made a point of Muslim inclusion,
it was purely cosmetic. Still, he did get his wife to cook mutton chops for his pal, Azad. Nehru, being a Hindu, didn't get any. He also wasn't allowed to smoke in the Mahatma's presence. But Gandhi was leading Azad up the garden path.
proponents of Hindutva disapproved of non-Hindu outreach, a process known in India as ‘appeasement’.
Nehru got rid of any and every concession previously made to the Muslims.
(Such was Savarkar’s aversion to Gandhi’s approach that he was implicated in his assassination in 1948.)
As was some Hindu Maharaja. Congress had to proceed cautiously. It was possible that the Princes and big landlords could come together and pose a problem for them.
Britain no longer dominates India, but for supporters of Hindutva, the country’s prime antagonists are still non-Hindu Indians, chiefly Muslims.
More particularly if Muslims ethnically cleanse Hindus where they are in the majority- e.g. the Vale of Kashmir.
And the coinage has stuck. Almost a century later, Savarkar’s writings remain a fount of inspiration for those who still seek to unify India under a putatively pan-Hindu banner.
Not really. The guy simply wasn't a Hindu. Chandranath Basu was orthodox. Vivekananda and Ramakrishna had religious charisma. But it is the Nehru dynasty which takes care to observe Hindu rituals. Sonia Gandhi may be a Christian but her daughter marred her Christian husband in a Hindu ceremony. Then, it turned out a Sankaracharya had performed her 'grha pravesh' ceremony! Rahul is actually a 'janeodhari' Brahmin! There are rumours that both Vajpayee and Advani were irreligious. Modi has taken care to appear orthodox. This is part of his appeal.
In India, the ideology of Hindutva
changed with the times. Back in the Sixties and early Seventies, when Socialism was popular, it became Socialistic. Now, its main claim to fame is its commitment to getting rid of casteism. After all, the essence of Hinduism is what is true of that religion in all possible worlds- including worlds where there was never any inherited inequality or discrimination on the basis of occupation.
is experiencing a second act, proving itself inextinguishable.
It would be extinguished if it were associated only with corrupt or cretinous clowns. Congress has declined because Rahul is useless.
‘The book is today a Bible for Hindu nationalists,’ wrote the journalist Uday Mahurkar of Savarkar’s tract in 2015.
He was lying. Hindus, nationalistic or otherwise, read the Bhagvad Gita. They don't read Savarkar's tosh.
The politics of India’s current administration are still greatly informed by the young law student’s vision of a Hindu nation.
No. They are informed by the RSS which had beef with the Hindu Mahasabha to which Savarkar belonged. That's why they helped Mukherji when he split from the Mahasabha. The fact is, Savarkar's personal atheism makes him distasteful to Hindus. Still, he and his brother had shown great valour and suffered greatly for it.
‘Savarkar has become more relevant today,’ said Amit Shah, president of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (the Right-wing BJP) earlier this year.
Indira Gandhi too said nice things about him in 1980. After all, Chitpavans have votes and they may like to hear praise of a hero from their community.
‘We have to apprise the youths and generation next of his freedom fight and literary work.’ Just two years after the release of Essentials of Hindutva, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was founded as a volunteer paramilitary organisation dedicated to advancing Savarkar’s platform of Hindu unity and promoting Hindu causes.
Nonsense! Dr. Hegdewar was emulating his friend Dr. Hardikar who had previously created the Congress Seva Dal in imitation of the 'Anushilan Samitis' of pre-War Bengal. Both had been medical students in Calcutta at that time. When the Brits cracked down on the Seva Dal, the 'non-political' RSS could function. Its philosophy was different from Savarkar. On the one hand, it did not criticize any Hindu ritual. On the other hand, it supported 'inter-dining' and abolition of untouchability. Savarkar, opportunistically, said his party would not vote for enforcement of Temple Entry. But the core belief of Hindutva is that caste is not part of the essence of Hinduism. It is merely a convention or 'samskar'. We must get rid of it to make progress.
It is often called the BJP’s ‘ideological parent’.
By ignorant people. The Jan Sangh was set up by the son of Sir Ashutosh Mukherji with help from the RSS precisely because the Mahasabha was stupid and shitty. Savarkar simply didn't have what it takes to succeed politically. He was a gifted writer but his tone is unappealing to Hindus.
In 2014, the self-styled populist Narendra Modi, an RSS member,
like Prime Minister Atal Behari, who had been Mukherji's right hand man,
won India’s general elections.
Because Rahul refused to run or to nominate some other PM candidate
Modi ran on a platform of neoliberal development schemes wedded to a Right-wing Hindu nationalist agenda.
