Country First? Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) and the Writing of Essentials of Hindutva

Janaki Bakhle

In March 1922 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the leader of the first Indian nonviolent noncooperation movement against British rule, did something that stunned his fellow nationalists. A group of angry villagers in Chauri-Chaura had set fire to a police station, killing nineteen policemen.1 Outraged by this violence, Gandhi called off the movement. This confounded his supporters because the British government was under extreme pressure from the India-wide protests. Many jailed noncooperators heard the news and were incredulous that a single act of violence made Gandhi call off the movement when success seemed within reach.2 But the Mahatma was resolute. India was not ready for independence, he argued, if her inhabitants resorted to violence even in a good cause. Paradoxically, this quixotic if high-minded decision renewed the colonial regime’s lease to rule precisely at the point when foreclosure seemed imminent. The colonial government had Gandhi to thank for its continued rule and rewarded him by arresting him.

Just a few months earlier, in 1921, a revolutionary nationalist who had been tried and convicted for gunrunning and abetting murder, among other offenses, was brought back to mainland India from incarceration on the Andaman Islands and placed in an Indian jail. His name was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.3 Gandhi had met him in 1909 and had subsequently described him as brave, clever, and a patriot.4 Savarkar, who was thirty-eight years old, had spent a decade in jail. He had devoted his life to the pursuit of Indian independence from colonial rule and had fashioned himself as a revolutionary even as a very young man. He was born into a poor, middling Brahman family in the small village of Bhagur near Nasik on May 27, 1883. The chief revolutionary in the family was Savarkar’s older brother, Babarao, and because of him the entire family was under surveillance.5In 1899 Savarkar and a couple of his friends founded a secret revolutionary association called Rashtrabhakta Samuha (Patriots Society), which in 1901 would become the Mitra Mela (Friends Society).6 In 1902 Savarkar joined Fergusson College in Pune, where he organized protests against the colonial government. Like many other young educated Indian men, he went to London to study law in 1906, but he spent most of his time engaged in political activities, some benign and some not so benign, such as smuggling Browning pistols into India for political assassinations. In 1910 Savarkar was arrested in London and charged with five serious offenses, including conspiracy against the king’s government and abetting murder. Extradited to India for trial, he was subsequently convicted and taken in 1911 to serve two life terms on the Andaman Islands.

One of the lesser charges that had landed him in jail was sedition. Nevertheless, shortly after his repatriation to an Indian prison in 1921, he wrote another potentially seditious work. But this book was different from his previous works: it was written in English, not in Marathi, his mother tongue. The book was titled Essentials of Hindutva. Hindutva is one of the few texts written by an Indian nationalist that links the present Hindu moment of Indian history to the preindependence anticolonial period. Not even Gandhi’s own texts from the 1920s, much as they are read by academics, can claim such a time span of influence. However, Hindutva’s influence has not been without controversy. Five decades after it was written, it became the bible of militant and exclusionary Hindu nationalism, taking as its chief enemy the minority Muslim community of India.7 The book would also come to encapsulate and exemplify Savarkar’s entire oeuvre of writing and would dramatically influence the course of modern Indian history. Why did this text, not easy to characterize, let alone subject to sustained analysis, become so important in its own time and even now?8

When Savarkar had been taken away from India in 1911, the British colonial government seemed reasonably in control. Gandhi was nowhere on the Indian scene, even if he was known to Indian nationalists as a political leader in South Africa.9 By the time Savarkar was repatriated to an Indian jail in 1921, he had spent nearly fifteen years away from India, between his years in London as a student and a decade in prison on the Andaman Islands. On his repatriation and reimprisonment in an Indian jail, he would have to contend with Gandhi, who had not only come back to India for good but also assumed control of the nationalist movement. In 1919 Gandhi had launched an all-Indian nonviolent noncooperation movement against colonial rule. For someone who had spent a decade in jail for revolutionary activities, the news that the anticolonial struggle had resumed under the banner of nonviolent noncooperation must have seemed unpalatable. Noncooperation, in any event, had not begun well. The first phase had sputtered out quickly, and Gandhi had restarted it in 1920. But however incomprehensible noncooperation may have seemed to Savarkar, Gandhi would baffle him even more by adding yet another element to his movement in its second phase.

What Gandhi had done was to yoke noncooperation to another cause called the Khilafat (Caliphate) movement.10 Sunni Muslim leaders of the movement had made three demands of the British colonial government. They had insisted that their demands were religious rather than political and asked for the maintenance of the sovereignty of the Turkish sultan as the khalifa (caliph, or spiritual leader) of Islam.11 In addition, they protested the possible dismemberment of the territories of the Ottoman Empire into mandates, and the internationalization of Constantinople, as further assaults on Islam. The Khilafat issue, as Gail Minault argues, was voiced in the language of religion but provided symbolic cover for both nationalist and internationalist Muslims, who for both India-specific and pan-Islamicist reasons opposed the British. For Gandhi, however, the specifically religious language of the Khilafat movement provided a different alibi. Since none of the issues was directly connected to the nationalist movement in India, he embraced the Khilafat movement primarily to unite a vast population of Indian Muslims, divided by regional, linguistic, class, and sectarian differences, behind his own movement.12

