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A disowned father of the nation in India:Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the demonicand the seductive in Indian nationalismAshis NandyPublished online: 24 Mar 2014.

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A disowned father of the nation in India: Vinayak Damodar Savarkarand the demonic and the seductive in Indian nationalism

Ashis NANDY

ABSTRACT This essay traces the trajectory of Savarkar’s life through its many vicissitudes and theinternal contradictions, to examine the deeper consistencies in his political beliefs and the deepersources of his absolute, uncritical faith in the modern-state system and its secular imperatives.

KEYWORDS: nation-building and state-formation, political ideology of violence, nineteenth-century modernity, rationality, political realism

The ideology and political legacy of VinayakDamodar Savarkar (1883–1966) triggeranxieties that centre on the ethical demandsof a national state on individuals andsocieties in those parts of the world wherethe communities have not obligingly diedout and where the violence involved in creat-ing a modern nation-state does not enjoy anyintrinsic legitimacy. Many sense the pres-ence within them of the same ruthlessnessand calculative cruelty that Savarkarsought to bring to the process, as inescapableparts of nation-building and state-formation;they are doubly hostile to a person who hascome to personify the psychopathic ten-dencies that the processes of state-formationand nation-building tend to unleash andlegitimize.

This essay traces the trajectory of Savar-kar’s life through its many vicissitudes andthe internal contradictions, to examine thedeeper consistencies in his political beliefsand the deeper sources of his absolute, uncri-tical faith in the modern-state system and itssecular imperatives. Probably more than anyother Indian leader of his time, he was inawe of Europe’s achievements in the areaof nation-building and state-formation.And such was the wide acceptance of theseachievements in urban, middle-class Indiathat few noticed that the basic categories ofSavarkar’s political ideology—nation,

national state, nationality and nationalism—always remained aggressively European.It was his misfortune that, in his lifetime,this middle class was not a sizeable part ofthe country and he never emerged as apopular leader with a large mass base, noteven as a leader of the Hindus. That positionwas occupied by Mohandas KaramchandGandhi (1869–1948), much younger thanSavarkar in Indian politics even if older inage, much less erudite, unimpressed by thefull-blooded social evolutionism of the likesof Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and full ofstrange, hare-brained ideas of politics suchas nonviolence, fasting and Satyagraha—allof which, Savarkar felt, could only hobblethe future of the Indian state.

I

However, before entering the world ofSavarkar, a few comments on the context ofthis essay on his life. First, Savarkar is oftenseen as a Hindu extremist. Like everythingelse in this part of the world, this also hasits own distinctive features. Those concernednot with academic puzzle-solving, but withlive problems of religion and violence inSouth Asia know the anomalies that markthe public career of “religious extremism,”caught between the culture of the globalnation-state system, the remnants of

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2014Vol. 15, No. 1, 91–112, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2014.882087

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19th-century colonial culture, and the every-day practices, values and categories ofpopular religion in the region. Thus, underthe umbrella of fundamentalism, there areclear differences between those who insiston total, literal allegiance to a sacred textand those who carefully avoid the issueand bypass the substantive contents offaith, to pursue the secular interests of a reli-gious community, invoking faith as only astrategy of mobilization.

This is not a matter of personal whimsy.Political communities and movements oftenoscillate between the two poles. Thus, thecontent of Islam for many decades was nota serious concern of Muslim nationalism inSouth Asia, although it has increasinglybecome so. Both strands are still visible inPakistan, but it has become more difficultto admit publicly that the founder of thestate, Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948),was an anti-clerical, secular, westernizedliberal in personal life, routinely breakingsome of the injunctions of Islam inmatters of food and drink. In Sikhs, too,there has been a similar oscillationbetween Sikh nationalism and fundamental-ism. For a while, during the 1980s and1990s, the latter was more visible; now it isless so.

The Hindu nationalism that has becomean important player in Indian politics hasmostly thrown up leaders to whom contentsof faith hardly matter, even though theirpolitics and rhetoric have changed the con-tours of Hinduism among some sections ofIndians. It took the Rashtriya SwayamSevak Sangh or RSS, deemed the steelframe of Hindu nationalism, something like15 years to find a serious, believing Hinduinterested in theology and religious ritualsto head it. And only during the Ramjanmab-humi movement in 1989–1992 did the RSSflout its conventions to allow religiousicons to enter its precincts.

Such anomalies are clues to the innerworld of those who participate in or shapeethnoreligious movements and an invitationto empathetically, yes empathetically, plumbthe complexities of persons involved. Yet,

this has become increasingly difficultbecause it is now seen either as an attemptto whitewash the violence and hatred suchleaders and their acolytes spew or as aninsult to the religious or cultural sentimentsof a community. As a result, serious culturalpsychological explorations of militantnationalism as well as millennialism arebecoming rarer in South Asia. Now, in thewake of 11 September 2001, such cultivatedblindness and tacit censorship are alsobeing indirectly endorsed by the global cul-tures of politics and knowledge.

Second, the early post-World War IIscholars of religious and ethnic prejudiceand violence—particularly those that werea response to the European genocide of the1940s, worked in an environment in whichthere was inchoate, vague tiredness withcruelty, hatred and gratuitous violence. Bystudying the authoritarian personality as aclinical syndrome, some of them sought touniversalize their work, and they remainedcaptive to the dominant culture of Europeanmodernity and heritage of the Enlighten-ment, both self-consciously oblivious of theway massive genocidal projects had beenmounted and successfully executed withimpunity outside Europe over the previous150 years (Adorno et al. 1960; Rokeach1960). Indeed, such violence was oftenseen as an ugly but unavoidable part of sta-tecraft and justified in social evolutionaryterms or as parts of a new medical regimeof social hygiene and eugenics. Joan Robin-son, the radical economist and manifestlyan opponent of colonialism, used tofamously claim that the only thing worsethan being colonized was not beingcolonized.

This is not unique to our times or to theculture that produced Savarkar. Everyonehas his or her own ideas of the sanctity andmeaning that must attach to some instancesof mega-deaths and the reasons why thoseresponsible for it should not be allowed to“over-contextualize” their genocidal acts asproducts of a sick society or mind. Evenwithin the psychoanalytic tradition, whichhas significantly deepened our insight into

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contemporary Satanism, is not free of suchdebates. Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheimwas convinced that fellow-psychoanalystRobert J. Lifton’s book, Nazi Doctors, basedon intensive interviews with homicidaldoctors, humanized the Nazis and, hence,was politically and ethically culpable (Bettel-heim 1986; Lifton 1986a). The fear of de-demonizing an enemy with a proven recordof Satanism persists. Hatred has becomemore respectable when directed against thehateful and the “hateable,” whether thetarget is Osama bin Laden or George Bush.The global culture of commonsense nowleaves one lesser scope to empathize withone’s subjects, even for purposes of research.As a result, what Philip Rieff (1959) used tocall the “analytic attitude,” has often beensacrificed at the altar of political and academiccorrectness masquerading as commitment tosecular humanism and radicalism. On theone hand, ethnoreligious and ultra-nationalistextremism demands a one-dimensional,heroic picture of sacrifice and martyrdom,on the other, those fighting it fear that anyhumane treatment of the subjectivities associ-ated with such extremism will only acknowl-edge the humanity of the enemy andlegitimize its politics. There is the unacknow-ledged fear in both that the enemy may notturn out to be an alien, infra-human species,but a dangerous human potentiality withineveryone, that serious psychological explora-tions might reveal continuities rather thanunbridgeable gaps. It is not easy to say thesedays what Lifton once did: “Yes, that wasthe Germans, that has been the Jews, but it’sanyone. It’s a universal potential which differ-ent groups may embrace or feel victimizedby” (Lifton 1986b, 20).

Thus, in South Asia in recent years, thegrowth of religion-based violence hasspawned an array of demonologies and arich vocabulary that eschews shades ofgrey. Terms such as fundamentalist, fascist,fanatic, terrorist and religious right are routi-nely bandied, to set up what Erik Eriksonused to call a new “pseudo-species,” whichhas to be annihilated the way the enemywould like to annihilate its targets and

opponents. The vocabulary establishes aregime of indignation, disgust and revul-sion, and of censorship imposed on enquiriesinto human motivations and technologies ofself (Chakrabarti 2005).1

This essay makes this point in a moreround-about way by entering the world ofone such ideologue, to show that whatappears at first to be an unforgivabledepravity could be an ideological solutionthat an era and a globally dominantculture of public life promoted as part ofsanity and rationality. Indeed, in manyAfro-Asian societies, such solutions consti-tuted a psychological trap in colonialtimes; some escaped it but most did not.Savarkar, the freedom fighter turnedMuslim-baiter turned the man behind theassassination of Mohandas KaramchandGandhi, arrived at an ethnonationalismthat could only be called an illegitimatechild of modern Europe, at the time routi-nely dumping its intellectual wares in thecolonies as culture-free, universal com-ponents of secular salvation. Savarkar is anextreme case of the way an entire generationof South Asian political activists and ideolo-gues thought.

Here I shall disobey Clifford Geertz’smaxim and supply only a thin descriptionof the person and his times. Data on Savar-kar’s personal life are scarce, though someof the ongoing works on him promise to dobetter. His best known, full-length, seriousbiography is also, as its title suggests, ahagiography; it mostly shuns his privatelife and interpersonal relations. Even thenames of his wife and children, though men-tioned cursorily in the text, find no place inthe index. Following the conventions of lifestories in many South Asian cultures, thebiographer reads Savarkar’s childhood andfamily life strictly through the prism ofadult Savarkar’s political career and ideol-ogy (Keer 1950).2 Savarkar’s own autobio-graphical writings are not much better;they too are, apart from being self-righteous,fearful of all human subjectivities, in anattempt to be rational, logical, secular, scien-tific and modern.