No. He ran on 'last mile delivery' and 'good governance'. He said here is mobile phone number. If you don't get your entitlement, do 'missed call'. Within a week my people will get back to you and make sure you receive your due.
His ascent to prime minister marked a shocking victory, which foreshadowed Donald Trump’s rise to power.
Trump has changed party several times. He is the only POTUS who never received a Government salary check in his life. By contrast, Modi was a party hack who had been a very successful Chief Minister of Gujarat. Yet, if Rahul had become PM and led his party in 2014, the BJP would have put up Advani, who was twice Rahul's age. Rahul would have won. The lion of Gir would have roared once or twice but have remained in Gujarat.
In 2008,
when Modi was worried that his former ally Parvin Togadia of the VHP would ally with Keshubhai Patel
while still chief minister of Gujarat – a tenure darkened by his suspected complicity in the brutal anti-Muslim pogroms of 2002
it brightened his political future just as Nehru's presiding over anti-Muslim pogroms brightened his political future. But it was Rajiv who got the biggest majority for presiding over anti-Sikh pogroms.
– Modi launched a website dedicated to archiving ‘Savarkar’s thoughts [which] touch upon every aspect of nation-building and are relevant even today’.
Only someone who hasn't read Savarkar would bother doing so.
In 2016, on the 133rd anniversary of Savarkar’s birth, Modi Tweeted out a salute to the ‘true son of Mother India’ using his popular honorific Veer, meaning ‘brave’.
Maybe, this helped his party in Maharashtra. It annoyed the fuck out of Rahul who doesn't seem to understand that his great-grandfather was a loyalist while Savarkar was in jail during the Great War.
Like Savarkar, the BJP presupposes an elemental Hindu-ness, survivor of myriad foreign onslaughts. ‘It weathered the storms of invaders, from the Greeks to the Huns … to the Islamic armies of Turks and Afghans,’ states the BJP website.
Nehru said similar things.
‘It fought and resisted external oppression,
How shameful! It should have offered its anus for sodomy to external oppressors.
and its essential civilisation and culture survived great challenges and attempts at effacement.’
That's true enough- in Hindu majority areas.
Singled out for special opprobrium is the ‘Holocaust’ that ‘Muslims reaped’ on Hindus during centuries of Mughal rule (1526-1857).
Why aren't Hindus celebrating being enslaved? What is wrong with them?
For decades, the BJP has been committed to giving Hindus a unified country,
Nehru gets the credit for ridding India of the Muslim headache. He also took back Goa from the Portuguese.
which they have already partially achieved through the consolidation of Hindu voting blocs. BJP now wields control over 18 out of 29 states.
It is now down to 14 and has lost its majority in Parliament. What will happen after seats are redistributed and the women's quota kicks in? In theory the BJP should benefit- but there is many a slip between cup and lip.
The Hindu nationalist vision of India hinges on
Hinduism of the 'Puranic' type.
an imagined, culturally pure Vedic golden age,
Actually, it is the Ramayana and Mahabharata which capture the Hindu imagination. The Vedas, Richard Crasto said, are Indian scriptures created by Indians for Indians but understood only by German Professors.
a Hindu rashtra, or nation. It’s usually represented by the ancient kingdom of Ram, the godly hero of India’s national epic, the Ramayana. The BJP gained popular support in the 1980s by launching a campaign against the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century Mughal-built mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya, claiming that it had been built over a shrine marking Ram’s birthplace.
Rajiv threw it open to Hindu worship. Sadly, he was killed before he could construct the Temple himself. It is interesting that when Rahul returned to India, one of the first things Sonia did was announce that her Sankaracharya would preside over the building of the Temple once the Court case was decided.
In 1992, Hindu rioters, incited by politicians, stormed the mosque.
It wasn't a mosque. Islamic law says that a place which is not used for Islamic worship is not a mosque. Hindu worship their had been ongoing since 1949.
The resurgence of Hindutva was spurred,
by the Mandal Commission- i.e. more affirmative action for other backward castes. The alternative to endless caste conflict was to appeal to the common religion.
in part, by India’s transformation from a socialist to a market economy. The demolition of the Babri Masjid directly followed the 1991 economic liberalisation of India, which quadrupled the country’s GDP by opening up to foreign investment and adopting a policy of trickle-down economics.
That may have been the intention but politics made buying votes with 'freebies' more attractive.
With widening income gaps and a barrage of foreign goods, Savarkar’s writings, which denounced caste divisions and emphasised cultural nationalism over economic equality, held a new appeal.
The silly man had started babbling about Socialism when that seemed cool.