The Khilafat movement was ultimately unsuccessful; not only did its demands fall on deaf British ears, but Kemal Pasha Atatürk himself abolished the khilafat. However, Gandhi was determined to recruit Muslims in India to the nationalist movement by demonstrating symbolic support for an Islamic cause, even if that cause was doomed to fail.13 He had taken on other symbolic causes in South Africa, for example, when he advocated the end of apartheid laws.14 In both cases, he was a master of symbolic politics in the service of the politics that most mattered to him. Whether or not he cared about the outcome or expected it to be influenced by Indian agitations, he made the Khilafat movement central to the second phase of noncooperation and Indian nationalism.

The Khilafatists argued that since they were also anti-British, Khilafat concerns and Indian nationalism were compatible.15 Mainstream nationalists, however, had to accept that Muslims as a community had the right to demand dual, if not triple, allegiance. The first was a spiritual and religious allegiance, not dissimilar to that held by believing Catholics and Jews in India. The second was a political allegiance to the cause of Indian independence from British rule. The third would have been a modern allegiance to Islam that was not religious or spiritual but Muslim and nationalist. Even though the third allegiance would have had much in common with Savarkar’s own conceptualization of Hindutva, it would have been highly disturbing. But given that Gandhi saw no harm in linking Muslim sentiment over the Khilafat movement — whether he took it as primarily religious or political — he was willing to use the cause to recruit substantial minority support for his platform. Many nationalists — Hindu and Muslim — were disturbed not only by the linkage of religion and politics but also by the particular form of Muslim politics represented by Khilafat in the context of a nationalist movement.

Savarkar was one such nationalist. He was not always consistent in his conviction that religion and politics had to be divorced, but he was a secular thinker who held territorial sovereignty to be absolute. The linkage of Indian nationalism to a transnational religious cause would have seemed deeply troubling. In theory he had nothing against Hindu-Muslim unity, having written about it romantically as the mainstay of the 1857 rebellion against the East India Company.16 But Gandhi had in effect called Savarkar’s bluff on the subject of Hindu-Muslim unity by supporting the Khilafat movement. How would he react? What shape would his reaction take?

From his prison cell in Ratnagiri in 1923, Savarkar smuggled out a manuscript of a book — an extended essay in English — that was a passionately nationalist, lyrical celebration of the Indian territorial nation. His basic argument was made in a pithy Sanskrit couplet: “Asindhu sindhu paryanta yasya bharata bhumika / Pitrabhu punyabhushchaiva sa vai hinduriti smritaha.”17 Translated literally, the verse claims that India’s geographic contours extend from the Sindhu River in the north (today in Pakistan) to the seas below in the south. Anyone at all, or anyone for whom India is both pitrabhumi (land of one’s ancestors) and punyabhumi (sacred land), can be its natural and national inhabitant.18

One word, an abstract noun, from the title of Savarkar’s book — Hindutva — would come to represent the exemplary expression of militant Hindu nationalism and be a descriptive epithet that encompasses an entire ideology as well as a movement. To call someone a hindutvavadi in contemporary India is to bestow either a compliment or a contumelious insult, depending on one’s ideological persuasion.

For these and other reasons, Hindutva has received its share of attention from Indian historians and commentators, as has Savarkar himself.

Yet the opinion and scholarship on him remain sharply polarized. While Gandhi dominates the literature, the lives and works of other equally important nationalists, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, B. R. Ambedkar, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, E. V. R. Naicker, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Maulana Azad, have generated some sustained, critical, and demanding scholarship. By contrast, Savarkar has generally been approached in straightforwardly political ways despite extraordinary contradictions in his personal and political biography.19 Even Ashis Nandy, a thought-provoking writer who takes Savarkar seriously, uses him as the exemplary figure of a deracinated and diseased secularism.20 While there are some partial accounts of his life and work by scholars writing in Marathi, the mode of both English and Marathi scholarship is at best either devotional or denunciatory.

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Notes

I am grateful to Arjun Appadurai, Akeel Bilgrami, Partha Chatterjee, Val Daniel, Prachi Deshpande, Faisal Devji, Christopher Dirks, Nicholas B. Dirks, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Jack Hawley, Ira Katznelson, Elizabeth Kolsky, Claudio Lomnitz, Uday Mehta, Dorothea von Mucke, Rosalind O’hanlon, Gyanendra Pandey, Neni Panourgia, Sheldon Pollock, Anupama Rao, Tanu Sankalia, Satadru Sen, Al Stepan, Gauri Viswanathan, Peter van der Veer, and Milind Wakankar for their suggestions, criticisms, and advice. I am particularly indebted to Arvind Godbole, Savarkar’s last physician, for his willingness to discuss this article with me, share his vast knowledge of Savarkar’s life and thought with me, and point out some of my factual errors. I have discussed many of these ideas with Ramdas Bhatkal, who has written his own work on Savarkar and Gandhi. The argument I make, however, is mine alone, and I am solely responsible for its flaws.

