What To Keep In Mind When Reading This New Biography Of Savarkar

Elite Marathi society was split down the middle during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. On one side were those who argued that India had to put its own house in order before it was ready for political independence. The other side argued that political power would give nationalists the means to address social ills.

Neither did the social reformers deny the eventual need for political independence nor did the political radicals dismiss the need for social reforms. The question was of sequence.

The battle of ideas was personified in the debates between two brilliant college friends in Pune, who later became bitter rivals — Gopal Ganesh Agarkar on the social reform side and Bal Gangadhar Tilak on the political agitation side. 

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar grew up in Maharashtra at a time when these debates formed the backdrop for much of local public life. He was one of the few who tried to build a bridge between the two camps, by drawing political inspiration from Tilak and social inspiration from Agarkar.

Savarkar led an extraordinary life that spanned the worlds of international revolutionaries, Indian nationalists and the Marathi milieu. However, I believe that understanding Savarkar requires an appreciation of the Marathi culture he grew up in, which shaped his ideas as a young man, and to which he contributed as a thinker, writer and poet.

Janaki Bakhle, a professor of history of the University of California Berkeley, has written a new biography of Savarkar that engages with what Savarkar wrote in Marathi, the long tradition of Savarkar scholarship in his mother tongue, and the broader world of Marathi letters at that time. The new biography has a 39-page appendix of excerpts from Savarkar’s Marathi essays as well as some of his poems. The result is a fine book that avoids the usual pitfalls of either hagiography or derision.

Bakhle, while often critical of Savarkar, sometimes too harshly, gives her protagonist the serious attention he deserves as one of the most influential Indians of the previous century, and whose ideas have only grown in importance in our times. Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva sequentially looks at Savarkar as an anti-colonial revolutionary, a “demagogue” on the Muslim question, an outspoken social reformer, a poet, a nationalist historian, and “a legend in his own time”.

The Marathi thinking of the time was shaped by two historical facts. First, the rebellion against Mughal rule that began in their land had led to the creation of a swarajya. Second, the British won Maharashtra by defeating this homegrown political power rather than a remnant of the Mughal Empire.

Marathi intellectuals before Savarkar saw the great Maratha uprising in the seventeenth century as the first stirrings of Indian nationalism, rather than a mere tussle for feudal power in medieval times.

One of the best expressions of this view was provided by Mahadev Govind Ranade, the preeminent liberal public figure in nineteenth century Maharashtra: “The rise of Maratha power was due to the first beginnings of what one may well call the process of nation-making. It was not the outcome of the successful enterprise of any individual adventurer. It was the upheaval of the whole population, strongly bound together by the common affinities of language, race, religion and literature, and seeking further solidarity by a common independent political existence. This was the first experiment of its kind attempted in India after the disastrous period of foreign Musalman invasions.”

The idea of Maratha power as a common endeavour that spanned all parts of society also meant an embedded idea of inclusion, at least during the reign of Chhatrapati Shivaji. A lot is known about his military achievements. Shivaji also had a broader vision for the state that he established. Ranade compared Shivaji to Napoleon Bonaparte, “a great organiser and builder of civil institutions”.

“Shivaji founded the Maratha state for doing good to the Maratha people. But he was also conscious of his role in Indian history as a defender of the Hindus against the onslaught of Islam. At the same time he was no crusader against Islam as an alien faith, he only wanted to divest it of its political role in India,” wrote the Marathi historian T.S. Shejwalkar, who features prominently in Bakhle’s book as a counterpoint to Savarkar, both for his approach to writing history as well as his conception of what Bakhle describes as “Hindu nationalism without Hindutva”.

Shejwalkar, who wrote a celebrated book on the third battle of Panipat, was also critical of the Peshwas for abandoning Shivaji’s grand political vision in the eighteenth century.

Yet, none of the major figures in Marathi public life in the second half of the nineteenth century hoped to turn the clock back to Peshwa rule. They looked forward to how to build a modern Indian nation state. They were informed by history while not allowing it to constrain their view on the future. This backstory is necessary to understand how intense debates about political liberty, social inclusion, tradition and modernity intersected in the Marathi world of ideas when Savarkar was a young man.

Bakhle begins her book with a pen portrait of Savarkar that is largely drawn from police files, including what she describes as a “smuggled archive”. The details tell us as much about Savarkar as about the colonial regime’s views on political radicals.

Bakhle then turns to the four issues that are central to her book — Savarkar views on Muslims, his social reform battles, his poetry, and his role as a nationalist historian. She delves deep into each of these. A few points are worth noting here.

Savarkar had made the Muslim question central to his politics. It was not just about the political threat he perceived in Pan-Islamism. Bakhle shows that Savarkar portrayed individual Muslims as subhuman in his Marathi plays.