The lure of a harmonious, Hindu-helmed past served as a galvanising fiction,
from the 1880s onward. In the 1890's it was 'cow protection' which gave Congress 'mass contact'. Incidentally, the founder of the INC- Alan Octavian Hume was a vegetarian Advaitin who believed in cow protection for agronomic reasons. Cow protection is a Directive Principle in the Constitution.
propelling the ideology of Hindutva to mainstream acceptability.
Everybody already had that ideology. True, they may have pretended to be secular, but they weren't really. In 1919, Nehru's younger sister married a Muslim. Gandhi broke up the couple and arranged a 'suitable' Brahmin boy for her to wed. The family had no problem marrying Jains, Jews, Zoroastrians or Christians. But they drew the line at Muslims.
BJP leaders are still focused on having Ram’s temple reinstated.
That has been done. Modi certainly milked the occasion for all it was worth.
This motive of ‘return’ to a purer, idealised nation informs the Hindutva claim to the Indian nation as a unique Hindu homeland.
Which is what it became thanks to Nehru pulling the trigger on Partition. Interestingly, Rajaji arranged for priests from Tamil Nadu to hold a Hindu consecration ceremony for Nehru a few hours before the official transfer of power.
In the opening pages of Essentials of Hindutva, Savarkar alludes to the ‘fair Maid of Verona’. He quibbles with Juliet over the importance of names: ‘Forgive us for this our idolatrous attachment to it when we make bold to assert that: “Hindus we are and love to remain so!”’
There's a good reason nobody reads Savarkar.
To Savarkar, Hindutva is at once precise and collective, both expansive and exclusionary. The word gave a title to political Hinduism, recasting Hinduism as a distinct national form for India.
The Hindu Mahasabha was created in 1915 by Madan Mohan Malviya. Gandhi & Motilal Nehru attended. At that time, Savarkar was still a Revolutionary of a left-wing type. But he was being tortured in jail.
Hindutva still offers Hindu-ness as a deep, shared identity, borne out of an unbroken lineage. In the Hindutva ideal, Hinduism represents a vast, encompassing reality, a subcontinental cultural ethos that is not reliant on faith (Savarkar himself was an atheist).
In other words, he was an opportunist seeking to make a political comeback. His legendary heroism did give him some glamour but he wrote too much. Unlike Hardayal or Aurobindo, there was no genuine spirituality to his work. Still, Indians agree that all freedom-fighters who suffered jail or who risked hanging were heroes regardless of ideology.
Hindutva secularises Hinduism, relying on a heavily mythologised golden age and, as is common to nationalist stories, a fictitiously unified past.
No. It offers an alternative to caste-based Dynastic parties. However 'Hindu consolidation' is easier said than done.
Hindutva introduced a nationalist history of Indian greatness and unity, in which all acknowledged the authority of the nation.
Alan Octavian Hume was Scottish. He created the INC which needed Hinduism to achieve 'mass contact'. The Muslim reacted by forming the Muslim League and the Hindus reacted by creating the Mahasabha. Savarkar came late to the party. By then Congress was the muscular arm of Hinduism. The question was whether Gandhi could lead the Muslims down the garden path. The answer was no. In Jinnah, he met his match.
Since the publication of his pamphlet, Savarkar, like the myths to which his vision of India defaulted, has also been memorialised, aggrandised and revered. In the Andaman Islands, where Savarkar carried out the harshest years of his sentence, the Veer Savarkar International Airport now greets arrivals. The BJP will soon adorn his small cell with a plaque in praise of the freedom fighter who challenged British rule in India and whose ideology of Hindutva now, a century later, has both united the country and set it bitterly at odds.
Nobody gives a shit about ideology- except Rahul who talks of 'vichardhara'. Apparently, his cousin doesn't have good 'vichardhara' which is why he won't let him back into the Congress party. Meanwhile, the BJP has pumped and dumped both him and his mother. That brought a smile to Sonia's face.
Another Aeon article on Savarkar by Mihir Dalal suggests that Hindus didn't know they were Hindus which is why they could put up no resistance to Islamic or Christian invaders. He forgets that the Marathas, the Sikhs, the Gurkhas and so forth were proud of their religion and happy to turn the tables on the Muslims.
Over a 70-year period starting in the 1750s, the British East India Company defeated both European and local rivals and turned the Mughal dynasty that had ruled India for more than 200 years into its puppet.
Previously, they were the puppets of the Marathas.
Britain’s barbaric traders carried out their conquest through loot and rapacity,
No. They were businessmen who punctually paid pensions to those who surrendered a fort to them or who otherwise helped them expand their rule. The reason they prevailed is because their finances were sound thanks to their great oceanic trade.
while its scribes, missionaries and historians provided the moral justifications by portraying India as a degenerate civilisation that British rule might redeem.
Money was the only justification. Morality didn't matter in the slightest.
