What is wrong with Indian historiography? Why can't it see the wood for the trees? The answer, I'm afraid, is that it attracts stupid people who have little interest in or knowledge of India.
Take the case of Veer Savarkar. He was the younger, more intellectual, brother of Ganesh Savarkar who was inspired by the Chapekar brothers who had assassinated a British official in 1897. They, in turn, had been inspired by Phadke and Salve who had led an insurrection less than two decades previously. Veer Savarkar was given a scholarship to study in London by Shyamji Krishnavarma and, the leader of the Garam Dal, Bal Gangadhar Tilak. However, it wasn't his ideas or his writings which mattered. It was his connection with revolutionaries in India. Once the Brits decided to transfer power, the revolutionary path became pointless. The door was open. The question was who could get through it first and bolt it behind them. Still, Indians retain respect for the pre-First World War revolutionaries regardless of their ideology or subsequent trajectory.
Sanjay Subhramanyam, reviewing two recent books on Savarkar- Vinayak Chaturvedi's 'Hindutva and Violence: V. D. Savarkar and the Politics of History' & Janaki Bakhle's 'Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva'- doesn't make the obvious point that Hindutva was associated with ecumenical religion and anti-Imperialist patriotism. It was indigenous and based on prior revolutionary movements of a wholly vernacular type.
Instead, Sanju writes of
Blood and Bombast
Shedding blood doesn't involve bombast though, no doubt, one might go in for it when incarcerated or in exile.
The last two decades have seen a marked uptick in projects of Indian—or more broadly, South Asian—intellectual history,
Intellect is needed to do 'intellectual history'. Indian historians have none. All that has happened is that shitheads have written shitty books.
often using a biographical lens. While stimulating in some ways, these writings have also been surprisingly narrow in their ambitions.
They are stupid because they have been written in a mechanical manner by stupid people.
A significant landmark was Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (2011), by the late Cambridge historian C. A. Bayly.
Bayly wasn't Indian and thus had a brain even though he was a historian
Published in Cambridge University Press’s celebrated ‘Ideas in Context’ series, the book attracted some attention outside the field of Indian history. But it could be argued that Bayly was not so much an innovator as the consolidator of a trend which had been emerging since the 1980s and 1990s, with the appearance of a number of works on the intellectual history of nationalism
it doesn't have an intellectual history. Some intellectuals were nationalists. Some weren't. One might as well write an intellectual history of flatulence.
in South Asia by political theorists such as Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj,
Bengali shitheads
both of whom were associated with the group called Subaltern Studies.
Nutters who wrote nonsense while actual 'subalterns' were becoming Chief Ministers and founding political dynasties.
In contrast, studies of intellectual themes unrelated to nationalism in its various incarnations have been few and far between, and largely limited to the period before 1750.
Such studies were shit.
It apparently remains difficult to interest the larger reading public in the writings of a major fifteenth-century Telugu poet like Srinatha,
who is popular with Telugu people because he was good at writing Telugu.
or the abhanga poems and songs of Bahina Bai,
quite popular with Marathas because she wrote in Marathi
the woman mystic from seventeenth-century Maharashtra. In India, as in many parts of the decolonized world, nationalism remains the regular refuge of historians,
No. It is an affiliation. It isn't a place they go for a crafty wank.
even if (as an old song goes) ‘every form of refuge has its price’.
It has benefits- e.g. not getting killed. True, there may be a charge for availing of it.
The two books under consideration here review the career and writings of a particularly
distinguished patriot
sulphurous figure
Why didn't he convert to Islam or demand that Hindus be denied the vote?
in the history of Indian nationalism, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966), whose life intersected with those of many other figures in the nationalist pantheon.
He was what he was because of his elder brother who was what he was because of the Chapekar brothers who were what they were because of Phadke & Salve who in turn were inspired by the great Maharashtrian warriors and patriots.
Hindutva and Violence by Vinayak Chaturvedi, a disciple of Bayly, and Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva by Janaki Bakhle, a former student of Chatterjee, bring contrasting approaches to the subject.
Both are shit. Some Indian families were patriotic. Others weren't.
Though he has long been the object of a cult-like veneration,
not really. People want to like him but there was something chilly about his personality. The one thing he got right was that Islam was a threat to Hindus. But even Rabindranath Tagore understood this.
