Speculative History

Many Enlightenment historians who lacked documents to reject the biblical account of early human history sought a plausible narrative through speculation and inference. They firmly established the use of conjectures in history. In a nutshell, conjectures are educated guesses and speculations to understand the past when direct evidence is limited or unavailable. They are often tossed up while decoding human beliefs, values, norms, motives, and decisions that remain unsaid and unstated, but these conjectures are routinely based on available records and historical contexts.

Now, imagine a definitive biography of a well-known man based on conjectures. Its go-to phrase is “would have” and the honourable sources are a few existing hagiographies. How do we make sense of such an enterprise? That’s the central dilemma one confronts while reading Sachin Nandha’s Hedgewar: A Definitive Biography (2025).

 It was September 1987. Veteran journalist and editor Girilal Jain wrote a scathing piece on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in the newspaper he spearheaded. Steering to Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889-1940) in the piece, Jain stirred a controversy, calling him India’s Stalin. Jain argued that Hedgewar, like Stalin, was obsessed with “a blatantly false history”. This false history made it out that “the Hindus had lost, and that they had lost because they were the kind of people they were”. No wonder, the article invited angry rejoinders by VS Maydeo, SB Bajpai, Mahesh Pandey and others who defended Hedgewar. Even a decade earlier in 1979, Jain in a write-up titled ‘The Janata and the RSS’ had written about Hedgewar’s appreciation of Sturmabteilung (Nazi Party’s “brownshirts”). CP Bhishikar responded to it, shielding and sheltering “Doctorji”, an alias of Hedgewar, thanks to his profession. It is another issue that Jain later championed and authored The Hindu Phenomenon (1994) and is now remembered lovingly by Hindutva-vadis.

Moving to 1989, the birth centenary year of Hedgewar. The same English daily saw the publication of a series of columns debating the legacy of the man, with prominent contributions from Monobina Gupta, SB Bajpai, AS Khan and KR Malkani. The year was also the birth centenary of Jawaharlal Nehru. Hedgewar could not stand up to Nehru even after a century, and the reasons for it are obvious. Most of these stories are lost to Nandha because he has not sought them. That explains the part of the problem that follows.

What is a definitive biography?

 CP Bhishikar, KR Malkani, Rakesh Sinha, HV Seshadri, NH Palkar, VR Karandikar, and others have tackled biographies of Hedgewar, fully or partially. Nandha has frequently called some of these books “RSS biographies”. He rightly piques that these books have often “extoled” their subject and that how “reality, as always, is more nuanced and far more interesting”. However, an attentive and curious reader navigates through 400​ pages waiting for that nuanced reality to transpire, but it never does. In the end, the book reads like a fatiguing “Waiting for Godot”. Why so? For a very simple reason: whenever Nandha states something specific and factual about his subject, he quotes from and relies on Sinha, Palkar, Seshadri and nothing else.

A book spread over 18 chapters, lucidly written in a flowing narrative, and occasionally, packing a punch with beguiling quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche and Kahlil Gibran, should make a scrummy delicacy of words. But, history and fanfiction are entirely different genres. Nandha sets out to write an intimate account of the life and times of a man who never wrote anything about himself. He went to prison but didn’t produce “notebooks” and “diaries”. He gave speeches for which he was tried for sedition once, but those speeches were not documented or transcribed. His letters and public interventions are scarce and scattered. His few favourable contemporaries rarely wrote about his ideals. And when he died in 1940, Hedgewar’s vision of Indian society and nation was far from complete. It was not even nascent.

Hedgewar’s successor, whom Nandha scarcely examines, didn’t help his case much. On September 5, 1949, a 25-article constitution of RSS was published. The Sarsanghchalak (chief) position was described as that of a “guide and philosopher of the RSS”. The only major issue was that this “guide and philosopher” felt he was “systematically misrepresented” in the press. Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar (1906-1973), the then sarsanghchalak, talking to the journalists in Patna on the same day, bellyached about it. He maintained that the newspapers should not put things in his mouth which he never said. However, the RSS chief remained silent when a newsman retorted that his statements were vague and were, therefore, “liable to misinterpretation”.

Vague! That seems like a pivotal keyword for the century-long history of RSS. Golwalkar felt he was misinterpreted then; the present chief Mohan Bhagwat courts a controversy every other day in the present. These chiefs make a statement, a storm of accusations rises, and then a retraction appears that the “guide and philosopher of the RSS” has been misquoted or quoted out of context. Why is it so? Answering that question becomes extremely difficult on two accounts. First, many thought leaders of RSS never left behind a systematised corpus of writings. Just for a comparison, the Shri Guruji Samagra, the complete works of Golwalkar, is a set of 12 books, and does not stand anywhere near the volume of writings by Gandhi, Nehru and other luminaries.  Second, even when they have, they usually operated with an ambivalence of categories: religion or dharma, nation or rashtra or the nation-state, community or panth or sampraday, or the best, organisation or sangathan. Nandha had a crisis to deal with. We can’t blame him for not handling it adequately.

Biography of “would haves”

Nandha sets out to retrieve the child Keshav and his cosmos. He writes him down in every historical event that occurred in his lifetime. Keshav’s defiance in school protesting Queen Victoria’s jubilee festivities in 1897 has been read as the genesis of a revolutionary. The Chapekar brothers’ act must have left a deep impact on him. We are constantly reminded how Keshav became an “avid reader” and was “studious”. What did he read? Nietzsche’s nihilism and Mazzini’s call for patriotism. He sometimes read the Mahabharata in jail, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Kesari and Mahratta. Nandha occasionally stretches these influences far. For example, he calls Hedgewar’s style of moustache “Nietzschean” and terms it as an adoption of the German expression of masculinity. The other German fellow with a “toothbrush moustache” must be smug somewhere.