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II

Sections of urban, middle-class, moderniz-ing Hindus of British India were reborn asfragments of a pan-Indian Hindu nationonly in the 1940s, roughly 100 years afterthe idea itself was born. This process ofnation-building is not yet complete and itmay never be complete. However, it hasgone far in urban, educated, middle- andupper-middle class India where individual-ism and social and occupational mobilityhave steadily grown since the 19th century.(The process has gone farthest among dia-sporic Hindus in the First World, some ofwhom have begun to think of themselvesas part of a Hindu ummah, but that is notour concern at the moment.) Both the indivi-duation and the mobility have taken place ina relatively impersonal, contractual, anon-ymous, urban-industrial context, wheremainstream Hinduism in all its diversity—its innumerable castes (some figures go ashigh as 70,000), tens of thousands of villagegods and goddesses, hundreds of sects,thousands of vernacular religious epics andjatipuranas, family priests and personal andfamily deities, rituals and practices specificto castes, sects and regions—cannot be sus-tained. The demand for Hinduism as a reli-gion that an ordinary, socially andgeographically mobile householder—asopposed to a world-renouncer—could carrywithin him or her as a portable device wasa direct product of colonial politicaleconomy and the growth of presidencytowns. At the moment of its birth, this newHinduism—also sometimes called reformedHinduism, proudly by some, wryly byothers— did not look like Hinduism at allto a vast majority of Indians, Hindus andnon-Hindus. To them, such an “essentia-lized,” desiccated Hinduism, seeking tocover so many incompatible religious prac-tices, lifestyles and theologies, seemedabsurd.3 This majority was to be surprised;it had not reckonedwith the new psychologi-cal demands crystallizing in colonial India.

It was a slow and painful process ofbirth. Among Hindus, the first well-known

group to talk of the Hindus as an incipientnational community were probably theYoung Bengal Group in the 1840s at Cal-cutta, then the capital of British India. Thegroup saw itself as a collection of reformersand talked of the Hindus and Hinduism criti-cally, sometimes with contempt. The processwas underwritten by the colonial tendency,reflected in the ruling culture of the Raj andin missionary tracts, to see Hindus as a com-munity defined—and doomed—by their reli-gion and the gradual institutionalization ofthis tendency in colonial law, education,administration and census. Partly as a reac-tion, within a decade or two, the idea of theHindus as a nation found a different statusand intellectual respectability in the writingsof Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (1827–1894), asocial and political thinker, and Bankimchan-dra Chattopadhyay (1838–1994), India’s firstimportant novelist. They, too, were criticalof many things Hindu but were even morecritical of the Anglicized Indians whothought Hinduism could not be retooled formodern times (Kaviraj 1995). In another twodecades had emerged BrahmabandhavUpadhyay (1861–1907), a Catholic theologianand Vedantic scholar, who ran into troublewith the church in his lifetime but was to berediscovered towards the end of the 20thcentury as a pioneer in indigenous Christiantheology. In his other incarnation, Upadhyaywas a Hindu nationalist scholar-activist andtheorist of violence—so at least it seemed tohis friend Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1940).As is well known, Tagore’s novel Ch�arAdhy�aya is built around Upadhyay andUpadhyay’s guilty awareness of nationalismas a sanction for ruthless, machine violencethat involved viewing human life andhuman emotions instrumentally.4 One couldargue that it was the desacralized, secularpart of Upadhyay’s political Hinduism thatfinally ended up as Savarkar’s theories ofstate and nationality (Nandy 1989).5

The idea that the Hindus were thecarriers of an overly diverse religion calledHinduism by default—and, to that extent,were an ill-formed, sleep-walking crypto-nation that had not actualized its

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possibilities—was to later become a centralassumption of Hindu nationalism. Naturally,a certain admiration for Christianity andIslam, as religions in better touch with theprocesses of state-formation and nation-building, was the obverse of such national-ism. All Hindu reformmovements borrowedfrom these two faiths to correct the “inade-quacies” of Hinduism. Such a stance wasthen popular among the modernizingmiddle class, which endorsed the contemptand hostility that often tinged Hindu nation-alist attitudes towards the Hindus. The over-done emphases on Hindu pride andmasculinization of the Hindus was built onsuch self-hatred.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923reinvented a term previously used by thelikes of Brahmabandhab Upadhyay todescribe this ideology: Hindutva (Savarkar[1923] 1969). Hindutva, Savarkar madeclear, was not the same as Hinduism,despite what an unthinking IndianSupreme Court was to declare 80 yearslater.6 Hindutva was a form of political Hin-duism that sought to organize and militarizethe Hindus as a nationality. Without suchnationality, the argument went, there couldbe no basis for nationalism in a highlydiverse society, and without nationalismthere could be no nation-state. From thebeginning, Hindutva had a strong masculinecontent. Savarkar was probably the first andthe last to call India a fatherland (pitrubhu)and not amotherland (matrubhumi). To intro-duce this Continental usage, he had todredge Sanskrit grammar to shed thecommon term bhumi (land), which was fem-inine, and use the rarer bhu. To this pitrubhuyou could not even sing one of the unofficialnational anthems of the freedom fighters,Bande Mataram, a paean to Mother India.

To this fatherland, by virtue of thesacred geography associated with it, theHindus had an exclusive right, Savarkarbelieved. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (2006)defines the secular Zionist as the one whobelieves that there is no God but insiststhat He has given the land of Israel to theJews nonetheless. Savarkar, a hardboiled

atheist who did not believe in sacred geogra-phies, was even less embarrassed to claimthe whole of India for the Hindus on theground of sacred geography.

When Savarkar propounded his two-nation theory—the first to explicitly do soin South Asia—it was a clear 16 yearsbefore the Muslim League embraced theidea of the Hindus and the Muslims as twodistinctive nations and demanded the div-ision of India. His pioneering efforts in thisrespect were recognized. Historian R.C.Majumdar, who called Savarkar a “greatrevolutionary leader,” was clear aboutwhere the League got its inspiration: it“took serious notice of the frank speechesof Savarkar” (quoted in Noorani 2002). Butthe idea of nationhood as the marker of apeople was not Savarkar’s either; he bor-rowed it from European thinkers such asGuiseppe Mazzini (1805–1872). Mazziniwas not unknown in India, thanks to theearly Bengali Hindu nationalists such asUpadhyay. Only the likes of Upadhyay didnot include in their repertoire an ideologyof political and cultural exclusion, leavenedwith hatred, as Savarkar openly did. In apublic speech in 1925, Savarkar said thatIndians had to learn to eschew soft valuessuch as “humility, self-surrender and for-giveness” and cultivate “sturdy habits ofhatred, retaliation, vindictiveness” (quotedin Noorani 2002, 25–26). Occasionally hewent further. At one place in his writings,he seems miserable that his heroes, Shivajiand Chinaji Appu, did not rape Muslimwomen, “because of then prevalent suicidalideas about chivalry to women, which ulti-mately proved highly detrimental to theHindu community” (Savarkar 1970, 71;quoted in Krishnan 2003).7 To spite admirerswho might think this to be an aberration, in1965 at the age of 82, Savarkar wrote in thewake of the India-Pakistan war that tookplace that year: “Pakistan’s barbaric actssuch as kidnapping and raping Indianwomen would not be stopped unless Paki-stan was given tit for tat.” One suspectsthat violence to Savarkar was not merely arevolutionary tool, but an end in itself, as if

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he was seeking legitimate targets to expressthe free-floating anger within him.8

Savarkar may not have been honestabout many things but he had a Brahminicrespect for ideas. When in the 1940s Moham-mad Ali Jinnah began to go places with histwo-nation theory, Savarkar was honestenough to say: “I have no quarrel with Mr.Jinnah’s two-nation theory. We Hindus area nation by ourselves and it is a historicalfact that Hindus and Muslims are twonations” (quoted in Nauriya 2004).

III

At this point, let me quickly outline Savar-kar’s life. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar wasborn in a Chitpavan Brahmin family in avillage near Nasik in 1883.9 It was a landedfamily but his father Damodarpant wasknown more for his poetry and his knowl-edge of Sanskrit and western classics thanfor his land holdings. Vinayak was thesecond son of his parents. His two brotherswere also to become freedom fighters andone of them was to be sentenced to lifeimprisonment at Andamans. He also had ayounger sister. Biographies suggest aHindu nationalist atmosphere in his house,but that was not rare then in educated Chit-pavan households. One of the few Brahmincommunities to have tasted real politicalpower in the declining years of the Mughalempire, Chitpavans were highly successfulin the professions under the Raj but seemedto resent their loss of power. Perhaps moresignificant were the vague indications of anamoral, violent streak in young Vinayak.Keer tells how Vinayak, as a child, proudlyvandalized a local mosque and then had abrawl with angry Muslim boys (Keer 1950,4–5).

From his early years, Vinayakwas a vor-acious reader and had superb memory. Hispoetry was first published when he wasten. This might have been a response to thesudden death of his mother from cholerathe same year. Young Vinayak was particu-larly fond of his mother and she had beenhis refuge from a stern, disciplinarian

father, not averse to occasionally metingout heavy doses of physical punishment(Keer 1950, ch. 1). Her death must havebeen traumatizing.