Savarkar has become far more prominent since the rise to power of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp),
No. The Jan Sangh (ancestral to the BJP) was formed when the RSS backed the son of Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee when he broke with the Hindu Mahasabha in which Savarkar played a role. It should be mentioned, Savarkar was actually less orthodox than Nehru and this repelled people. In any case, it was Nehru & Congress which was kicking Muslim & Commie ass. Thus Congress was the muscular Hindu party which was seizing Muslim property on the grounds that the owners might be thinking of moving to Pakistan.
which sees him as one of its spiritual ancestors.
Only if they don't read his shite. What is important is that he and his brother were considered very dangerous revolutionaries by the British.
This increased prominence, along with the outbreak of communal violence in Gujarat in 2002,
Muslims attacked Hindus and then got stomped by the majority. But it was Congress which was better at mob violence. Sadly, they failed to kill Veer and had to be content with killing his younger brother.
seem in part to have led Vinayak Chaturvedi to his subject, as well as a strange autobiographical coincidence: Chaturvedi was named after Savarkar, one of whose disciples happened to be his doctor as an infant.
Vinayak is another name for Lord Ganesh. It is an auspicious name.
On the anniversary of Savarkar’s death in February 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on social media: ‘India will forever remember his valiant spirit and unwavering dedication to our nation’s freedom and integrity. His contributions inspire us to strive for the development and prosperity of our country’.
So what? Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had said, when he died, that he was 'a great figure of contemporary India. His name was a byword for daring and patriotism. Mr Savarkar was cast in the mould of a classical revolutionary and countless people drew inspiration from him.'
The man himself was not quite as anodyne as these phrases might have one believe, however.
He was a patriot. Anti-National historians, teaching in America, hate him.
His career was one of twists and turns,
No. It was a straight line. Perhaps if the French had granted him asylum, he would have moved to the Left like some of the Jugantar revolutionaries. As things were, he remained a devotee of 'Harbhat Pendse' (Herbert Spencer).
which make him far more than just the father of ‘Hindutva’,
He was the younger brother of a typical Hindutvadi revolutionary. But such people could be found across the length and breadth of India.
a term he popularized and reinterpreted but did not invent.
One might say there was initially some tension between 'Sanatan Dharma' which people like Gandhi believed upheld the caste system and the more ecumenical and anti-casteist 'Hindutva' (i.e. essence of Hinduism such as might exist in a better world without hereditary hierarchies).
Savarkar was born in 1883 in the Nashik region of Maharashtra, formerly Bombay Presidency, into a modest family of Chitpavan Brahmins.
The Brits spread the canard that the Chitpavans wanted to establish their own hegemony in a revived Maratha Empire. They suspected that Gokhale and Tilak (who were opponents) were secretly in cahoots because both were Chitpavan.
This was a regional sub-caste of warrior-administrators that had been closely associated with the consolidation of Maratha power in the eighteenth century: they had for an extended period held the key ministerial post of Peshwa and acted, not as the actual sovereigns, but as the shoguns based in Pune. After several conflicts with the East India Company, the Peshwas and their allies were diplomatically outmanoeuvred and dealt a severe defeat in the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817–19, permitting the durable consolidation of British rule in western India. Though some of the Maratha sardars accepted this outcome, others seized the occasion of the Great Rebellion of 1857–58 to mount one further stand against the Company.
People like Nana Saheb (a Deccani Brahmin) & Tatya Tope (Deshastha) & the Rani of Jhansi (Karhada).
After the bloody suppression of this revolt, the descendants of the erstwhile elites associated with the Marathas may have nursed their grievances, but they came to terms with colonial dominance.
Phadke & Salve didn't.
This included acculturation into European mores and participation in the institutions of Western-style higher education that were set up after 1860.
Phadke helped found what would become the Maharashtra Education Society in that year.
Among these was the well-known Fergusson College in Pune, founded in 1885, where Savarkar enrolled as a student in 1902.
His elder brother made sacrifices for his sibling's education.
As Chaturvedi notes, Savarkar’s early years are difficult to reconstruct with clarity;
if you ignore his elder brother- sure.
little direct evidence survives from that time and his own later writings must be treated as somewhat slanted and unreliable. It would seem that he was regarded as intelligent, possessing a remarkable memory and a gift for languages. By his later teens, he had a good level of Sanskrit and wrote a somewhat florid version of Victorian English, as well as Marathi and the lingua franca of Hindustani (it is unclear whether he learned Persian, as the Chitpavans of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often did).
