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Hindutva and violence: V. D. Savarkar and the politics of history

2023; Oxford University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ia/iiad206

1468-2346

C. Christine Fair,

Politics and Society in Latin America

Hindutva and violence charts the intellectual arc of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the founder of Hindu nationalism from which India's contemporary Hindu chauvinists draw their mission to transform the nation into an authoritarian Hindu state.Throughout his lifetime, Savarkar promoted a two-pronged programme, to 'Hinduize' Indian politics and to militarize Hindus in the pursuit of a 'permanent war against Christians and Muslims' (p.3).In the book, Vinayak Chaturvedi engages Savarkar's principal conception: 'a history in full' through which he linked 'Hindutva to Being' (p.11).Chaturvedi's analysis is organized into four chronological sections, dividing several key texts that Savarkar published according to particular locations and time periods: London (1906); Port Blair and Pune (1911-23); Ratnagiri (1924-37); and Bombay (1937-63).Accordingly, the first chapter focuses on two of Savarkar's earliest essays, published in London: Joseph Mazzini (1907) and The Indian war of independence of 1857 (1909).Savarkar employed the revolutionary principles of the Italian Mazzini in his 'history in full', and he translated Mazzini's works into Marathi.Savarkar found several aspects of Mazzini's ideas appealing, namely the revolutionary's assertion that religion and politics were synonymous and that it is 'a religious duty to establish politics in religion' (p.61).Savarkar deployed Mazzini's revolutionary arguments in his own account of the first war of Indian independence in order to 'liberat[e] the enslaved history of India' (pp.91-3).He blamed Indians for '"the plague of slavery" … [because they] had lost their ability to "defend religion"' (p.94).In his 1909 publication on the 1857 war of independence, Savarkar depicted Hindus and Muslims as partners freeing India from the British.At the time, he detailed his loathing for effeminate men who 'should be annihilated and suffer super-savage cruelty' (p.112).However, Savarkar's hatred for Muslims would only appear later in his life, perhaps as a consequence of his encounters with Muslim jailers at Port Blair in India.The second part analyses Savarkar's Essentials of Hindutva (1923).In 1910, he was arrested and sentenced to two life sentences, which he served first in Port Blair and subsequently in Pune.While many viewed Savarkar as an anti-imperialist, Chaturvedi maintains that he 'argued precisely for the centrality of empire' for all Hindus who 'had once participated in the violent colonization of land' that culminated in a Hindu nation, and subsequently a Hindu empire (p.121).Crucially, Savarkar attributed the loss of this empire to the feminization of Hindu men, and he pointed to the Maratha's 'last great Hindu empire' to promulgate the violent recolonization of 'Hindustan' through a forever war against Muslims and Christians.Moreover, he saw diasporan Hindus as potentially instrumental for religious warfare and state-building abroad (p.123).Then, part three evaluates Savarkar's approaches to writing a history in full after his transfer from Port Blair to Pune (p.211).This section draws upon Hindu Pad-Padshahi (1925), in which Savarkar asserted the need for accounts of pan-Hindu