Some European thinkers, Orientalists and Romantics valorised ancient Hindu India as the cradle of civilisation, but they too lamented its decay.
Nobody cared about 'lamentations'. Could money be made in India? That's what mattered.
Under British colonialism, elite Hindus often accepted the British narratives for colonial rule.
No. Everybody tried to get some sort of official employment so as to get rich. Narratives didn't matter. Money did.
They were especially tortured by the question: how could a vast nation like India be conquered by a distant island a fraction of its size and population?
The answer was obvious. Princes fought each other when they weren't being killed by their own sons or nephews. Moreover, the fiscal foundations of Kingdoms were shaky. Sooner or later there would be a revenue shortfall. Unpaid soldiers desert or turn to dacoity. The tiller of the land hopes that invaders will lower the tax burden.
Such musings about Indian or Hindu history furthered the development of Indian nationalism. By assuming that a ‘national’ Hindu-Indian identity had existed since time immemorial (it hadn’t),
It certainly had for caste Hindus- especially Brahmins. We know from which Vedic Rishi we are descended.
elite Hindus felt driven to recover their Hindu-Indian identity in the present.
They already had it. Just ask your purohit (family priest).
In fact, until British rule, people in the subcontinent hadn’t seen themselves as Hindu (or Muslim) in the modern sense.
Yes they had. That is why the British found that there was a different personal law for Muslims of different 'mazhabs' and Hindus belonging to various sects.
They balanced various identities, including those of place, caste and family lineage;
this was preserved by their family priests in the case of Hindus and Jains.
religion merely provided one among several, as the political theorist Sudipta Kaviraj and others have written.
They are ignorant shitheads.
However, in the 19th century, some upper-caste Hindus, awed by the power of Britain’s military and industrial superiority, launched vigorous movements to ‘purify’ their religion and make it more like Christianity.
Some guys who had got rich working for the Brits did create a 'Brahmo Samaj' which at one time seemed likely to merge with the Unitarian Church. It must be said, there were some very high quality converts to Christianity.
They moved to cast off what they saw as the appendages dragging down Hinduism – the inegalitarian caste system, the large diversity of gods, sects and practices – believing this reformation would make India great again.
Does Mihir mean the Prarthana Samaj and the Arya Samaj? They came later and in the latter case were concerned with 'shuddhi'- reconversion.
British historical narratives portrayed Hindu-Muslim enmity as a fundamental, self-evident feature of Indian history.
No. They portrayed India as a place which could be ruled in a secular manner because there was a tradition of people of different faiths working together in the administration. Indeed, such was the case in their own offices.
In reality, religious pluralism and toleration – not fanatical religious hatred – had been the norm among people of various religions in South Asia.
Unless it wasn't. The problem with hatred is two can play at that game. You may start the persecution but end up being slaughtered. What mattered was money. People need it to buy bread.
In The Loss of Hindustan (2020), the historian Manan Asif Ahmed writes that, before British rule, many elite Hindus and Muslims had thought of Hindustan as a homeland not only of the Hindus, but of the ‘diverse communities of believers’ including Muslims and Christians.
But it was better administered by sojourners from a distant isle. They only stayed long enough to qualify for a pension. But this meant that they were less corrupt and nepotistic than the locals and thus more widely trusted. Still, what mattered was money. If the Brits couldn't make a profit running the place they would run the fuck away.
British colonialism constructed a different narrative, one in which Hindus had been subjugated in their home for 1,000 years by Muslim invaders.
Why the fuck would they construct such a narrative? If Hindus started killing Muslims, it would be their own turn next.
This distorted the South Asian experience of Hindustan into claims of immutable enmity between Hindus and Muslims.
Muslims don't regard Hindus as kaffirs. British historians invented this myth.
The British census aggregated Hindus and Muslims across India into homogeneous groups and facilitated the creation of solidarity – and belligerence – among them.
Prior to the British census, Indians did not know whether they were male or female. Evil Britishers forced them to choose between having a penis or a vagina. This is called 'bio-politics'.
Towards the end of the 19th century, colonial influences combined with what the historian Christopher Bayly in 1998 called ‘old patriotisms’ to contribute to the invention of a pan-Indian Hindu nationality, and a more inchoate Muslim nationality.
Why? The answer is the reforms of the 1880s which were meant to increase Indian representation in the administration. The hope was that India could become more and more self-administering and self-garrisoning. Also, it was vital that agricultural productivity rose so that the Government gained more fiscal headroom. Otherwise, with the decline of the price of silver, retired officers would find their pensions insufficient.