When Nandha pursues the revolutionary credentials of his subject, affairs appear murky. We are told about his comrades-in-arms like Ganesh Khaparde, Shankar Naik, Niranjan Singh, Narayan Savarkar, Trilokyanath Chakraborty, Pratul Ganguli and others. Well and fine. But while the likes of Chakraborty and Ganguli, along with forty-four others, got arrested in the Barisal conspiracy case in 1913, Hedgewar remained unharmed. How? Which revolutionary, despite belonging to “inner circles”, evaded arrests or a notation in a CID file in colonial India? According to Nandha, Hedgewar did, thanks to his “luck, his working style, and his focus on Maharashtra instead of Bengal”.

How did Anushilan Samiti and Congressman Hedgewar proceed with the idea of forming RSS? Nandha takes us through familiar tropes of Khilafat, Moplah, Savarkar’s Hindutva, and getting disillusioned with Gandhi’s Muslim appeasement. We are told how Hedgewar was aware that Khilafat was “infusing a dangerous sectarian consciousness against Hindus”. Did he ever make a public speech about it? Are there writings, diary entries, letters, or public exchanges that could be used to confirm these conjectures? How do we know that Gandhi’s article in Young India on Shraddhanand’s assassination really “perplexed and vexed Hedgewar” unless we have evidence?

Not fascist enough

“All Hindus belong to the same nation, the Hindu nation.” The author cites a letter of 1933 from Hedgewar to Ganesh Savarkar. He again relies on secondary literature. Had he had some archival instincts, if not dexterity, he would have cared to look for contemporary records. For instance, on May 2, 1938, nearly all major newspapers reported on the first session of the Maharashtra Hindu Youth Conference held in Poona (now Pune). It was attended by BS Moonje, VD Savarkar, LP Bhopatkar, PM Bapat and Hedgewar, who served as its president. Hedgewar, in his presidential address, declared: “Hindusthan is for the Hindus, and we shall not allow any other community to override this claim.” He went on, “Hindusthan is not a dharamshala so that any community may come in and spread its bedding here.”

Regardless of Nandha’s contempt for serious academics like Marzia Casolari, who has established the historical overview of the relationship between fascism and Hindu nationalism, what do we do about such public interventions? If many academics read resonances of Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One nation, one empire, one leader) in many Hindu nationalist outpourings, can they be blamed for a certain “trajectory of thought” alone?

Nandha’s defence of Hedgewar is resoundingly weak. He suggests that had Hedgewar been fascist and an ultranationalist, “he would have created far more mayhem for the authorities than he did.” The author seems to be unaware of the likes of MR Jayakar, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Tarak Nath Das, Kavde Shastri, Subhas Bose and many others in the 1930s who openly interacted with and appraised fascism in varying degrees. Moonje who finds enormous space in the book as a great influence on Hedgewar, is on the record expressing the desire for “a Hindu as a Dictator like Shivaji of old or Mussolini or Hitler of the present day in Italy and Germany” for the creation of swaraj. While there is a plethora of literature on fascism with Indian characteristics, any counter to them should be a more engaging scholarship and not hollow words.

Contemporary Judging of the Past

On March 17, 1883, a poorly attended funeral was organised at Highgate Cemetery in London. Estimates vary, but it’s unlikely more than two dozen mourners were present. We know of thirteen named individuals. The deceased, Karl Marx, “was before all else a revolutionist”. That’s how his lifetime collaborator and comrade Friedrich Engels remembered him. Engels also knew that Marx died a failure. The “overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being” and “the liberation of the modern proletariat” were nowhere in sight. Engels still concluded his funeral speech, declaring, “His name [Marx] will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.”

Engels’ declaration could’ve been a method for Nandha and others who wish to construct a happening and triumphant past of RSS because it is a force to reckon with in contemporary India. They could’ve recounted and documented the fall and rise of the enterprise for what it is. Just because at their establishment centenary, we have an ever-stronger RSS and a declining communist movement (at least, its parliamentary forms), does not mean that Hedgewar, Moonje and Golwalkar stand vindicated while MN Roy, SA Dange, Muzaffar Ahmed and others should be jettisoned.

Nandha’s construct of “Hedgewarian” and randomly declaring the likes of Karl Popper as “Hedgewarian” does not help the matter. If you have a central thesis that argues that an organisation envisioned to capture the spirit of the rashtra (cultural) and did not focus solely on the rajya (political), one cannot leave the question of what kind of rashtra was and is being formulated. When Hedgewar died in June 1940, just at the age of 51, a nation-state was already in the making through different expressions of anti-colonialism and varying homelands. Hedgewar stood for something very peculiar, and that could not be absolved in hindsight because the state power has been captured by those who espouse his thoughts.

A new reinvented biography of Hedgewar from an articulate Anglophile was a great opportunity to rescue the subject from sarkari and sanghi hagiographies. Unfortunately, that opportunity has been missed. The author desperately tries to locate Hedgewar in his time, but with missing textures and fabrics. The book would make an interesting read for those who do not go seeking endnotes at the back. However, those who still pursue facts would want the author to list the addresses of those “RSS archives” that he condemns academics for not using.

bookKeshav Baliram HedgewarRSSRSS founderSachin NandhaWeb Exclusive