Vinayak Chaturvedi. Hindutva and Violence: V.D. Savarkar and the Politics of History
Some years before his passing in 1966, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar wrote an essay titled “How Hindu organisers should read and write their national history.” Savarkar explained that he had long intended to write this essay, but political work had taken precedence. Now, in the evening of his life, he wanted to leave an intellectual testament for Hindu political leaders and publicists who would carry on his unfinished work. The essay reprised Savarkar’s old ideas and hammered home his central message: Hindus were engaged in a war to protect the Hindu nation. “One of our main tools in this struggle”, he emphasised, “is itihaas [history].”
At this time, Savarkar was ostracised by the mainstream of Indian politics. The assassination of Mohandas K. Gandhi by a follower of Savarkar and his own indictment in the trial had placed him beyond the pale for most Indians. This was a remarkable downturn in the public standing of a figure, who had once elicited admiration across the political spectrum – despite sharp ideological differences – for his early career as an anti-imperialist revolutionary. Six decades on, there has been an equally extraordinary apotheosis of Savarkar: his ideology of Hindu nationalism is now enthroned in the republic.
Savarkar’s reminder of the principal weapon in this struggle continues to resonate among the faithful. Historians are exhorted, from the highest offices in the land, to rewrite history and show how the Hindu nation strived valiantly to protect itself from assaults of assorted Muslim ‘invaders’. As Home Minister Amit Shah recently put it, “We will work towards reviving India’s glorious history.” As if on cue, the Indian Council of Historical Research has announced a multi-volume project in which “everything about India will be rewritten.”
Against this backdrop, the publication of Vinayak Chaturvedi’s Hindutva and Violence could not be timelier. Savarkar has lately drawn the attention of scholars and biographers. Political theorists and intellectual historians too have started taking his work more seriously. Yet, there has been little sustained interrogation of the conceptual and historical dimensions of his thought and writings. Chaturvedi’s account is neither an intellectual biography nor a comprehensive theoretical account of Savarkar’s ideas. Rather, he focuses on a crucial aspect of Savarkar’s thought: the relationship between history and politics in his conception of Hindu nationalism.
The urgent contemporary salience of this issue apart, Chaturvedi’s work is an outstanding contribution to the emerging scholarship on modern Indian thought. The author of an important book on the social and cultural history of the Gujarat peasantry in the colonial era, he brings to this subject the much-needed rigour and scrupulousness of the historian.
The principles of history
No admirer of Savarkar’s politics, Chaturvedi refuses to partake of the squeamishness and condescension of many scholars when confronted with his subject. As he forthrightly puts it, “There is often an assumption that reading Savarkar at all is an expression of political sympathy with his ideas […] Needless to say, it is a point I reject. For many who oppose Hindutva, the subject of Savarkar is itself a problem, let alone the assertion that he was an intellectual: the impulse to dismiss his ideas because of hostility to his political allegiances is strong.” Chaturvedi’s interest in Savarkar stems from an unlit corner of his own life. He was named ‘Vinayak’ after Savarkar by his childhood physician, Dr D.S. Parchure – a man who was also indicted in Gandhi’s murder trial for allegedly supplying the weapon to the assassin Nathuram Godse. While he explicitly turns to this in an arresting Coda, the book subtly braids together the intellectual and the personal, the past and the present….
https://www.theindiaforum.in/book-reviews/history-service-hindutva
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