A note on diacritical marks: Essentials of Hindutva was written in English, none of the Marathi or Sanskrit words were diacritically marked, and in quoting passages from the work, I have left the text unmarked. To keep the text consistent, I have added no diacritical marks and/or accents to any words in Hindi, Sanskrit, or Marathi, since most of the words and names are familiar to scholars of South Asia.

1. See Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri-Chaura, 1922–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
2. On the range, scope, failures, and successes of the noncooperation movement, see Ravinder Kumar, ed., Essays on Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
3. I have used a number of works, primarily in Marathi but also in English, for my biographical information about Savarkar. His own writings have been compiled in Samagra Savarkar Vangmaya, 10 vols. (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 2000), and four of those volumes have been translated into English as Selected Works of Veer Savarkar (New Delhi: Abhishek, 2007). For additional biographical information, the most respected and comprehensive work in English is Dhananjay Keer, Savarkar and His Times (Bombay: A. V. Keer, 1950). The works I used in Marathi include Pra La Gawade, Savarkar ek Chikitsak Abhyas (Pune: Swadhyaya Mahavidyalaya Prakashan, 1970); Da Na Gokhale, Swatantryaveer Savarkar: Ek Rahasya (Bombay: Mauj, 1989); Ja Da Joglekar, Dnyanayukta Krantiyoddha (Bombay: Manorama Prakashan, 2002); and Sha Na Navalgundkar, Swatantryaveer Savarkar Vicharvishwa (Pune: Anmol Prakashan, 1999). A comprehensive and annotated bibliography of the chief works in Marathi on Savarkar is provided in Ramdas Bhatkal, "Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Savarkar" (PhD diss., Bombay University, 2007).
4. See The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 87 vols. (Ahmadabad: Navjivan, 1966–), 20:104–5. Hereafter cited as CW.
5. Social History 35, no. 1 (February 2010): 50–75 (forthcoming).
6. Samagra Savarkar Vangmaya, 1:122–25.
7. For ease of access, in this article I have used Essentials of Hindutva (hereafter cited as EOH) as published in vol. 4 of Selected Works of Veer Savarkar.
8. I take my lead in this essay from a question Gyanendra Pandey poses apropos of the stunning success of “Hindu history as myth or, more carefully, as a fraud that slides all too easily between myth and history.” Pandey asks, "After we have pointed out its inconsistencies, ambiguity, duplicity, and refusal to account for so much of what it says, the question remains why this fraud persuades so many people of different classes, regions, and sexes, why such large numbers of our countrymen and women fail to notice what we see as its ambiguity and duplicity — or, at any rate, are untroubled by it" (“The Culture of History,” in In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998], 35). Pandey suggests looking anew at older works, and it is with that intention that I approach Essentials of Hindutva. My concern is not to point out inaccuracies or mistakes but to move past them to ask questions about the nature of the public assumed and generated by the work and the strength and affective power of the text’s rhetoric.
9. For a Gandhian overview of the independence movement, see Bipan Chandra, India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Vikas, 1988). For a Marxist approach focusing on labor movements and peasant movements and paying greater attention to nationalism’s dark side, see Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983).
10. Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
11. Minault, introduction to Khilafat Movement, 2–5, and esp. chap. 2, “Emergence of the Movement, 1919–1920” (65–111).
12. Minault, Khilafat Movement, chap. 2.
13. For Gandhi’s support of the Ali brothers, Mohammed and Shaukat, and the Khilafat movement, see CW, esp. vols. 17–20. For examples of his viewpoint, see his editorials and speeches on Khilafat in CW, 17:1–2, 58–62, 105–7; 18:203–4; 20:155–60, 291–92.
14. For an account of Gandhi’s early years, including his struggles in South Africa, see Chandran D. S. Devanesen, The Making of the Mahatma (Madras: Orient Longmans, 1969).
15. Minault, Khilafat Movement.
16. See “The War of Independence,” in Samagra Savarkar Vangmaya, vol. 4, pt. 2, 233–432.
17. EOH, 537.
18. I am grateful to Sheldon Pollock for the precise translation.
19. The corpus of writing on Gandhi is far too voluminous to be easily cited. A sample of the journalistic and scholarly writings on him includes David Arnold, Gandhi: Profiles in Power (London: Harlow, 2001); William L. Shirer, Gandhi: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Harper, 1950); Geoffrey Ashe, Gandhi (New York: Stein and Day, 1968); and David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). On Nehru, see Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); M. J. Akbar, Nehru: The Making of India (New Delhi: Roli, 2002); and B. R. Nanda, ed., Indian Foreign Policy: The Nehru Years (New Delhi: Vikas, 1976). On Bose, see Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalist Leaders Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). On Azad, see Mushirul Hasan, ed., Islam and Indian Nationalism: Reflections on Abul Kalam Azad (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992).
20. See Ashis Nandy, “The Demonic and the Seductive in Religious Nationalism: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Rites of Exorcism in Secularizing South Asia,” Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, no. 44, February 2009, hpsacp.uni-hd.de.