The Language of Hindutva

The terms “Hindu Rashtra” and “Hindutva” have dominated political discourse since 2014. The first notable use of these terms can be dated to VD Savarkar’s 1923 pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva. Whereas Hinduism refers to the “system of religions the Hindus follow,” Savarkar explained during his presidential address at the 1939 session of the Hindu Mahasabha, Hindutva “is far more comprehensive and refers not only to the religious aspect of the Hindu people … but comprehends even their cultural, linguistic, social and political aspects as well. It is more or less akin to ‘Hindu polity’ and its near exact translation would be ‘Hinduness.’” He used the word “Hindudom” to mean “the Hindu people spoken of collectively. It is a collective term for the Hindu world, just as Islam denotes the Moslem world or Christiandom denotes the Christian world.” Throughout its history, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has espoused these ideas as its foundational goalposts, even though they display a flawed understanding of India. As a result, while attempting to accomplish the project of turning India into a Hindu Rashtra, it has had to distort history and misrepresent the “cultural, linguistic, social and political aspects” of the Indian people.

In the sociopolitical realm, this has involved harking back to a glorious ancient past, despite the injustices rising out of the formation of varna and jati hierarchies, and the despicable patriarchy to which women were subjected in that period. This age of glory is held up against the “dark age” of the mediaeval period, which is depicted as full of humiliation for Hindus and atrocities by Muslim rulers. These false images of the past overlook that, at the time of Independence, only 45 of the 565 principalities in undivided India were ruled by Muslims. An overview of the entire second millennium shows that mediaeval kingdoms were not theological and were increasingly dependent on regionally powerful chieftains, who secured and consolidated power under both Hindu and Muslim overlords before being assimilated by the British as “rajas.” Indian culture did not wither away during the period of Muslim domination—the Bhakti Movement, for instance, emerged after the fall of the Gupta Empire and matured under the Mughals, declining only under colonial rule.

The Sangh’s reimagining of the linguistic aspects can be seen in the efforts of the Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti, a body set up by the Narendra Modi government’s education ministry in 2021. The committee is headed by Chamu Krishna Shastry, who joined the RSS as a teenager and cofounded its affiliate Samskrita Bharati. Shastry’s personal website credits him with having “brought Sanskrit back to everyday life as a vibrant communicative language,” adding that millions of people have participated in the “Speak Samskrit Movement” he launched in 1981. In May 2025, The Telegraph reported that the government had been paying him a higher salary than vice-chancellors of central universities and that the education ministry had responded to a right-to-information request by saying that a bio-data listing his qualifications was “unavailable.” The Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti has been charged with redefining India’s linguistic identity by overturning the wisdom accrued by thousands of researchers across the world over the past two centuries.

Last year, the committee, in association with the National Book Trust, published two books, titled Bharatiya Bhasha Pariwar: A New Framework in Linguistics and Collected Studies on Bharatiya Bhasha Pariwar: Horizons and Perspectives. These provided a scholarly basis to a mission that had been outlined in a 2016 manifesto prepared by the education ministry’s language expert committee, which had been set up soon after Modi first came to power. Titled Comprehensive Language Policy for India, the manifesto argued for the need to empower Indian languages in apocalyptic terms.