Persian is easy to learn.
This early education gave him a grounding in a traditional form of philology
i.e. he learnt his mother tongue properly.
that he would later put to use.
He wrote well in different languages.
He also read a certain amount of popular history in English, such as the ‘Story of the Nations’ series which included volumes on Greece, Holland, Mexico and so on. It was during his years at Fergusson that Savarkar became obviously politicized,
he was politicized by his brother and his milieu.
joining secret societies and beginning to publish articles in Marathi that attracted the attention of prominent nationalists such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), also a Chitpavan Brahmin.
Like Gokhale. But the money was provided by Shyamji Krishnavarma who was from the Bhanushali agricultural community in Kutch. Incidentally Shyamji rose through his excellence in Sanskrit. Monier Williams took him to Oxford to help him with his dictionary. Thus he was able to graduate and qualify as a barrister.
Tilak and other patrons facilitated and financed Savarkar’s passage to London to study law at Gray’s Inn,
ostensibly. However, the real aim was to form a revolutionary cell amongst the Indian students there. The younger brother was doing the same work in London that the elder was doing back home.
where he arrived in early 1906. A clearer picture emerges of the man from his time in London, partly because he produced a flurry of writings.
Shyamji & Guy Aldred were running the 'Indian Sociologist' in London. Savarkar was part of a cosmopolitan revolutionary sub-culture.
These included translations of the essays of Giuseppe Mazzini, a figure of fascination for Indian and many other Asian nationalists in these years,
He had been an exile in London and was highly regarded there.
and an original work on the 1857–58 rebellion titled The Indian War of Independence of 1857 (1909) which remains one of his most widely read books, especially among Indian nationalists of various stripes.
That may have been true of earlier generations.
It announced Savarkar’s claim to be a historian, not one with an academic bent or an inclination to work with archives and documents, but rather a popularizer who deployed his rhetorical skills in charged emotional prose. Here was a history full of heroes and villains, but above all of ‘martyrs’ to the cause of the nation.
His book wasn't boring shite. Sanju disapproves.
London in the years preceding World War I, teeming with students and foreign visitors, was a hotbed of political activity, with Lenin visiting on several occasions.
The Brits were keeping tabs on the Indian students. They didn't give a fuck about Lenin.
Savarkar’s base was India House in Highgate, which was frequented by a number of figures with diverse political leanings (its library, as Chaturvedi notes, contained the first three volumes of Mazzini’s collected works, which Savarkar said he devoured ‘over a single week’). It was in this setting that Savarkar engaged in a celebrated debate with Mohandas Gandhi, who had by this time emerged as a charismatic public figure after his stint in South Africa.
Gandhi was with Gokhale. Savarkar was with Tilak.
The subject was somewhat arcane,
germane, not arcane. The Ramayana is a sacred text for Hindus. Nobody told Sanju.
namely their contrasting interpretations of the ancient epic the Ramayana, which Gandhi read in a spiritual mode and Savarkar more as a call to violent action against the forces of evil.
Gandhi, quite rightly, saw the Brits as good. They kept the peace. But the political ascendancy of the Boers, despite their defeat, showed that the colonies would be self-administering and self-garrisoning. The question was which ethnic or linguistic or confessional group would dominate. The Brits hoped to create Federations to which they could transfer power. Sadly, in India this was not possible. Savarkar regained salience by pointing to this inevitability.
Gandhi apparently also realized that Savarkar’s reading of Mazzini differed substantially from his own
Gandhi didn't want the Brits to leave. Savarkar did. Gandhi's reading of everything was coloured by this. His big idea was that Indians should serve the Brits without asking for any reward because they had a duty to do so.
and even took it upon himself to try and refute Savarkar’s position (without naming him) in his work Hind Swaraj (1909),
inspired by Chesterton's article saying the Indians were wrong to want Parliaments because Parliaments were European. Sadly, that fat fuck didn't draw the conclusion that the Brits should give up Christianity and revert to Druidism because Christ was Jewish and lived in Asia.
staging a dialogue between the Editor (who speaks for Gandhi) and a revolutionary interlocutor, who supports the idea of a violent struggle for independence. ‘Whom do you suppose to free by assassination?’, the Editor asks. ‘The millions of India do not desire it. Those who are intoxicated by the wretched modern civilization think these things. Those who will rise to power by murder will certainly not make the nation happy’.