Working in this legacy, Savarkar made his first lasting contribution to Indian politics in 1909, with the publication of a historical work, The Indian War of Independence of 1857. In 1857, large numbers of Indian soldiers and gentry in northern and western India had risen under the banner of the fading Mughal dynasty in the largest armed uprising against the British Empire by a ruled people.
But Indians sided with the British in even larger numbers. That is why they prevailed.
British historians had played down this war as a ‘sepoy mutiny’, restricted to disgruntled soldiers rather than a polity – a view Savarkar set out to correct. In Hindutva and Violence (2021), an authoritative work on Savarkar, the historian Vinayak Chaturvedi shows that Savarkar was a master at reclaiming Indian history from the British by reading colonial records and works of scholarship ‘against the grain’.
An interesting story could be told about why Maharashtra was relatively untroubled. The fact is, if British officers acted sensibly, disturbances could be localized and easily crushed. A.O Hume, in Etawah, was very successful in this probably because his reforms were appreciated by the local people.
Drawing inspiration from the French and American revolutions as well as the ultranationalism of Mazzini, Savarkar reconstructed 1857 as the ‘first war’ for Indian independence. To this day, 1857 is understood as such in India.
Not really. The thing is a pretence. The word 'ghaddar' has a negative meaning.
His passionate, romantic account glorified Indian war heroes with the intent of inspiring a revolution against the British.
Because he and his brother were revolutionaries inspired by Vasudev Phadke and the Chapekar brothers.
In the book, Savarkar introduced the central motif in his historical works: violence as mystical unifier. He held that Hindus and Muslims had become united for the first time ever during the war through the means of violence.
They were even more united in the Three Company Armies which stayed loyal.
The literal ‘shedding of [British] blood’ together had forged the Hindu-Muslim bond, as the political theorist Shruti Kapila characterises Savarkar’s idea in Violent Fraternity (2021).
To be fair, at that time it was possible to posit an alliance between all colonized people against European powers. Amba Prasad Sufi & Ajith Singh tried to make this a reality during the Great War. But once it ended, it was obvious the age of multi-ethnic Empires was over.
Savarkar’s conception of Hindu-Muslim history had been partly shaped by the long tradition of religiopolitical enmity against the Mughals in his homeland of Maharashtra, as the historian Prachi Deshpande shows in Creative Pasts (2007). But Savarkar, always the innovative thinker, borrowed only what suited his purposes. He wrote that, since Hindu kings had avenged centuries of Muslim oppression by defeating the Mughals in the 18th century, the ‘blot of slavery’ had been ‘wiped off’. Having re-established their ‘sovereignty’ at home, they could now fraternise with Muslims.
Not in Hyderabad. Anyway, Savarkar was already out of date. The Morley-Minto reforms would make reservations on the basis of religion the crucial question. The only way to solve it was Partition.
And finally, such was the power of the violence in 1857 that India now became ‘the united nation of the adherents of Islam as well as Hinduism’. Indian War and its author were admired across the political spectrum.
Gandhi condemned him and his 'kato maro panth'- i.e. 'stab & kill party'.
The book was the high point of Savarkar’s youth. Soon he lost his infant son to smallpox, and his elder brother was arrested for treason. In 1910, Savarkar himself was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Andamans, a brutal penal colony in the Bay of Bengal. He had become notorious on account of the violent activities of his secret society. But more than this, it was his ‘seditious’ writings with their potential to sow widespread disaffection that had threatened the British, the historian Janaki Bakhle wrote in 2010.
The brothers were indeed heroes. However, by the end of 1917, the Brits understood that power would have to be ceded to representative institutions in India.
Prison broke Savarkar. In his autobiography, Savarkar writes about frequently suffering from dysentery, lung disease and malaria. He was put in solitary confinement for months, and for eight years was denied permission to see his wife. The Irish jailor was sadistic, and Muslim warders were cruel to Hindus. Nearly driven to suicide, he filed mercy petitions, abjured revolution, and promised to serve the empire (the issue most debated about Savarkar today). The petitions were rejected but in the early 1920s Savarkar was moved to a less harsh prison in western India.
He was irrelevant. Egypt, Ireland & Afghanistan had gained Independence in 1922. But, in India, Gandhi had unilaterally surrendered. It was obvious that Hindu-Muslim unity was based on hypocrisy. Hindu were pretending they would die to establish an Islamic Caliphate.
By then, Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian National Congress had revolutionised Indian politics. His religiosity and asceticism attracted the masses to the independence movement, which had been limited to a tiny section of educated Indians.
No. Some Provinces had seen mass-movements- e.g. Bengal after Curzon partitioned it. The Hindus of Punjab, under the banner of the Arya Samaj, were politically very conscious. Madras had a lot of political activity though there was friendly feeling towards the British.
