Book Review of 'Savarkar: The true story of the father of Hindutva by Vaibhav Purandare, Juggernaut, 2019'

Book Review by K.S.Loganathan, Tyre and rubber consultant and author.

Savarkar: The true story of the father of Hindutva by Vaibhav Purandare, Juggernaut, 2019

The Marathi biographer Vaibhav Purandare follows up on his biographies of Sachin Tendulkar and Bal Thackeray with that of the great anti-imperialist Indian patriot, Savarkar.

He deals brilliantly with the interpretation of the immense mass of documents, particularly as reported in Marathi journals, relating to the complicated period of Indian history from the years 1883 to 1966 that Savarkar lived. The dark side of imperial Britain, the high hopes of the Indian nationalists and Savarkar’s own trials and tribulations are captured well. It was a period of much bitter discontent and turmoil all over Europe and Asia, marked by two world wars and the weakened position of the European colonial powers after 1945.

Savarkar was born into a Chitpavan Brahmin community near Nasik, which embraced the British education system early. The gerrymandering of Bengal by Curzon in 1905 exemplified the British policy of divide and rule in India. It had been the tipping point for nationalist fervour, the advent of the bomb cult in Bengal and the bonfire of British manufactured fabrics as part of the growing Swadeshi movement. Communication at the time for political activists was limited to the press and loudspeakers in Hindu religious public gatherings. Savarkar’s activism led to his expulsion from the college hostel. He won a scholarship in 1906 to study law in London. To mark the 50^th anniversary of the 1857 uprising, Savarkar’s anarchist activities in London intensified. He wrote the seminal work, ‘The first Indian war of independence’ in Marathi, which was translated into English. The book presented an Indian perspective, and its intensity was to ignite revolutionary-minded youth for over a generation to achieve swaraj.

Savarkar was named prime conspirator in killing or attempting to kill British officials and was given two terms of life imprisonment. He was dispatched to the Andamans and was incarcerated in the cellular jail for ten years in the company of hardened criminals. The imprisonment proved to be his crucible. Although he had cleared his law examinations, he was disbarred from practice for life. When he was shifted to Ratnagiri prison in 1921, he wrote the tract Hindutva. His call for Hindu revival is in largely political terms although some extreme religious reforms were recommended. He defined the nation based on the unifying Hinduness of its native people. The word Hindu originally meant ‘inhabitant of India’. The Mughals and the European colonists had brought into the country proselytization and extra-territorial spiritual loyalties. In the era of simmering Hindu-Muslim tensions following the Khilafat movement, the tract was inflammatory, and he earned ‘district arrest’ in Ratnagiri from 1924-37. The national movement had undergone a radical transformation towards non-violent civil disobedience under Mahatma Gandhi in the years Savarkar was in prison. His individual freedom only came in 1937, but national freedom was still a decade away. The British were wary of his propagandist activities as he was still revered by revolutionary-minded youth who were inclined to direct action. His differences with Mahatma Gandhi and other political leaders came to the fore in the Quit India Movement. Savarkar was arrested and arraigned in the case of Nathuram Godse’s murder of Mahatma Gandhi, based on his utterances days before the murder. Although acquitted, Savarkar could not escape the moral burden of the assassination as the plotters were his followers. It gripped him in a downward spiral with poor health and a tendency to shut out people close to him altogether in his last days. This then is the story of a patriot who ‘ loved not wisely but too well’.

My views

It is remarkable that the main leaders of the freedom movement — Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Savarkar and Jinnah— were all Western-educated and well acquainted with European political and economic theory. It gave them leverage in dealing with the British rulers and negotiating concessions. To be politically enfranchised was instead a privilege than a right in those times. Prior to independence, slow industrialisation, poverty, famine and plague, military weaknesses, illiteracy and superstition prevailed in the land. Their leadership propelled essentially a peasant India toward self-determination. The spirit of the times, extreme nationalism at one moment, and conciliatory in the next, in due course settled on the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi with his non-violent civil disobedience movement as a political tactic to overcome a powerful oppressor. Even as the various political leaders stimulated national consciousness, they had vastly divergent ideas on the shape the country would take under self-rule. While their influence on the people was profound, the continuing relevance of their ideas in today’s discourse is a matter of debate.

The industrial and political revolutions in Europe in Savarkar’s youth propagated the ideas of automation, liberty, equality and national self-determination among Western-educated Indians.  For the masses, increasingly, their linguistic or religious consciousness tended to merge with their awareness of being poor and without rights. Since independence, universal adult franchise, linguistic and political divisions, the Westminster model of governance, reservations and a guarantee of individual freedoms have all happened in a secular and rapidly industrialising India. While individual freedoms can thus be protected, at the societal levels, these are circumscribed by tradition and faith, social stratification by caste and class, and distribution of wealth and opportunities. We cannot ignore the complex issues like federalism, cultural autonomy or regional traditions of this diverse population now engaged in nation building. It is from the collective energies and wisdom of the people that solutions are to be found in a people’s democracy. Most decolonised Asian countries have retreated to despotism, martial law or theocracy even as accelerating changes in the global order threaten to depose the existing systems.

Of the leaders of his time, Savarkar’s assessment of global realpolitik was perhaps the most pragmatic and least idealistic. His prescriptions for religious reform, which was the burning question of the day, and for the purity of language, though appealing to a few, are often bizarre. His life story, as told by Purandare, is riveting and thought provoking. It is likely to provide Indo-centric ideas for introspection to the question of identity when our cultural pre-occupations are still predominantly Western — who are we and where are we headed?

Purandare’s fact-checking is meticulous, but the text can be tightened and embellished with photographs of the period.