IT SHOULD NOT COME as a surprise that a figure who was once deeply invested in presenting India’s history as a series of glorious, often fictive, Hindu exploits is now being memorialised in a manner that reflects his own tendency to alter facts. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the Hindutva ideologue, has been the subject of numerous biographies—there are around two hundred and fifty, most in Marathi, including a spate in the last decade, with a biopic out this April. In her recent book Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva, the historian Janaki Bakhle points out the circular logic that several unquestioning, adulatory biographies exhibit. “What Savarkar wrote about himself,” she writes, “became what Savarkar’s acolytes claimed about him, only then to be used as straightforward evidence of the truth of what Savarkar claimed.”
Bakhle’s book and another recent title, Vinayak Chaturvedi’s Hindutva and Violence: V.D. Savarkar and the Politics of History, stand out against the mostly hagiographic accounts that preceded them. They do not omit facts that might lead to uncomfortable conclusions about Savarkar’s ideological positions, and largely succeed in challenging his ventures in rewriting history. The books also piece together his life story, separating it from the myths that surround it. And yet, the circumstances surrounding his political transformation—from being a critic of the British government before he was sent to jail, in 1911, to becoming a Hindutva ideologue, defined mainly by his animus towards Muslims, upon his release—still remain somewhat unclear. This is where Savarkar’s legacy is most at risk, and this is the aspect of his intellectual thought and politics that has remained most obscure.
After his release from jail, in 1924, Savarkar was never again seen participating in the anticolonial struggle. Instead, he fought against nationalist efforts to unite Hindus and Muslims, and adopted a stance that suited the colonial government’s policy of divide and rule. He also attempted to undermine the Quit India movement and assisted the British war effort. His writing during this time was direct and searing—his books were weapons wielded against Muslims, not the British.
This transformation was to have enormous consequences. Hindutva, the ideological foundations of which Savarkar developed during the final decades of British rule, has loomed large over the history of independent India, particularly over the last ten years, since Narendra Modi came to power. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s 2019 manifesto promised a posthumous Bharat Ratna for Savarkar, and Modi has regularly offered tributes on his birth anniversary, variously extolling his “tireless efforts towards the regeneration of our Motherland” or remarking that his “fearless and self-respecting nature could not tolerate the mindset of slavery at all.” The aggressive rehabilitation of Savarkar makes it vital to consider the aspects of his persona, writing and ideology, as well as the many myths and misconceptions around them, that have currency today.