But, unusually, Gandhi emphasised nonviolence, ethical conduct, social reform and Hindu-Muslim unity as much as political independence.
Did he really want it? He said that he would deliver it if a large enough sum of money was collected. It was but he didn't. The truth is, he valued 'Pax Britannica'. Without the Brits there would be war. Banias (businessmen) like himself would be displaced by 'Rajput' warriors.
He also often upset fellow nationalists. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, some Indian Muslims launched a movement to compel the British to preserve the institution of the Islamic Caliphate, a symbol of international Muslim solidarity. Gandhi encouraged Hindus to join in, even though they had no stake in the cause.
He was leading Muslims up the garden path. After he surrendered and went meekly to jail, the Muslims discovered that it was the Viceroy, not Gandhi, who put most pressure on the Cabinet on this issue.
Savarkar had met Gandhi, and had disdain for the man and his politics, which seemed to him anachronistic and effeminate.
Gandhi condemned him. The truth is, the older generation were shocked by Dhingra's assassination of Wylie- who was a friend of his father. Dhingra's family repudiated him.
The Caliphate movement also triggered Savarkar’s fears about India being invaded again by Muslims.
What alarmed him was a Muslim Congressman saying Muslims would have to support an Afghan invasion on religious grounds.
This wasn’t simply Islamophobia. Many elite Muslims resisted the slow democratisation unfolding through the colonial period, for fear of losing out to Hindus. They saw themselves as India’s historical rulers whose say in its affairs ‘could not be merely proportionate to their numbers’, as the political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot writes in The Pakistan Paradox (2015), a history of Pakistan. Some Muslim leaders used the rhetoric of pan-Islamism and threats of violence to push their claims with the British. After the Caliphate movement, Savarkar felt that Indian War’s paean to a composite nationalism had been rejected by Indian Muslims because of their ‘divided love’ (the other interest being Muslims outside India); he reacted like a ‘spurned lover’, writes Bakhle in 2010.
His problem was how to re-enter politics. Gandhi & Congress wouldn't touch him with a barge-pole. As non-cooperation ended and was replaced by Hindu-Muslim riots, there was an opening on the Right. The problem was that Savarkar wasn't religious.
In Hindutva, Savarkar applied the European framework of nationalism – that a nation needed a homogeneous community, a common culture, a long history – to the subcontinent.
He was reviving Hindu Bengali ideas from the 1890s. But he had come late to the party. Lala Hardayal and Aurobindo had moved in a philosophical or spiritual direction. But Savarkar was not a philosopher or inclined to mysticism.
In western European nations and the United States, Christianity, race and language had offered the basis for a common history and identity (or so their nationalists claimed). But what could work for India? Hinduism, the religion of the majority, seemed unfit since it lacked a unifying mechanism of one book or church.
Just say 'Ram! Ram!' and the thing is done.
India’s resident Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists and others also bitterly resented attempts to hitch an Indian nationality to Hinduism.
They were even more upset that Hindus were the majority. Why can't they just kill themselves already? Would that be too much to ask?
Hinduism thus posed ‘the main obstacle’ in Savarkar’s quest for a big-tent Indian identity, as Kapila notes.
Yet, Gandhi, saying 'Ram! Ram!' had worked the trick. But then he was genuinely Hindu.
To resolve this conundrum, unlike religious nationalists, Savarkar strove to secularise Hindus – instead of Hindu scriptures, he chose as the foundation of his ideology the discipline of history, the paradigmatic secular form of the enlightened political thinker.
No. Unlike Chandranath Basu, he wasn't a historian. However, many Marathas find his love of a pure form of their language (which he linked to Shivaji) very inspiring. He truly was a son of the soil influenced by heroic Maharashtrian patriots through the ages. He wrote English well but his heart belonged to his mother tongue.
By turning to history, Savarkar wanted to show that followers of all religions born in India – Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism – owed allegiance to a common genealogy: Hindutva, or Hindu-ness. ‘Hindutva is not a word but a history,’ Savarkar wrote in his pamphlet. He also seized the chance to redefine who is a Hindu. Essentially anyone whose ‘fatherland’ and ‘holy land’ resided within the subcontinent qualified as Hindu, he concluded. Not only followers of Hinduism, but Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists counted as Hindus – a novel interpretation.
No. That was the law at the time. Moreover ancient Hindu temples which refuse admittance to Christians or Muslims have always welcomed Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs etc.
Muslims and Christians, however, were outsiders as their holy lands lay beyond India,
Sadly, Hindus consider Muslims like Shirdee Sai Baba and Christians like Mother Theresa as worthy of worship.
he emphasised. The influence of social evolutionism was clear. Hindus must remember that ‘great combinations are the order of the day,’ Savarkar wrote. ‘The League of Nations, the alliances of powers Pan-Islamism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Ethiopism, all little beings are seeking to get themselves incorporated into greater wholes, so as to be better-fitted for the struggle for existence and power.’