Gandhi's family couldn't become Diwans so long as the threat of war remained because they were 'banias'- businessmen, not warriors. Thanks to Pax Brittanica, his grandfather and father had risen. Gandhi himself would be awarded the Kaiser-e-Hind medal for supporting British rule and trying to recruit soldiers for their army during the Great War.
By contrast, Maharashtians have martial qualities. They were happy to fight. Gandhi was happy to surrender.
Besides such real and imagined exchanges, which had the effect of burnishing Savarkar’s credentials as a polemicist,
It was actions not words which the young found inspiring.
he was also active in groups that supported violent anti-colonial actions both in India and in Britain.
Because he was a revolutionary. Sanju, shithead that he is, thinks he was an intellectual. Why was he a patriot? Must be because he read Mazzini. How else could a Maratha man get the idea that loving your own country is a good thing?
One of his associates, Madan Lal Dhingra, eventually acted on these plans, in early July 1909 assassinating a colonial official in London, as well as a Parsi doctor who intervened. Dhingra was summarily tried and hanged, but the trail took the police to Savarkar, who had already been under surveillance for some time.
But what Savarkar was charged with was abetting the killing of Nasik District Collector A.M.T. Jackson in 1909. To get rid of foreign rule, you have to kill foreigners not in their country but in yours.
This led to what might be considered the key phase of Savarkar’s life—his arrest, trial and imprisonment, which gave him the aura of a true hero (or vir) of the nationalist movement.
Like his brother. Indeed, Jackson was killed in retaliation for the sentencing of Ganesh Savarkar to life long incarceration in the Andamans.
This aura would act as a lasting shield, ensuring that more moderate nationalists flinched from dealing with him or treated him with exaggerated courtesy and deference.
No. The Brits remained suspicious of him and thus limited his political role. You can be courteous to a guy who is not your rival
Savarkar was arrested in London in early 1910, then shipped to Bombay to stand trial. En route, he managed to wriggle out of a porthole and swim ashore at Marseille only to be detained again having been mistakenly handed back to the British by a local French policeman in what became something of an international cause célèbre.
Savarkar should not have returned to London from Paris. He probably had an exaggerated idea of the virtues of British justice- at least in England.
The French government sympathized with his cause, and his case was considered at The Hague but all to no avail. Once in India, he was tried for various offences, in particular the so-called Nasik Conspiracy, in which he was accused of shipping pistols from Europe that were used in the assassination of an English magistrate. Savarkar was sentenced to two life-terms at the Cellular Jail in the penal colony of the Andamans, an unduly harsh punishment by most accounts. He would remain there for ten years, including a substantial period in solitary confinement. The library of the Cellular Jail contained two thousand volumes, so Savarkar was at least able to read. Following repeated petitions his sentence was commuted, and he spent a longer period in a more limited form of confinement in India, first in Pune and then Ratnagiri, before eventually being released in 1937, after twenty-seven years in prison.
In other words, unlike Gandhi & Nehru etc. the Brits considered him a genuine threat. This has nothing to do with 'intellectual history'. It was a political reality. Revolutionary cells could have driven out the Brits. But, in that case, power would have passed to the revolutionaries, not the verbose lawyers. Thanks to the Gandhian policy of spending time in jail together with fellow party members, Congress developed esprit de corps and, under Nehru's leadership, was able to give the country stability even under conditions of multi-party democracy. Savarkar was an isolated, provincial, figure. Still, Nehru had to be cautious in dealing with him because there was a risk that some of the Hindu Princely States would rally under his banner and oppose the emergence of a unitary polity with a strong centre. As this danger faded, Savarkar lost salience. He himself started using Socialistic language and thus it was Rajaji who presided over the first and last genuinely Right Wing party in post-Independence India. It failed and its remnants joined one of the other new caste based Socialist parties. Meanwhile the RSS- because it remained a voluntary organization with decent people (rather than a bunch of thugs & careerists)- was able to provide some fairly competent leaders who weren't all as corrupt as fuck. But the dynasty would still rule had assassination not so tempered autocracy that Rahul turned gun-shy. Sadly, he is a dog in the manger who will neither rule not appoint some technocrat to do the job for him. This alone explains the BJP's metamorphosis into the default party of governance- at least, at the centre.
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