Vinayak also turned out to be a goodpublic speaker; at the age of 14, he won aprize for elocution. At around the sametime, deeply moved by the hanging of theChapekar brothers by the British regime, hetook a vow at the altar of his familygoddess, Durga, to fight for India’sfreedom. He even started in 1899, as a 16-year-old student, an anti-imperialistFriend’s Circle, Mitra Mela. The same yearhis father and uncle died of plague. Histwo brothers also contacted the disease butrecovered. Vinayak’s elder brother Babaraohad to now bear the burden of maintainingthe family. Life for the three brothers hadsuddenly become unpredictable and cruel;there were reasons for them to be bitterwith fate and its treacherous ways.

After matriculating from the city ofNasik in 1901, Vinayak joined FergussonCollege at Poona in 1902, where he com-pleted his studies and passed his examin-ation. His degree, however, was withheldbecause of his political activities. Fortu-nately, he won a scholarship to go toEngland in 1906. There, at the age of 23, heestablished another anti-imperialist groupcalled the Free India Society. They produceda manual on bomb making and sent copiesof it to India, and Savarkar himself produceda Marathi translation of Mazzini’s writings,which was published from India.

In 1908, to commemorate the 50th anni-versary of the rebellion of 1857 againstBritish rule, the Sepoy Mutiny, Savarkarpublished his well-known tract, The FirstIndian War of Independence – 1857, whichmany consider to be his best work. A.G.Noorani, no admirer of Savarkar, calls it a“veritable classic.”10 The government dulyproscribed it but it was republished fromHolland. He also led the Indian students incelebratingmartyr’s day on the 50th anniver-sary of the 1857 uprising. He was then noteven 25. In 1909, he heard in Englandthat his brother had been sentenced to

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transportation for life at Andaman for hisrevolutionary activities. Soon afterwards,Madanlal Dhingra, his one-time colleagueand protégé, was caught after he killed acolonial bureaucrat at London at Savarkar’sinstigation (Savarkar and Joshi 1967, 114).

Savarkar met Mohandas KaramchandGandhi (1869–1948) for the first time atLondon. Much of Savarkar’s life was to belater defined by his differences with andantipathy towards Gandhi. He had con-tempt for Gandhi’s “unscientific” and“unscholarly” mind and he despisedGandhi’s critique of the urban-industrialvision and modern technology and preoccu-pation with things such as truth force,fasting and concern for the cow (Keer 1950,530). Above all, as an obedient student ofEurope’s political history, he hatedGandhi’s non-violence, which Savarkarthought irreconcilable with modern—and,of course, European—politics and statecraft.“Absolute non-violence,” he would laterdeclare, was “absolutely sinful.” Later, hecame to develop as strong a dislike for thecharkha or spinning wheel and Gandhi’spacifist interpretation of the Gita. They allseemed to Savarkar forms of primitivism,gloriously ignorant of what modern scienceand political theory had to offer India.What remained unmentioned at the timewas Savarkar’s strong belief that theHindus had been de-masculinized over thecenturies and his own desperate search formasculinity in a political where Gandhi’sandrogynous presence, he was to find outto his utter chagrin, had a natural spaceand legitimacy. It is said that when Gandhionce came to meet him at London at Indiahouse, Savarkar was cooking prawns, hisown favourite. When Gandhi broachedsome issue, Savarkar cut him short, “wecan discuss it later… first come and haveyour food with us.” When Gandhi said hewas a vegetarian, Savarkar reportedlyretorted, “If you cannot eat with us, howon earth are you going to work with us.”Savarkar’s contempt for the effeminate, ret-rogressive, vegetarian, Gujarati Bania neversubsided (Srivastava 1983, 28–29).11

This story is symptomatic of a basic per-sonality difference between the two of themand their rival ideologies of freedom. Thefour years of his exposure to the West atthe prime of his youth, as his doting biogra-pher Harindra Srivastava recognizes, hadremade Savarkar as a secular, modern,western-educated Indian who had studiedmainstream British life, literature, culture,and the British mind (Srivastava 1983, 4).Mazzini was already his God and he suf-fered from what some biographers havecalled a “Mazzinimania” (Srivastava 1983,33);12 his stay in England now equippedhim with European concepts and methodsof statecraft and protest. Gandhi, on theother hand, had cussedly chosen to decidewhich West would influence him and howmuch; he searched for and discoveredanother West that could be an ally of notonly his political but also cultural self. Herefused to be retooled as a standardized, pro-gressive nationalist or as a conventionalrevolutionary.13

In due course, Savarkar qualified as abarrister from Grey’s Inn, but he refused togive an undertaking that he would not par-ticipate in seditious activities and was notcalled to the bar. (As we shall see, thatmight have been the last time Savarkarrefused to give an undertaking underpressure from authorities.) Such incidencesof dissidence and his earlier secret revolu-tionary activities had a cumulative effect. In1910, he was arrested and deported toIndia. On the way to India, he tried toescape at Marseilles but was recaptured,even though it was French territory. Presum-ably, even post-revolutionary, republicanFrance, when it came to anti-colonial vio-lence, knew where and when to draw aline as far as its ideas of freedom and sover-eignty went.

Savarkar was tried in India and was sen-tenced to transportation for life twice over,which meant jail for 50 years. His property,too, was confiscated.14 The university can-celled his BA degree. At the age of 27, Savar-kar was sent to the notorious Cellular jail atPort Blair in Andaman Islands.

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The journey to Port Blair was itself trau-matic. He was to later write:

Climbing into the steamer to be trans-ported for life was like putting a liveman in his own coffin. Hundreds andthousands must have gone to the Anda-mans… and not ten in a thousand hadreturned alive to India! Young men of18, as soon as they put their step onthe steamer, became old and theshadow of death was visible on theirfaces. (Quoted in Kamath [1993, 445])

The Cellular jail, Savarkar soon foundout, took its notoriety seriously and tried tolive up to its image the hard way. The jail’swalls were adorned with manacles andother items of torture and sadism was apart of everyday life.15 He was allowed oneletter a year and had to wear a plaquewhich said that he was sentenced in 1911and would be released in 1960. His punish-ments included solitary confinement for sixmonths, seven days of standing handcuffsand ten days of cross bar fetters, which didnot allow him to bend his knees for tendays. He was also yoked to an oil meal likea bullock—along with two other revolution-aries, Indu Bhushan Roy and Ullaskar Dutt—to produce 30 lbs of mustard oil. (Roycommitted suicide, unable to bear thetorture and the humiliation, and Dutt wentmad and was put in an asylum in Andamansfor 14 years.) However, what the finickyBrahmin hated most were the filthy, primi-tive, grossly inadequate toilet facilities. Asprisoners were locked up and not allowedto use the jail toilets for about 12 hours atnight, many eased themselves in their cellsand had to learn to sleep next to theirfaeces and puddles of urine.

All this, but particularly the solitary con-finement, began to induce subtle but decisivechanges in the personality and worldview ofSavarkar, still a young man who could hopeto return home only as an oldman. “He oftenfelt that his mind had been on a rack all thetime, his nerves completely shattered”(Kamath 1993, 445). And the hardened revo-lutionary began to show signs of physical

fright and psychological collapse. Theculture of violence, cruelty and totalism inthe jail was a constant invitation to suicideand madness. One could survive thatextreme situation only by radically retoolingoneself to ensure survival and the costs ofthat retooling could be distasteful, both forthe victim and the onlookers.16

Savarkar’s ideological self always hadtwo axes: along one he worshippedmodern scientific rationality and Machiavel-lianism, along the other he used Europeanromanticism to empower his ideas of nation-alism and revolution. His ethics probablycame from the latter. The Cellular jailcrippled the romanticism, so that it now sur-vived mainly as a rhetoric that allowed himto give fuller play to his amoral, reason-driven, Machiavellian self as a technologyof survival. Contrary to the impression hegives in his autobiographical writings,within a year of his arrival at Andamans hebegan to write abject appeals to the auth-orities, seeking clemency and promisingloyalty, obedience and good behaviour.There had been a manipulative streak evenin his revolutionary career and he nowbegan to take even greater care not toantagonize the jail authorities. There is atleast one other respected revolutionary, Trai-lokya Nath Maharaj, a fellow-prisoner ofSavarkar in Andamans, who complained tohistorian R.C. Majumdar that the Savarkarbrothers egged on the political prisoners tocall a strike and then did not join it (quotedin Noorani 2002, 58–59). Rumours say thatSavarkar’s experiences in jail sharpened hisantipathy towards the Muslims, for the tor-turers included Muslim warders, two ofwhom allegedly sodomized him. Savarkardoes mention that the warders for politicalprisoners in Cellular jail were all Muslimsand they were nasty.17

However, Savarkar’s own accountforces one to ask if his sufferings in thehands of his Muslim warders were not atleast partly a result of his self-fulfilling,anti-Muslim prejudices. For instance, oncean infamous, low-level functionary of thejail, a Pathan called Mirza Khan, came to

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Savarkar and complimented him for theloyalty, courage and determination of NaniGopal, a political prisoner who had goneon hunger strike and was nearing death.Khan called Gopal a “true disciple” of Savar-kar and “verily a Pathan lad.” Savarkar’sresponse to this attempt to establish arelationship was,