But Nehru was better at that type of struggle. His vision of India prevailed. Hindus wanted a strong centre lest they once again fall prey to Muslim or Communist salami tactics.
He theorised that Hindu identity had been formed chiefly through violence,
In which case, Kshatriyas, not Brahmins like himself, should rule.
Chaturvedi notes, whether it was in the Islamic period that lasted more than a millennium starting in the 8th century or even earlier. In the long war with the Muslims, ‘our people became intensely conscious of ourselves as Hindus and were welded into a nation to an extent unknown in our history,’ Savarkar wrote in Hindutva.
Sadly, Princes preferred to fight each other before getting stabbed by a son or a nephew.
He ridiculed nonviolence – to negate Gandhi’s ideas – which, along with Muslim hatred, became his lifelong obsession.
Plenty of Hindus hated Muslims with better reason. But Maharashtra is strongly Hindu majority. You have to tackle socio-economic issues- e.g. job reservations for 'sons of the soil'- to get elected.
Eloquently written with a clear sense of urgency, Hindutva became The Communist Manifesto of the Hindu Right.
No. It wasn't Hindu enough.
Soon after its publication, K B Hedgewar, a former Congress member from Savarkar’s homeland, founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925.
He continued to be a Congress member. His pal, Hardikar set up the Congress Seva Dal. The RSS was an imitation of it which was supposedly 'non-political' and thus might not be banned when the Seva Dal was banned.
He conceived it as a sociocultural organisation that would transform the character of Hindus through indoctrination and paramilitary training, and make them masculine in order to defeat ‘outsiders’.
Like the Seva Dal which Nehru enthusiastically joined.
Hedgewar thought RSS would stay away from direct politics. It would operate in the shadows to avoid backlash from the British, and build Hindu unity from the ground up to realise a Hindu nation in the future.
The RSS did impressive work in breaking down caste barriers. Their Hindutva is Hinduism without caste.
Mihir may be too young to remember Advani's rath yatra movement. Thus he foolishly writes
The Rama temple evangelism was manufactured by an insurgent BJP primed to knock over the decrepit ancien régime of the Congress.
The BJP's target was Mulayam Singh Yadav, not Congress which might decide to build the Temple for the greater glory of the Dynasty. 'Hindu consolidation' was a weapon against caste-based parties which opportunistically allied with Muslims.
It is the same former insurgent – now a dominant but deeply insecure incumbent, haunted by its discreditable past
Its past is highly creditable. Unlike Congress or the Caste-based parties, it is not dynastic or kleptocratic.
– that orchestrates the Savarkar propaganda.
Savarkar is a hero of the freedom struggle and an important Marathi writer. He is celebrated by the BJP for the same reason they celebrate Netaji Bose.
Both campaigns share a common feature: the Right’s felt need to locate its legitimacy in history.
The Dynasty had rewritten all the history books to legitimate themselves. The BJP is playing catch up.
The BJP has carried on Savarkar’s legacy of
losing elections and being side-lined? Fuck off! The BJP knows it can only get re-elected if it does 'last mile delivery' and improves governance.
turning to history instead of Hindu religious texts for validation. It’s not the Vedas or the Bhagavad Gita, the greatest Hindu scriptures, that ordained the BJP’s rule, but the
voter. Also, Rahul's refusal to step up to the plate made it a case of 'Modi or Nobody'.
civilisational history of the Hindus that did. Positing an unbroken chain stretching back thousands of years, the BJP-RSS present themselves as the guardians of the great Hindu civilisation, successors to iconic kings like Chandragupta Maurya (reign c322-298 BCE), Prithviraj Chauhan (c1178-92) and Shivaji (1674-80).
Whereas Indira Gandhi was Goddess Durga and Rajiv was Lord Ram.
The significance of their success in appropriating Indian history cannot be overstated.
Nobody gives a shit about history. It is the future which concerns us.
The appropriation allows for the exclusionary politics of the BJP-RSS to subsume, even replace, religious belief.
Nonsense! The BJP supports the Hindu religion.
For example, the inauguration of the Rama temple by Modi this January, one of the biggest events in modern Indian history, incited a national frenzy among Hindus. But the spectacle wasn’t mainly a celebration of Rama bhakti (religious devotion). It was about a politically united Hindu community declaring its pre-eminence in its homeland.
Rubbish! It was a highly auspicious occasion. Modi was one of the yajmans and took the sankalp for the pran prathistha. For Hindus that is very meaningful.
