Nationalist As Revolutionary

VINAYAK DAMODAR SAVARKAR (1883-1966) is a polarising 0figure in modern India’s history. For most English-educated and westernised persons he is the progenitor of “Indian fascism” while for the large number of Indian nationalists he was a patriot and freedom fighter of the first order who withstood immense hardship and punishment both at the hands of India’s colo­nial rulers as well as those after Independence.

This polarisation has not left history-writing untouched. There is either a “sophisticated” literature that explores his writings and his activities to conclude that he was not a nationalist and was, instead, a dangerous demagogue. Then, there is a vast hagiographic literature around the man with no attempt at analysing his oeuvre. There is biographic literature in Marathi as well as a recent popular history. The English biography by Dhananjay Keer is dated: it was published the same year that Savarkar died (1966). There are only a handful of careful studies on Savarkar in English. Vinayak Chaturvedi’s Hindutva and Violence: VD Savarkar and the Politics of History (2022) offers a reading of Savarkar’s Essentials of Hindutva. Janaki Bakhle’s long-awaited Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva is a deeper study that assesses his politics, his life as a revolutionary, as a social reformer, a history writer and as a poet. The book is probably the farthest that one can get to a fair, scholarly assessment of Savarkar’s life and work from a liberal historical perspective. Anything beyond that is anath­ema to India’s history establishment.

Bakhle writes that it is hard to understand Savarkar from a singular vantage of his complex character or extraordinary life. To use her word, Savarkar’s life is like a “kaleido­scope” and as one shifts one’s gaze, a different perspective emerges. Her careful reading of his poetry, his role as a social reformer and her assessment of his life as a revolutionary are refreshing in a field that is dominated by polemics and hagiography. As a liberal historian she finds his anti-Muslim attitude, in writing and his politics, troubling. It is noteworthy that her narrative stops at 1937, three years before the Lahore Resolution was passed, an event that proved Savarkar’s worst fears to be true: the coming vivisection of his punyabhu (or holy land).

While Bakhle notes and emphasises that Savarkar can­not be understood from any individual aspect of his life, what stands out ultimately is that he was nationalist before anything else. This is one way to understand the complex interplay between his anti-Muslim attitude and his zeal as a social reformer. Histories, especially those written in recent decades—and those in English—emphasise the anti-Muslim part while downplaying or almost erasing the fact that Savarkar, a Chitpavan Brahmin, was dead set against the caste system and wanted it eliminated root and branch. How do we make sense of these two allegedly distinct parts of his life?

Janaki Bakhle writes that it is hard to understand VD Savarkar from a singular vantage of his complex character or extraordinary life. To use her word, Savarkar’s life is like a ‘kaleidoscope’ and as one shifts one’s gaze, a different perspective emerges

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Consider first, his antipathy towards Muslims. Savarkar was a five-year-old child when Sayyid Ahmad Khan estab­lished The Patriotic Association in August 1888 as a forum to oppose nascent Indian nationalism led by the Indian National Congress. This laid the foundations of what ulti­mately led to the Two Nation Theory. From that time onward there was not a single decade when Muslim separatism did not gather strength. One can count any number of events all the way to the Direct Action Day. Savarkar, who wrote history as poetry, was only too well-aware of this “external” danger: his anti-Muslim attitude was clearly dictated by the threat posed by Muslim separatism. His writing against the caste system was outrageous for the conservative elements of his time. The range of his writing against caste discrimina­tion, from temple entry to intermarriage and more, was quite remarkable for his time and his position in the caste hierarchy. He could clearly anticipate this “internal” danger to India as a nation. One could not form a nation if the vast mass of those who were to be a part of the nation were discrimi­nated against and considered “outcastes”. His anti-Muslim and anti-caste attitudes are umbilical to his nationalism.

While Gandhi clung to the caste system rigidly and believed that if varnashrama dharma was taken away, you effectively “ended” Hinduism, Savarkar, in contrast, had an altogether different, richer, understanding of Hinduism and imagination of India as a nation. Should it surprise any­one that Savarkar admired BR Ambedkar even if their outlook was so different from each other?

It is interesting that when Savarkar’s anti-Muslim attitude is played up along with Hindutva, a very different picture arises. That menacing image of a disaffected Brahmin is a cari­cature of the man, and is sketched on purpose. That distortion is what historians of modern India have wanted to transmit and have succeeded in doing for long. That is changing now.

Bakhle writes, “As Hindu fundamentalism began to assert its political power in India, especially regarding the agitation around the idea that a mosque had been built over a temple in Ayodhya that culminated with a march and attack on the mosque in 1992, Savarkar began to eclipse Gandhi and Nehru as the most influential nationalist thinker for modern India, the touchstone for rising nationalist pride in Hinduism and the growing rejection of both secularism and the place of Muslims as a respected minority.”

This is too simple an interpretation of the events of the last century. Here, the judgment of the Marxist historian Perry Anderson is more accurate: Savarkar was a revolutionary nationalist before Gandhi ever set political foot in India. The eclipse of the ancien régime was not due to a ragtag band of karsevaks descending on a dusty town in Uttar Pradesh but due to brutal experi­ments with “secularism” by Nehru and his heirs from Punjab to West Bengal and from Kashmir to Assam. Here again, Anderson’s outline of how Congress was outflanked by BJP due to a mix of corruption, exhaus­tion and ineptitude, has greater explanatory power. (See the discus­sion in The Indian Ideology, Expanded Edition, 2021, pages 150-153). As a liberal historian, Bakhle has to pay lip service to the quaint notion of secularism that prevails among Indian intellectuals. But to be fair to her, Savarkar and the Making of Hindu­tva crosses what was until recently an impossible chasm: a careful presenta­tion of facts on Savarkar’s life, and their thoughtful interpretation. For example, the calumnies around Savarkar’s mercy petitions continue to be the staple of leftist consump­tion in India. As if writing them made him something less than a nationalist while leftist collaboration with the British in 1942 was for some “higher order ideal”. As Bakhle shows, YD Phadke’s Shodh Savarkarancha (Search­ing for Savarkar) (1984) presented the actual facts on these petitions long ago. But that book was written in Marathi. Marathi literature is incomparably richer and more accurate in this respect not only because the vast bulk of Savarkar’s writings are in Marathi but also because keeping them un-translated into English and Indian languages served the purpose of keeping Savarkar at bay. As long as that literature remains “provincial” it serves the purpose of India’s “national” historians.

Savarkar died in 1966. In the 58 years since then, he was never really considered part of the nationalist pantheon except an odd biography and some philatelic admiration. But in the last quarter century he has been subjected to vicious treatment. This period has coincided with the decline of the ancien régime and the rise of BJP. The two events are linked. Ideally, a proper appreciation of his life and his work should have emerged during this time. But that did not happen. With Bakhle’s book a start of sorts has been made.

About The Author

Siddharth Singh

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