Bada Jamadar, you are wrong. Yourfather was a Pathan and you are aPathan. If he [Nani Gopal] were aPathan, he would not have rotten inthis jail for the sake of his country; hewould have, like you, licked the shoesof Mr. Barrie and would not havedefied him.… It is because Nani Gopalis a born Hindu that he is so brave.(Savarkar 1984a, 91–92, 254)

That Savarkar shared the widespread stereo-type of the Pathans and considered thePathan warders to be “ignorant block-heads”—apart from being, like the Sindhiand Baluchi Muslims, “cruel,” “unscrupu-lous,” “bigoted” and “fanatics”—did nothelp matters (Savarkar 1984a, 252–253). Atone place in his jail memoirs, he mentionsthat there were exceptions among theMuslims, but his narrative has no place forany of these exceptions and his ideologydoes not allow him to talk of them.18

Savarkar’s admirers claim that themercy petitions and the undertakings hesigned so readily were strategic; he wantedto be released to participate in the freedommovement. It is true that the British neverfully trusted his petitions and his relation-ship with the colonial regime did notautomatically become cosy immediatelyafterwards, as some of his detractors insinu-ate. It is also true that some degree of manip-ulative cunning was part of Savarkar’srepertoire. Filing of such petitions by politi-cal prisoners, too, was not rare. But it isalso true that the authorities trusted himenough to appoint him a foreman in the jailand Savarkar never again played any signifi-cant or insignificant part in the anti-imperial-ist struggle. On the contrary, he openlybegan to look upon the British Empire as a

boon and an opportunity to cleanse Indiaof the Muslims, his version of the “yellowperil.”19 There was in his new politics ident-ifiable strains of what some clinicians willdiagnose as authoritarian submission andidentification with his tormentors.

Savarkar’s petitions paid dividendsnonetheless; the colonial authorities prob-ably had a more rounded understanding ofhis personality than his Indian admirersand detractors. He was considered harmlessand released in 1921 at the age of 38. But theauthorities did not take any chance either.After his return from Andaman in 1921, hewas kept in Ratnagiri jail for three years.The ghosts of Andamans still haunted himand this new sentence was probably thelast straw. At least at one point he wasdepressed enough to think of suicide:

High up in that cell was a barredwindow as in the jail in the Andamans.I thought out in my mind how to reachmy hand to the window and how toput an end to my life by hangingmyself by a rope to its bars…my mindwas overcast with complete darkness.20

In 1924 Savarkar was finally released on thecondition that he would not participate inpolitics and not go outside Ratnagiri district.Indeed, “seeing his spirit broken and will-power completely shattered,” the Govern-ment also suggested that he should statethat his trial was fair and the sentenceawarded was just. At the same time, it toldhim this was “in no way… a condition ofhis release.” Yet, he went ahead and madethe statement.21 The colonial system wasmore efficient than it itself thought; Savarkarhad returned from Andamans a shadow ofhis old self and the three additional yearsin jail, too, had done their job. When releasedin 1924, “at forty one he looked sixty andresembled a lean and hungry hawk, withbitter mouth and eyes that looked hooded”(Payne 1968, 208).

It was in Ratnagiri jail that Savarkarwrote the tract, Hindutva (1923), which stillserves as the Bible of Hindu nationalists.22

Savarkar had started public life as a

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secular, reasonably non-sectarian, anti-imperialist activist. He might have alreadybeen a bit of a Hindu chauvinist but thatdid not distort much his political ideas.One indicator is his book on 1857. Even hisfavourite argument that the holy land,punyabhu, for Muslims and Christians wasoutside India—and hence they could not beequal partners in a common nationality—does not find a place in the book.23 Hindutvawas the milestone in a journey that was todevour him. There are hints in the book ofa totalism that induced him to marry evenhis classical scholarship to concerns thathad little to do with classicism and every-thing to with imperial Europe and whathad already become an imperial knowledgesystem—nationality and national culture,nation-building and state-formation,secular rationality and a social-evolutionaryconcept of history. Each of these importedideas was absolutized, seen as sacrosanctand all traditions, however sacred, weremade subservient to them.

In politics, if you wear a mask longenough, it becomes your face. The peculiarmix of collaboration and xenophobia gradu-ally overwhelmed Savarkar and helped tohold together his post-Andaman self. Politicshad always given him the scope to publiclyexpress his more psychopathic and violenttraits and he was learned enough to knowthat modern nation-building and state-for-mation had been a violent, criminal enter-prise in all societies. At the same time,being a typical product of late 19th-centurycolonial knowledge system, he could thinkof India only as a potential, European-stylenation-state. Once he had thought throughthis issue, his authoritarian traits did notpermit him any ambiguity in this matter.The “prince of revolutionaries” now openlyredefined British colonial rule as an appren-ticeship, which taught the Indians the prin-ciples of “normal” nationhood. He was toodeeply seeped in history, the new obsessionof India’s modern elite (Kaviraj 1995,109),24 not to notice that the basis of nation-and state-building in each and every Euro-pean country had been, to start with, religion

and ethnicity. He was one of those who hadnot only taken to heart the “lessons” ofEurope’s political history, but also wantedall Indians to live by that history.25

Whether Savarkar himself fully sharedthe passions and symbols on which theHindu nation was to be built is, however,another issue. Realpolitik, too, was a partof his ideological kitbag and under his lea-dership his party, the Hindu Mahasabha,often collaborated and formed governmentsin alliance with parties that others did notexpect him to touch (with the MuslimLeague, for instance, when the League wasdemanding the division of India). Thismanipulative use of religion and culturecould not but boomerang; in Savarkar’slater years it looked as if he himself hadturned into the soulless instrument that hewanted the Hindus to be.

In 1937, Savarkar became the Presidentof the Hindu Mahasabha. This was not sur-prising; the party was his in any case. Moreimportant was the publication of his novelKalapani the same year. Savarkar wasalready the author of a novel, Mopla (1924),and a play, Ushap (1927). Both mirrored hisideology. Kalapani was something more—itreflected his and perhaps Hindutva’s onlyattempt to envision an ideal or desirableIndia. He had written in 1907, The FirstIndian War of Independence – 1857, which pro-jected the idea of a unified, Indian resistanceto colonialism, cutting across all socioreli-gious barriers. At the centre of the newwork, shaped by his days in Andamans,was an imaginary, futuristic, post-penalcolony as the epitome of a post-colonialsociety. It was the vision of a secular, egali-tarian, homogeneous, Hindu communitywhere people married across linguistic andcaste boundaries and shared the sameculture, language and ideology—a terriblyinsipid, deadly version of a fully modernnation-state with all its unmanageable angu-larities ironed out. The First Indian War wasevidently a distant memory now.

Magnanimously, Kalapani confined itsthought experiment to the Hindus. Theywere the ones who were to be thus

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homogenized for the sake of a viablenational state and cured of the Hinduismthat a chaotic, amorphous Indian societyhad thoughtlessly inculcated in the “slum-bering” Hindus over the centuries.26 Unfor-tunately, though Savarkar exiles Muslimsand Christians from his utopia, they arethere in his novel in full strength. Theyhaunt Savarkar’s utopia as monolithicghost communities, as fully formed nationsrunning full-fledged states. They are therein the novel as the unacknowledged futureof the Hindus. 27 Kalapani represents thehope of the author that, despite rebuffinghim and his party, the Hindus wouldsomeday be rational enough to gulp theheavy dose of uniformity he was prescrib-ing, for the sake his idea of India.

The Hindus proved to be more head-strong; Savarkar’s ideology and politicsonly further distanced him from thefreedom movement. Once the SecondWorld War started in 1939, the gapwidened because he began helping the colo-nial regime to recruit Indians as soldiers. Heargued that this was his way of militarizingthe Hindus. By the end of the war, he waseven more of a lonely figure, excludedfrom virtually all serious negotiations ontransfer of power and the division ofBritish India into two nation-states. Savarkarmust have been hurt that though Gandhihad helped a recruitment drive in SouthAfrica many years ago, it was never heldagainst Gandhi, while his recruitment drivefor the British-Indian army, in a war thatenjoyed much more legitimacy among theliberals and the Left, further isolated him.

Although it was Savarkar’s two-nationtheory that triumphed at the end and justi-fied the partitioning of India, he wasdeeply distressed by the division and heldGandhi primarily responsible for it. Savarkarwas never terribly self-exploratory and anti-intraception was almost an article of faithwith him; like many revolutionaries hefeared looking within, perhaps because hethought it would soften his resolve. In1947, the aging rebel got involved in a plotto kill Gandhi who was threatening to

become a long-term liability for the youngIndian nation-state. This time Savarkarfound his willing instruments in NathuramVinayak Godse and Narayan Apte, two ofhis young admirers. They were membersof the Hindu Mahasabha and formermembers of the RSS. Godse was the one topull the trigger on an unarmed, unprotectedGandhi on 30 January 1948.