Savarkar also sometimes hinted at the possibilities of a political settlement that transcended the historical schism, for example in his book on the 1857 war of independence and his book on Maratha history. In the latter, he wrote that the point of studying history is to learn how to overcome the faultlines of the past, rather than deepening them. As Zionist leader Shimon Peres said when he switched to becoming a votary of peace with the Palestinians: “There are times when we should use our imagination more than our memory”.

Although her book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, Bakhle has restricted her analysis till Savarkar’s release from internment at Ratnagiri in 1937, as is also the case of a celebrated Marathi book on Savarkar by the historian Y.D. Phadke.

The Hindu Mahasabha’s draft constitution for a Free Hindustani state or the coalition governments with the Muslim League suggest that Savarkar was also open to a political settlement in an independent state where every citizen had equal political and social rights, irrespective of caste, religion, language or gender.

One reason the response to Savarkar has been more nuanced in Maharashtra, as Bakhle notes, is that even people in the anti-Hindutva camp have genuine respect for the path he lit up in his early years as a revolutionary, his rationalism and his social reform struggles.

There has always been the question whether Savarkar fought against social ills as a matter of principle or as a necessary requirement for the broader goal of Hindu unity. My own view is that it is the former. His Marathi writings on these issues show that Savarkar framed social reform in the context of national progress rather than Hindu consolidation. He was, as I have mentioned earlier, a disciple of Agarkar in these matters.

Bakhle may disagree with this assessment. She says that “all his writings on caste were about Muslims”. She also uses a telling phrase in the chapter on social reforms — “Brahmin progressivism”, born out of a sense of noblesse oblige among certain sections of the upper castes. B.R. Ambedkar targeted this tendency in his writing.

Maharashtra in the early decades of the 20th century also saw the strengthening of the non-Brahmin movement, with leaders such as Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj, Bhaurao Patil, Keshavrao Jedhe, Dinkarrao Javalkar, Prabodhankar Thackeray. Many originally came from the Satyashodhak Samaj formed by Jotiba Phule. Prachi Deshpande has written about these themes in her wonderful book, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960.

The non-Brahmin movement had a deep impact on the politics of modern Maharashtra, especially in the Congress. It launched blistering attacks on the Pune orthodoxy. Even Tilak was not spared. The Lokmanya’s son Shridharpant split ranks with his father’s followers to support the anti-caste activists, till the pressure on him led to his suicide at a young age.

However, the reason to mention this movement here is that it also influenced a different strain of Hindutva in Maharashtra, as signified by the original Shiv Sena, and quite different from the Hindutva of the RSS and Savarkar.

The subsequent chapter on Savarkar as a poet is especially interesting, since I do not know of any other English work that looks at Savarkar through his poetry in such detail. Savarkar was a master of poetic form, from Sanskrit poetry to folk ballads. “It is as if Savarkar wanted his readers to know that no part of the 800-year-old Marathi literary tradition or the Sanskrit poetry tradition was beyond his reach,” writes Bakhle.

Savarkar was a precocious talent as a poet, making his mark even as a school boy. Two of his poems have survived in popular memory, thanks to dazzling compositions by the Mangeshkar family, who were also personally close to him. But his overall influence on Marathi poetry has faded away.

His style of verse was eventually left behind as Marathi poetry took two sharp turns in the two decades before independence. First, the Ravikiran Mandal, a group of poets, began to write romantic poetry for a new middle class. Second, the world of Marathi poetry then entered the modernist era thanks to the brilliant innovations of poets such as B.S. Mardhekar, P.S. Rege and A.R. Deshpande.

Savarkar was deeply interested in history. He was a prodigious reader. Bakhle compares his historical writings with those by contemporaries such as Shejwalkar, G.S. Sardesai and Jadunath Sarkar. Savarkar’s books on history may not match the standards of scholarship that professional historians expect, but it must be remembered that Savarkar was writing to spark a nationalist fire in young hearts rather than for an academic audience. There is no reason why both cannot co-exist.

Jawaharlal Nehru has written how he was inspired by Savarkar’s book on the First War of Indian Independence in 1857. Bhagat Singh is another example. The historian R.C. Majumdar wrote the introduction to Hindu Pad Padshahi.

Savarkar is today best known for his short book, The Essentials of Hindutva, especially for its definition of a Hindu as someone who considers this land his fatherland as well as his holy land. Savarkar ranges wide and far in this work, showing his prodigious memory, but the main intellectual argument gets lost in all sorts of historical and etymological detours. As Bakhle notes: “The section that would seem most germane to his endeavours, given that it carries the title of the book, Essentials of Hindutva, is only a paragraph long”.

In an essay written a few years ago, Bakhle had drawn an insightful parallel between Savarkar and one of his inspirations, the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini: “Both Mazzini and Savarkar saw themselves as literary figures and succeeded more in the realm of writing than in politics. Neither was a systematic thinker. Both were cosmopolitan nationalists, stipulating that the nation should be based more on a common political project than on ethnicity, religion, culture, or language”. It is something to keep in mind while reading this new biography of Savarkar.