If the BJP-RSS have worked very hard to make history – admittedly, partly a colonial one – their strength, it is also their weakness.
Nope. Nobody gives a shit about history. The fact is, Indians suspect that the country would have been better off if the Brits had stayed around till the 1970s.
The RSS is hypersensitive to its shaming non-participation in India’s freedom movement.
It did participate. But by the time it was founded, the door to freedom was wide open. The problem was that everybody wanted to be the first to pass through it so as to lock it behind them. Anyway, guys who meekly go off to prison every few years aren't fighting or struggling. They are merely sulking.
(This is what Congress party members meant when they called Right-wing leaders ‘anti-national’, which, now, unsurprisingly, is one of the Right’s favourite labels for its critics.) There is no escaping the fact that Indian independence came
because of Hitler & Tojo & the Americans refusing to finance the Empire.
under Gandhi using Gandhian methods,
or under Jinnah using Jinnahian methods or under Aung San using Aung Sanian methods or under Senanayake using Senanayakian methods.
and the Hindutva antipathy for Gandhi and his methods is hard to hide, indeed central to their formation and history.
Everybody hates Gandhians. They are useless tossers. Gandhi may have been lovable. His acolytes weren't. Nobody shed a tear for the Gandhi Peace Foundation when Indira returned to power and Buta Singh put the boot into it.
The Right cannot fundamentally alter public perception of these facts all at once.
Nothing can alter the fact that if Rahul is unelectable then there is no point pretending Gandhi & Nehru weren't shit. Suppose Congress had a good PM candidate. Then we could say this marvellous candidate has all the good qualities of Gandhi & Nehru & the goat which supplied Gandhi with milk.
Savarkar is the one figure who cannot be claimed by the Congress and who has genuine links with the anti-British struggle.
There were plenty such- e.g. Bagha Jatin, Lala Hardayal, Amba Prasad Sufi, Aurobindo & so on.
His revolutionary past and later marginalisation yield a counterfactual interpretation that can cover somewhat for the Right’s embarrassing absence. In the Right’s telling, Savarkar was sidelined by Gandhi and Nehru while the Hindu polity foolishly rejected Hindutva – Partition was the calamitous outcome of these two decisions. If Hindus had chosen Savarkar’s (and the RSS’s) macho Hindutva over Gandhi’s ‘Muslim appeasement’, they would have reigned supreme in undivided India, it is implied.
If Rahul is crap, we have no incentive to say his ancestors weren't crap. As for praising Savarkar, if it annoys Rahul, then we have a good reason to do it.
The icon of Savarkar thus reminds Hindus: without Hindutva, India’s national security is perennially under threat. Only by heeding ‘the man who could have prevented Partition’ can you secure Hindu India, especially when Islamic terrorism is perceived as a threat, and Muslims constitute 14 per cent of India’s population. Muslims oppressed Hindus for centuries and won a nation for themselves by expropriating Hindu territory – why shouldn’t Hindus become masters in whatever was left of their own ancient homeland? Gandhi had dedicated his life to fighting such realpolitik, a struggle carried on by Nehru after independence.
He presided over the biggest slaughter of Muslims in the history of the sub-continent.
Hindutva now, however, enjoys wide legitimacy among Hindus of all castes. The BJP won about 37 per cent of the votes cast in the last national election of 2019, but that number greatly understates the public’s approval of Hindutva. Rival parties can criticise the BJP, but they dare not oppose Hindutva.
Nonsense! Mamta has done so as has Vijayan and Stalin and so forth. The problem is that Rahul is a moon calf.
The self-professed secular Congress party, for instance, tends to respond to the BJP’s Savarkar propaganda by questioning his lack of machismo for filing mercy petitions with the British, instead of contesting his Hindu supremacism lest it be seen as anti-Hindu.
It is anti-Hindu as is the author. Nothing wrong with that. If it can provide better governance, Hindus will vote for it.
As BJP and RSS leaders have brought Savarkar to prominence in Indian politics and thought, a cult of Gandhi’s assassin Godse has flourished among party loyalists. In recent years, statues and even temples dedicated to Godse have cropped up, while Gandhi memorials are defaced.
Because Gandhi made Nehru his heir. This would be fine if Rahul were not a moon-calf.
As resurrected Hindutva icons, they stand in death as they did in life: Savarkar, the guru, behind the pulpit; Godse, the disciple, on the streets. Savarkar would have thought that India’s Hindus today are finally being cured of what he hated as their perverted virtues of nonviolence, tolerance and respect for adversaries.
They never had any such thing. Nobody did. Also, nobody gives a shit about history. What matters is the future. Vote for the guys who will ensure we have more money. That's it. Nothing more can be said about the subject.
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