The police and the government couldhave easily prevented the killing, for one ofthe plotters, Madanlal Pahwa, had throwna bomb at one of Gandhi’s prayer meetingsa few days earlier, was caught, and withina few hours revealed all the relevant detailsand names of the persons involved in theplot. However, many in the ruling circleswere fed up with Gandhi’s “eccentric,”“effeminate,” “irrational” defiance of thecanons of modern statecraft, his non-vio-lence, and what some Indian intellectualshad already begun to call “pulpit politics.”28

Payne directly accuses the Bombay police ofbeing involved in the conspiracy to killGandhi. Embarrassment and perhaps atouch of guilt pushed them to act more deci-sively after the assassination. The conspiracywas unearthed soon enough and Savarkarwas arrested within eight hours of the assas-sination. He was tried, along with sevenothers, for murder. In February 1948,before the trial began, he had predictablyoffered to give another undertaking abjuringpolitics if let off. The offer was rejected andthe trial finally ended the political and intel-lectual career of this gifted but troubledvendor of hate and violence. However, he“escaped conviction by the skin of histeeth,” for this time too he had taken hisusual care to hide his links with the assassins(Noorani 2002, 4). In addition, some of themost powerful political leaders too wantedSavarkar to be acquitted. Deputy PrimeMin-ister and Minister of Home Affairs Vallabhb-hai Patel, for instance, admitted that thegovernment had annoyed the Muslims and“could not afford to anger the Hindus too”(Gandhi 2007, 732–733).29

Godse—the naïve, ideologicallydriven killer of Gandhi, pushed by forces

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that he neither controlled nor fully under-stood—faced the other Savarkar, the onewhom he had not met during his longacquaintance with the guru, only duringhis trial in 1948. Although he had directlyinspired Godse to kill Gandhi, Savarkarduring the trial was not merely aloof anddistant, he was careful to avoid any showof concern or fraternal feelings towards hisprotégé, lest it weakened his plea of inno-cence. Advocate P.L. Inamdar, an admirerof Savarkar who unsuccessfully defendedNathuram’s brother Gopal in the sametrial, found Savarkar very nervous and agi-tated during the trial. Savarkar, himself abarrister, repeatedly sought reassurancefrom Inamdar and asked the lawyer if hewould be acquitted; he did not ask a singlequestion about the fate of the others(Inamdar 1979, 23). He was still phobicabout jails.

Godse, we learn from those close to him,was deeply hurt. He worshipped Savarkaras a selfless, heroic, father figure and wasnot prepared to discover in the formerfreedom fighter a self-centred, manipulativepolitician desperately trying to save hisskin. Inamdar (1979, 14) says:

During the various talks I had withNathuram, he told me that he wasdeeply hurt by Tatyarao’s [Savarkar’s]calculated, demonstrative non-associ-ation with him either in court or in theRed Fort Jail.…How Nathuramyearned for a touch of Tatyarao’s hand,a word of sympathy, or at least a lookof compassion…Nathuram referred tohis hurt feelings in this regard evenduring my last visit with him.30

Savarkar had reasons to be careful.Although the trial court acquitted him, ajudicial enquiry later established his compli-city. The Supreme Court judge J.L. Kapur,who headed the enquiry, was clear in hisfinding: Savarkar did lead the conspiracythat killed Gandhi (Kapur 1970, 303).

The assassination was the last politicalact of Savarkar. Though he lived another 18years, he withdrew into a cell and took care

not to offend the government evenindirectly. He had already mastered the artof buying peace with authorities. Once in1950, when he tested waters in the wake ofthe Nehru–Liaqat Ali Pact and the govern-ment frowned upon his political activities,he once again offered to abjure politics toavoid prosecution. When the authoritiesasked for a formal undertaking, he promptlygave it.31

Savarkar died in 1966, a bitter, defeatedman. He had fought for the Hindus fornearly 60 years, but the Hindus had failedto appreciate it and had not given him orhis party a respectable voice in any electionin independent India.32 The man he hadloathed for more than 50 years, Gandhi,was triumphant even in death. Not onlywas he already being called a saint but,horror of horrors, the father of the nationby the same Hindus whom Savarkar hadtried so hard to organize as a nation andwean away from the bewitching guiles ofthe retrogressive counter-modernist andcrypto-anarchist. Savarkar, a 19th-centuryEuropean rationalist caught in the hinges oftime, could only “retaliate” by showing hiscontempt towards his ungrateful compa-triots and their fake hero one last time. Hedeclared that he did not want any Hindurituals after his death and insisted that heshould be carried to an electric crematorium,not on human shoulders, as conventionsdemanded, but on mechanical transport(Keer 1950, 544).

VI

It is a peculiar sensation, this doubleconsciousness… this sense of alwayslooking at one’s self through the eyesof another, measuring one’s soul by thetype of a world that looks on inamused contempt and pity… twosouls, two thoughts, two unreconciledstrivings, two warring ideals in onedark body, whose dogged strengthalone keeps it from being torn asunder.(W.E.B. Dubois, quoted in CharlesLong 1995, 178)

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Savarkar’s life became controversialonly after independence, and more so afterhis death. As details of his role in Gandhi’smurder and his obsequious letters to Britishauthorities, seeking forgiveness and promis-ing loyalty, began to get better known, theyled to all-round embarrassment. However,that does not fully explain the attempts toundervalue his anti-imperialist record inrecent years, why even the 50-year sentencepassed on him is not considered a proof ofhis credentials as a freedom fighter. Nordoes it explain why there has been so littleacceptance that, after being sentenced to jailfor 50 years in one’s mid-20s, one mayhave a failure of nerve and collapse of self-esteem. True, the criticisms often comefrom those who have no direct or indirectlink with the freedom struggle against theworld’s then-reigning superpower andhave the luxury of demanding total con-stancy and persistent self-sacrifice. But it isalso true that there has been no enquiry indepth into the inner drives that pushedSavarkar to his particularly petty version ofxenophobia. Was his violence an unrealistic,adolescent search for a heroic stature, whichcollapsed the moment he confronted its“natural,” inevitable consequences under acolonial dispensation? Did the Muslimsbecome for him a safer target, once hesensed the might of the British Empire? Didhe represent or tap a political-psychologicalpotentiality in urban, middle-class, educatedIndia during the last hundred years? Is thatpotentiality a price India has paid for itsmodernization? Are the attempts to demo-nize Savarkar ultimately a form of exorcism?

The last two questions are especiallyimportant. The hostility Savarkar arouses isthe hostility towards one who dares toremind us that the post-17th-century ideaof a nation-state and secularism have bothbeen complicit with ethnoreligious violenceduring the last two centuries. For Savarkar’shatred for Muslims came not from ideas ofritual purity and impurity or caste hierarchybut from his prognosis of communities thatcould or could not be integrated—assimi-lated or dissolved—within the framework

of a modern Indian state. The standard con-ventions of a nation-state within the West-phalian model constituted his religion andhe brought to it the fervour of a fundamen-talist. He was not willing to wait for thedecline of communities, the spread of lit-eracy and urban-industrial values—indivi-duation, secularization and instrumentalrationality—to ensure nation-formation in asociety organized around a different set ofprinciples. Actually, he was searching forsomething more substantial than territorial-ity to give Indian nationalism a stable base.The search was not unknown to modernIndians; many had mounted it before Savar-kar and many others were to do so after him.But most of them avoided facing the fullimplications of it. Savarkar was more openand honest about his goals. Hence, the peri-odic obsessive concern in India with the lifeof a person who throughout life remainedat the margin of Indian politics and whommainstream India and Hinduism neverknew well enough to forget.

The second part of the story is therecord of secularism in genocide, particu-larly ethnonationalist genocide, in the lasthundred years. Data on mass violenceshow that secular states, backed bysecular ideologies, account for at leasttwo-third of all the deaths in organizedmass violence during the 20th century.33

Savarkar typifies the attitudes and themotivational structure—the genocidal men-tality—that underlies politically engineeredmass violence.34 The conservative folktheory of secularism in many parts of theglobe, particularly its South Asian variantscannot cope with this reality. G.P. Desh-pande acknowledges this when he callsSavarkar a “secular communalist” vendinga “supra-religious ideology,” but does notsense how absurd these expressions soundin South Asian intellectual circles wheresecularism is seen as a magical cure of allcommunal passions (Deshpande 2006).35

Nor is Deshpande willing to take the nextstep and to read Savarkar as a pathologicalby-product of the modern idea of a secularnation-state rather than that of Hinduism.

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This love–hate relationship with Savar-kar in sections of India’s urban middleclass and the political identity he offeredcan be read, more aptly, as a lesson on thelimits of 19th-century modernity, scientificrationality and political realism rather thanas pathological ethnophobia. He was oneperson who had grasped the scope modernrationality offered to act out the hate withinhim, and his attitudes to Hindutva and theHindus were as instrumental as his attitudetowards the Muslims. His rationalist,amoral, anti-religious self had, paradoxi-cally, arrived at the conclusion that only reli-gion could be an efficacious building blockfor nation- and state-formation in SouthAsia and he did not know where to stop.In his impersonal, reified, Brahminic ideasof statecraft and politics, there was notmuch place for emotions, certainly not forcompassion. The aloof ruthlessness camepackaged in an arrogant trust in his own cle-verness and strategizing skills.

Even Savarkar’s atheism was not thephilosophical atheism associated with Bud-dhism and Vedanta, but the anti-clerical,hard atheism of fin-de-siècle scientism,increasingly popular among sections of theEuropean middle class and, through culturalosmosis, in parts of modern India.36 His poli-tics paralleled the way European racism inthe 1940s drew upon modern science, par-ticularly 19th-century biology and eugenics,and saw itself responsible for doing thedirty work of scientized history.37 The scep-tics might like to look up Savarkar’s com-ments on the cow, worshipped as sacred bymost Hindus, and compare it with the pos-ition of the organizations and parties thatconstitute the Hindu nationalist formationtoday. While the latter try to pander to thesentiments of the Hindus, Savarkar publiclysupported cow slaughter when necessaryand declared the cow to be a uselessanimal with no sacredness about it.38 Healso advised Hindus to give up vegetarian-ism and eat fish and eggs (Keer 1950,443–444). When Gandhi’s assassin andSavarkar’s protégé Godse complained inhis last testament in court about Gandhi’s

“superstitious” use of ideas such as soulforce and fasting in modern politics, it wasnot the accusation of a Hindu fundamental-ist. It mirrored Savarkar’s statism.

Over the last 80 years, most ideologuesof Hindu nationalism have neither comefrom orthodox Hinduism nor have theyflaunted their orthodoxy the way Gandhidid, by proclaiming himself a SanataniHindu. They have proudly affirmed theirlinks with the 19th-century Hindu reformmovements, which they see as analogues ofa masculine Protestantism, cleaning up adegraded, distorted faith to make it fit theneeds of a national state.

These ideologues borrowed from ideasthat were in the air during their formativeyears. Not only among European fascistsbut also among the European intelligentsiain general and among westernized Indianstrying desperately to cope with their feelingsof inferiority and attain global respectabilitythrough tough-minded, secular rationalitywedded to ideas of national interest, socialevolutionism, political realism and progres-sivism. Savarkar’s contempt for the likes ofGandhi came partly from that. Savarkarwas not alone. The first head of the RSS,Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889–1940),too, could hardly be called a run-of-the-mill, believing Hindu. An urban, well-edu-cated, modern doctor, with poor links withrural India and mainstream Hinduism, helike many pioneers of Hindu nationalismwas an aggressive critic of Hinduism andwas exposed to religious and social reformmovements, especially the RamakrishnaMission founded in 1897 by Swami Viveka-nanda (1863–1902). Hindu nationalism, onthis plane, was popular European politicaltheory and political history telescoped intoSouth Asia as a form of toady Hinduism.In retrospect, one realizes why Gandhiinsisted that the 19th-century religiousreform movements had done more harmthan good to Hinduism in the long run.

The entire process has remarkable paral-lels with the experiences of Sri Lankan Bud-dhism and Indian Islam under colonialismand the dual impact of urbanization and

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industrialization. There is in them the sameefforts to rationalize one’s faith and to setup demonic others who seemed betterequipped to handle the demands ofmodern world and its amoral ways; theytoo, consequently, initiated the same kindof self-engineering to be able to flirt withthe Dionysian in human personality,39 as ifthey were all caught in a larger, inescapable,evolutionary process that enjoyed intrinsiclegitimacy even among those hostile to reli-gious nationalism.40 That partly explainswhy most conservative Muslim clerics inIndia opposed the idea of a separatecountry for South Asian Muslims as un-Islamic, whereas the leadership of the Paki-stan movement sought a modern Muslimstate, the way many secular, liberal Jewssought a Jewish state. Is the dream of aliberal, ethnonationalist, modern state sus-tainable in the long run? Or is it an oxy-moron? No final answer has yet been given.

The founder of Pakistan, MohammedAli Jinnah—westernized, loyal to constitu-tionalism, staunchly secular in personal life—had as his avowed role model the classicalliberal Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915).Jinnah kept the ulema at a distance through-out his life, but was perfectly willing to usethem to advance the cause of a separatehomeland for South Asian Muslims —exactly as Savarkar, despite all his anti-Muslim rhetoric and passion for unitedIndia, not only established coalitions inSindh and Bengal with the Muslim League,fighting for Pakistan, but was proud ofthese alliances. He argued that the allianceswere more nationalistic than the ministriesformed by the “pseudo-nationalist” IndianNational Congress, led by Gandhi andNehru.41 There are parallels between the tra-jectories Savarkar and Jinnah traversed andthe reason they chose religion as a vehicleof nation-building despite being nonbelie-vers or casual believers. Both had interna-lized contemporary European politicalcategories and saw nationality as a crucialmodule of sovereign, modern republics.Both sought to replicate in South Asia exist-ing wisdom in the global citadels of

knowledge. Both represented the triumph inthe South not so much of history asof European history. If they were fundamen-talists, their fundamentals came from conven-tional European wisdom about nation-building and state-formation. Defying thewarning of Rabindranath Tagore, theyowned up the “motive force” of westernnationalism as their own (Tagore 1917, 77–78). Not surprisingly, the personal relationshipbetween Savarkar and Jinnah never soured.Nor did Savarkar ever entirely lose therespect of the likes of Subhas Chandra Bose,M.N. Roy and B.R. Ambedkar.

V

I have used some scrappy biographicaldetails on Savarkar to pose a series of ques-tions: has it become more or less inevitablefor a social group—be it a religion, caste,denomination, sect or ethnic entity—togradually acquire the features of a national-ity because that seems the only way commu-nity grievances can be aggregated andeffectively articulated in a culture of a statebased on a concept of citizenship enmeshedwith the idea of nationality? Do claimsmade in the name of a nationality havemore political impact than the same claimsmade in the name of other aggregates and,as a result, has there grown, in the last 100years, a tendency in religion-based orethnic political formations to act as national-ities to empower themselves? Does thatallow more effective mobilization in moder-nizing societies, particularly among thenewly modern, uprooted by social changesand seeking new communities, real or ima-ginary? Does it also mean that such national-ism has natural limits in a society that is notfully modern? Does Savarkar’s marginaliza-tion in Hindu society have something totell us?42

Everyone knows that the westernhistory of state-formation and nation-build-ing is simultaneously a story of how reli-gions, denominations and ethnicities werebludgeoned into nationalities. For thoseentering the realm of history for the first

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time in Asia and Africa—and facing the hier-archies and exclusions of the global state-nation system for the first time—the tempta-tion is not only to construct their ownhistory, but also to read into Europe’shistory their own past, present and future.Even when they construct their ownhistory, the categories and concerns thatframe it are “universal” or, it comes to thesame thing, European. When that readingis deployed as an evolutionary grid in anAsian or African society, there is a naturalfear that unless one builds a nation, what-ever its cost in human suffering, one willnot get justice locally or globally.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar andMohammed Ali Jinnah were not personallyas culpable as many like to believe. Theevil that many locate in them resided, atleast partly, in the political ideas that domi-nated the world. Savarkar and Jinnah were,like most first-generation builders of SouthAsian states, faithful and obedient pupils ofthe Bismarckian state and post-medievalEuropean republicanism, both vital parts ofthe dominant culture of common-sense intheir times. Once they accepted thatculture, they could not but try to duplicateEurope’s history in South Asia, whateverthe cost. Not surprisingly, neither of thetwo is known to have ever mourned theunnecessary death of more than a millionpeople in the bloodbath that came with thedivision of British India.43 For both, humanbeings were means of implementing impor-tant historical designs and in their versionsof nationalism the sufferings of the nationsthey represented were probably onlyinstances of collateral damage. The ration-ality they worshipped overlay deepemotional voids, created by personal lossesthat came almost like betrayals by fate.Both coped with the betrayal throughuncompromising, dispassionate, ruthlesspursuit of a form of political rationality thatallowed and even glorified withdrawalfrom or avoidance of personal emotionalinvolvements (Akhtar and Kumar 2008).Both lived with fragile, perhaps anchorlessself-definitions that pushed them to

embrace aggressive, ideological posturesthat tallied with their deeper psychologicalneeds. As I have said, in politics if youwear a mask long enough, it becomes yourface.

Jinnah’s case was more tragic. In hisfamous speech of 11 August 1947, threedays before the birth of Pakistan, he declaredinclusive nationalism based on territorialityas his project and sought to distinguishbetween inclusive and sectoral nationalismexactly the way Jawaharlal Nehru did.44 Hewanted Pakistan not to exclude non-Muslims in principle and in practice.Himself a Shia, Jinnah included in Pakistan’sfirst cabinet an Ahmadiya as the foreignminister and a Hindu Dalit as the ministerof law.45 Pakistan’s first national anthemwas written by a Hindu and, it is said,Jinnah had a hand in that choice. These didnot help; it was too late or, perhaps, tooearly. Nor could Indian nationalism,despite the presence of leaders such as Jawa-harlal Nehru, avoid full-scale militarization,nuclearism and intermittent religious andethnonationalist violence. Nationalism,once let out of the bag, tends to becomeself-sustaining and to plot its own political-psychological agenda.

Many Southern scholars, blinded bynationalism’s anti-imperialist role in theSouth, believe it can be tamed and used crea-tively. The experiences of South Asia in thelast two centuries suggest that usually reli-gions and cultures change to accommodatenationalism, not the other way round. Savar-kar, whom many see as a minor pawn ofSouth Asian history, did change not onlySouth Asian Hinduism but also SouthAsian Islam and Buddhism. All three hadto accommodate strains that have more incommon with house-broken versions ofChristianity in Europe and North Americathan with home-grown, South Asian Hindu-ism, Islam and Buddhism.46

Ultimately, Vinayak Damodar Sava is thename of a blown-up, grotesque temptationinherent in the Southern world’s encounterwith the global nation-state system and withreligious traditions that facilitate the

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internalization of the motive force of westernnationalism. That temptation is a part ofeveryone dreaming of working with tamedversions of nationalism and nation-statesarmed with ideas of rationality, secularism,progress and the so-called lessons of history,careful not to be trapped by empathy, com-passion and other such subjectivist traps.

Acknowledgement

This paper has grown out of a small paperthat was presented, under a different title,at the Panel on History of Religions asHermeneutics of Contact Situations: Coloni-alism, Imperialism and Popular Religions,organized by Michio Araki for 19th WorldCongress of the International Associationfor the History of Religions, Tokyo, 23–30March 2005. This, the final version, was pre-pared for the 2012 Shanghai Summit of theAsian Circle of Thought, held in connectionwith Shanghai Biennale. A revised andexpanded version was delivered as theSankari Prasad Bannerjee Memorial Lectureat the Department of Philosophy, CalcuttaUniversity on 29 August 2006. The presentversion was written for a public lecture atthe Ruprecht-Karls-Universit, Heidelberg,on 23 October 2008 and a section of it pub-lished in the website of the Karl JasperCentre of the University. I am grateful toMohan M. Trivedi who 30 years agohelpedme read some of the Marathi writingsof Vinayak Savarkar and Nathuram Godse.Others who have contributed to my insightsinto Savarkar’s personality include GopalGodse, whom I interviewed some 30 yearsago, and Siegfried O. Wolf, who drew myattention to some materials on Savarkar’ssojourn at London.

Notes

1. See also Nussbaum (2004). I am grateful to Chak-rabarti for drawing my attention to this work.

2. Nevertheless, the present essay has gained muchfrom Keer’s work and the correctives to it inNoorani (2002); and Sharma (1996). For aninsightful, nuanced discussion of the cultural

status of the autobiography in India and thebifurcation of the genre into jıv̄anvritt�anta and�atmakath�a by Gandhi, see Parekh (1989).

3. Years ago, I plotted the process of this reformalong two axes—Semiticization and revaluationof Kshatriya virtues—mainly to supplement thesocially more critical process of Sanskritizationthat M.N. Srinivas has studied (Nandy 1983).The third axis was missing—the emergence of ageneric, “portable,” tamed Hinduism thatwould make sense not only to scholars and theo-logians but also to a socially and geographicallymobile householder, cut off from his or herlocal, vernacular roots. To survive in the contem-porary world, that newHinduism had to be moreopen to Hindu nationalism and more compatiblewith a modern nation-state.

4. Upadhyay in many respects served as Tagore’sdouble. All three explicitly political novels ofTagore—Gor�a (1909), Ghare B�aire (1916) andCh�ar Adhy�aya (1934)—negotiate the personalityand ideology of Upadhyay. For a while in hisyouth, Tagore himself was close to Hindu nation-alism and, when he was moving out of thatphase, he found Upadhyay moving towards hisabandoned ideology (Nandy 1989).

5. For a detailed and insightful look at Upadhyay,see Lipner (1999). Others elsewhere in Indiawere moving towards Upadhyay’s position, indi-cating that it was somethingmore than an idiosyn-cratic, personal choice. Only a few years later, HarDayal (1888–1939) in North India began articulat-ing a similar idea of political Hinduism, althoughwithout an explicit theory of violence.

6. Justice J.S. Verma, who delivered the judgment,was to, however, later claim that politicians hadmisused his judgment, without admitting thatthe judgment gave a suspect political ideologythe status of a religion, which even Savarkar andthe RSS had not claimed or done. On JusticeVerma’s self-justification, see Verma (2003).

7. For a detailed, well-researched discussion ofSavarkar on rape and his belief that a woman’sbody can be a political instrument and weaponand the Hindus must learn to use this weapon,see Agarwal (1996).

8. Even this may not be the whole story. LloyddeMause has argued that the origins of war liepartly in the fantasy of war as righteous rape.Savarkar might have reversed the process, ima-gining rape as a form of war that allegedlymakes nations. See deMause (2002, ch. 6).Suresh Sharma (1996, 202) argues that Savarkarreneged on the inclusive nationalism of hisearlier years “not because Hindu rashtra rep-resented a higher ideal” but because he came tothe conclusion that his earlier project was not a

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feasible one, whereas a Hindu nation was a rea-lizable goal. Sharma is not wrong but hisinterpretation does not fully explain the lowrhetoric and passions of an otherwise Machiavel-lian politician who was proudly dispassionateand impersonal. For that one must take intoaccount the inner demons that populated Savar-kar’s world.

9. On the political-cultural context from withinwhich Savarkar emerged and within which hemade sense, see Fasana (1994, 1996).

10. It is a remarkable coincidence that Savarkar’sbook was published more or less at the sametime as Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, which projectedan entirely different view of India’s self-definitionand political future, and Rabindranath Tagore’snovel Gora, a sophisticated rebuttal of Savarkar’sideology from a prescient, proto-Gandhian pointof view.

11. One result was that, when Gandhi next visitedIndia House in 1909 to preside over Dusserah cel-ebrations, he made it a condition that only veg-etarian food would be served. On the basicphilosophical clash between Savarkar’s modern-ism, including his total commitment to modernscience and technology, and Gandhi’s radical,futuristic critique of modernity, the urban-indus-trial vision and Baconian science and technology,see Sharma (1996), Raghuramaraju (2006, 66–91),and Nandy (1987, 127–163).

12. Also see Karandikar (1947, 33).13. For Savarkar’s version of his days in England, see

Inside the Enemy Camp (www.Savarkar.org).14. The property was not returned to him in

independent India either. When the lastrequest in Savarkar’s life time was made toMorarji Desai, then Chief Minister of Bombay,Desai was unambiguous. He said that theharm Savarkar had done to the country in hislater life outweighed the good he did to itearlier (Keer 1950, 406).

15. To get a flavour of the sadomasochistic environ-ment of cellular jail, as it was experienced bySavarkar, see Savarkar (1984a). This is a trans-lation of the book Mazi Janmathep serialized intwo Marathi journals in 1925–27 and laterpublished as a book by Savarkar. For those whomight be tempted to read the account as exagger-ated and self-serving, there is also the more recentinvocation of the concentration-camp-like ambi-ence of the jail by two British journalists inScott-Clark and Levy (2001). Scott-Clark andLevy depend not only on survivors’ testimonybut also on official records. See also Aggarwal(2006).

16. Some amount of doublespeak, ingratiation andmanipulative behaviour was common in the

sick environment of Andamans, both amongthe prison staff and the prisoners, includingsome of the most respected freedom fighters.These had become inevitable tools of survival,even resistance. See Savarkar (1984a, ch. 16).However, Savarkar’s attempts to cast himselfin a heroic mould and judge others by imposs-ible standards, standards by which he himselfcould not live, did not make him particularlypopular among other freedom fighters in thejail. Ideologically, he could not accept infreedom fighters the normal “weaknesses” ofhuman beings. He was not sensitive to theinner life of persons and his ideology hadlittle space for human subjectivities, which hetended to see as emasculating. One revealinginstance was his inability to see through theweak, fearful, insecure, scheming Barrie, theIrish jailor who at one level was a tyrant anda sadist, and at another, a self-hating, colonialsubject trying to ingratiate him by talking toSavarkar about his early hatred of the Englishand the unpleasant duties his job imposed onhim. Savarkar’s attempts to score debatingpoints whenever Barrie opened a conversationwith him quickened Barrie’s feelings of inferior-ity and his lurking awareness of his moraldegradation and made him doubly dangerous.

17. These rumours probably induced two popularwriters to suspect that there was homosexualbonding between V.D. Savarkar and NathuramGodse. See Collins and Lapiere ([1975] 1997).Could it be that in the masculinized worldviewof Hindu nationalism, these rumours, even ifuntrue, were a metaphoric means of recognizingthe emasculation of Savarkar?

18. Things were seemingly different before Savarkarwent to Andamans. On the way to Andamans,when he was staying in a jail at Bombay, hewas helped by one of his Muslim warders and,he openly acknowledged that.

19. See Raghavan (2003). Raghavan tries hard to sellthe colonial regime’s natural suspicion of Savar-kar’s motives behind his mercy petitions as aproof of Savarkar’s persistent faith in his politicaltactics. Actually, such proof is not necessary. Hisparticipation in Gandhi’s murder is a more thanadequate proof that his tactics did not changeover a period of four decades. The question is:was he willing to or psychologically capable oftaking on the colonial state or, for that matter,any state after his experiences in Andamans?Savarkar was an incurable statist, but the Cellularjail taught him a thing or two about the powerand ruthlessness of states. The tone of his mercypetition to the government sent from the cellularjail says it all. Not only did he promise to “serve

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the government in any capacity” it wanted, healso added, “… the mighty alone can afford tobe merciful and therefore where else can the pro-digal son return but to the parental doors of thegovernment” (Noorani 2002, 18).

20. Quoted in Kamath (1993, 445). IdeologicallySavarkar was against suicide, but the idea didcome fleetingly to him even at Andamans.When Indu Bhushan Roy committed suicideunable to bear the life at Andamans, Savarkarsaid to himself, according to his own admission,“Who knows, one day your fate will be thesame as his” (Savarkar 1984a, 216).

21. Savarkar wrote: “I hereby acknowledge that Ihad a fair trial and just sentence. I heartilyabhor methods of violence resorted to in daysgone by, and I feel myself duty bound touphold Law and the constitution to the best ofmy powers and am willing to make the Reform[Montagu-Chelmsford proposals of 1919, rejectedby virtually every Indian political party] asuccess insofar as I may be allowed to do so infuture” (Dubey and Ramakrishnan 1996).

22. When Madhavrao Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906–1973), the head of the RSS during 1940–1973,attempted an updated handbook on Hindunationalism, he ended up crudely parrotingSavarkar, even though he had been a butt ofSavarkar’s biting sarcasm for his softnesstowards Hindu rituals and beliefs. See Golwalkar(1939). Golwalkar reportedly showed the manu-script of the book to one of Savarkar’s brothersfor comments, criticisms and suggestions. It didnot help, for Savarkar’s aim was to producenothing less than a house-broken, defangedversion of Hinduism that would be subservientto a modern nation-state.

23. It is surprising that to a person as obsequiouslyand uncritically European in his politicalthought as Savarkar, it never occurred to himthat every European nationality had its holyland not only outside their country but outsideEurope as well. Probably he thought thatEurope was advanced and modern enough tohave outgrown its ethno-religious past anddenominational differences, and could sustainits nationalities on rational and secular groundsalone.

24. By Indians, Kaviraj of course means the small,modernizing, urban, middle-class India thatdominated public discourse at the time.

25. As he put it in a speech unearthed by historianPrabha Dixit (Hindu Mahasabha Records, File13, quoted in Noorani [2002, 34]), “in Hindustanit is the Hindus professing Hindu religion andbeing in overwhelming majority that constitutethe national community and create and formulate

the nationalism of the nation. It is so in everycountry of the world.”

26. As he once said in a maudlin homage to themartyrs of 1857: “And then, oh Martyrs, tell usthe little as well as the great defects which youfound out in our people in that experiment ofyours. But above all, point out that ruinous,nay, the only material draw-back in the body ofthe nation which rendered all your efforts futile—the mean selfish blindness which refuses tosee its way to join the nation’s cause. Say thatthe only cause of the defeat of Hindusthan wasHindusthan herself” (Savarkar 1984b, 55–56).

27. Though he never directly wrote on the subject,Savarkar had swallowed hook, line and sinkerEuropean social evolutionism. He “did notapprove of the Indians writing on Vedanta. Hewould have them write rather on politicalhistory, science, economy and such other subjects,because, he said, “The Americans need Vedantaand so does England; for they have developedtheir life to that fullness, richness and manliness—to Kshatriyahood and so stand on the thresholdof that Brahminhood. But…we are… at presentall Shudras and cannot claim access to the Vedaand Vedanta” (Savarkar 1984b, 5).

28. For more details see Nandy (1980, 2010). Payne inhis Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi neatlydescribes the political ambience in which theassassination took place. He talks of the “…shadowy presences lurking in the background.… Their names are unknown to history, or canbe guessed at. The attentive reader of the volumi-nous trial reports soon finds himself haunted bythe certainty that many others who never stoodtrial were involved in the conspiracy (Payne1968, 646).

29. Tushar Gandhi also suggests that Patel madepeace with his conscience by choosing tobelieve that Gandhi was killed for going on fastto force the Government of India to give Pakistanthe Rs 550 million due to it. Actually, the samegroup of conspirators had made at least twoearlier attempts to kill Gandhi years before theissue of money came up.

30. These details do not support Tushar Gandhi’sbelief that Savarkar wrote or edited NathuramGodse’s powerfully testimony in court (Gandhi2007, 606–607). However, the testimony doesshow how deeply the assassin had internalizedSavarkar and wanted to act as an extension ofSavarkar’s self.

31. By this time, giving obsequious undertakings toauthorities had become a way of life with Savar-kar. The last undertaking was also his mostabject. In independent India, despite his totalopposition to the pact, he promised, in writing,

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to “exhort the people to observe the Nehru-LiaqatAli Pact.” Even his fawning biographer Keer isforced to admit that “for a moment, the physicalagonies [of preventive detention] must haveoverpowered his stubborn will” (Keer 1950,432). This undertaking, too, was given underMorarji Desai, then the Home Minister ofBombay. Understandably Desai, who was inexcellent spirits when jailed during the freedomstruggle and was to improve in his health whenjailed by the Indira Gandhi regime at about theage of 80 during the Emergency and suspensionof civil rights in 1975–1977, had utter contemptfor Savarkar.

32. Payne (1968, 209) puts it succinctly when he says,“Long before he died, he knew that he had beenlike a man waiting in the wings for the call tooccupy the centre of the stage, but the call nevercame.”

33. See for example Rummel (1994).34. See for example Lifton and Markusen (1990).35. Deshpande also points out that Savarkar concep-

tualized Hindutva as some kind of HegelianGeist. It is not clear from his brief but insightfulcomment whether Savarkar borrowed as directlyfrom Hegel as he did from Mazzini.

36. Nothing expressed Savarkar’s tough-mindedatheism better than his refusal to allow anyHindu religious ritual or rite when his wifedied, notwithstanding public protests and Satya-graha by some of his followers. He did not evenwant her body to be brought home, saying thatit was “no use lamenting over the dead body”(Keer 1950, 529–530).

37. Aditya Nigam in a comment has differentiatedbetween two styles of Hindu nationalism, one typi-fied by Savarkar and the other by Golwalkar, thebelieving Hindu who came to head the RSS inthe 1940s. He suggests that Golwalkar’s is themore dangerous version (Nigam 2005). Nigammay be right, because the likes of Golwalkar cantake Hindu nationalism into Hinduism andreshape the culture of Indian politics and, at theend, Hinduism in a way that Savarkar couldnever do. On the other hand, Savarkar seems toconform more faithfully to the profile of thefascist personality as portrayed in post-SecondWorldWar psychoanalysis and social and politicalpsychology. Could it be that, despite the rhetoric ofpublic debate in India, the “classical” Europeanfascism in India can be the ideology of only a con-spiratorial political fringe and the moredangerous sources of political authoritarianismlie elsewhere?

38. Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of Arya Samaj,also approved of eating beef in the first edition ofSaty�arthaprak�ash (1874) but the remark was

dropped from the second edition in 1882(Ghosh 1960; quoted in Sharma 1996, 69). As iswell known, similar comments are also attributedto Vivekananda.

39. See for instance, Tambiah (1992) and Madan(1998). The overall cultural psychological frame-work within which Savarkar worked has beendiscussed in Nandy et al. (1995).

40. For instance, the early Hindu nationalists wererole models for Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalists.Anagarika Dhammapala (1864–1933) lived inCalcutta, the capital of British India until 1911and was an admirer of Vivekananda. The Maha-bodhi Society that Dhammapala established wasdirectly inspired by the Ramakrishna Missionand less directly by the theosophical society.

41. Savarkar and Joshi (1967, 96–105); see particu-larly pages 99–101.

42. I should clarify at this point that I view nationalismas an ideology that is radically different from thesentiment called patriotism, alhough the firstkind of territoriality may build upon or mobilizefor its purposes the second kind. For a moreextended discussion of the issue, see Nandy (2005).

43. I have already drawn attention to Savarkar’s fas-cination with gratuitous violence in politicalmatters. That fascination, though it came pack-aged in the rhetoric of revolution, preceded hisideological convictions. Many have found moredisorienting the openness to violence of Jinnah,whom Eqbal Ahmad (2000, 10) has called aliberal constitutionalist. Kuldip Nayar, forinstance, says that when asked in 1946, after thecall for Direct Action given by the MuslimLeague, whether Direct Action would be violentor non-violent, Jinnah said, “I am not going todiscuss ethics” (Nayar 2006, 25).

44. Mr. Jinnah’s first Presidential Address to theConstituent Assembly of Pakistan, 11 August 1947(http://www.stanford.edu/group/pakistan/pakistan/legislation/constituent_address_ 11aug1947.html).

45. It is remarkable that the passage of modern,secular constitutions of both India and Pakistanwere officially piloted by two Dalits, BabasahebAmbedkar and Jogen Mandal. The former, whoof course played a more significant role inshaping the constitution of his country, is vir-tually deified in India; the latter is forgotten inboth countries.

46. For instance, Daniel (2001). True, surveys done inIndia suggest that only about 10% of those whovote for Hindu nationalist parties do so on ideo-logical grounds, but in absolute numbers that isa substantial presence. Data Unit of the Centrefor the Study of Developing Societies, 1998Survey of General Elections in India.

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Author’s biography

Ashis Nandy began as a sociologist and clinical psy-chologist but has, over the years, strayed into areasoutside formal social sciences and normal academicconcerns. His research interests now centre on the pol-itical psychology of violence, cultures of knowledge,utopias and visions, human potentialities, andfutures. Presently he is working on genocide and onlost cities. The running themes in his work have beenhis concern and respect for marginalized categoriesand systems of knowledge and a robust scepticismtowards expert-driven, packaged, professional sol-utions to human problems. His work seeks to createmore space for concepts and categories thrown up bythe experiences of Southern cultures and the algorithmof everyday life of ordinary citizens. He has authoredmany books, including: The Intimate Enemy: Loss andRecovery of Self under Colonialism; The Tao of Cricket:On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games; The Illegi-timacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Poli-tics of Self; The Savage Freud and Other Essays inPossible and Retrievable Selves; An Ambiguous Journeyto the City: The Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Selfin the Indian Imagination; The Romance of the State andthe Fate of Dissent in the Tropics; Time Warps: The Insis-tent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts; and Time Treks:The Uncertain Future of Old and New Despotisms.

Contact address: Centre for the Study of DevelopingSocieties, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054, India

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