Veer Savarkar

Title: Veer Savarkar

Author: Devendra Kumar Sharma

Publisher: Nisha Publications, New Delhi, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9789385621376

Pages: 280

 

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883 – 1966) was an Indian politician, freedom fighter and social reformer who developed the Hindu nationalist political ideology, Hindutva. He is the central icon of modern Hindu nationalist political parties. His last years were clouded with accusations of involvement in Gandhi’s assassination by a member of the Hindu Mahasabha which was led by Savarkar. Though he was acquitted for lack of evidence, the slur on his reputation remained. At the age of 83, he refused to take food and elected to die peacefully at the hour chosen by him. This book looks like a biography, but it is not. It appears that his biographical details are obtained from free sources like Wikipedia with no research or elaboration. A large part of the book contains Savarkar’s writings. Devendra Kumar Sharma was an archivist at National Archives of India and a former professor of history at the University of Allahabad.

 

Sharma provides a very brief narrative on Savarkar’s life which helps only to whet the reader’s appetite. He craved for freedom from foreign rule and was ready for armed conflict to achieve this. He formed a secret society called Abhinav Bharat for waging war against the British. In his drive to promote Swadeshi clothes, he made a bonfire of foreign cloth amid Dussehra festivities in 1905. After completing his B.A degree in India, Savarkar went to England to pursue studies in law. He pined for guerilla warfare while in England and learned bomb-making from a Russian revolutionary. His elder brother was also an ardent supporter of armed conflict against the imperial masters. His brother, Ganesh, organized an armed revolt against the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909. Both the brothers were booked for sedition. Savarkar made a daring attempt to escape from the ship that was carrying him to India. He jumped out of the bathroom porthole while it was berthed at Marseilles, but the French police caught and handed him over to the British. He was sentenced for fifty years of imprisonment as double transportation. He was lodged in the Cellular Jain in the Andamans in 1911. He was moved to Ratnagiri jail in 1924 and interned in a house with the proviso not to leave that district. He was finally released in 1937, after serving a 26-year sentence in one form or the other.

 

Savarkar coined the term ‘Hindutva’ and so it had become necessary to define it. According to this ideology, a ‘Hindu’ is any patriotic individual of India, venturing beyond a religious identity. You are a Hindu if your forefathers belonged to this land, you find yourself connected to this land and your religious commitments evolved from this land. Not only the Hindus – in the current narrow religious sense of the term – as well as adherents of all Indian religions are readily in this fold. With a little wrestling with facts, the others could also be brought within it. Savarkar wants every person belonging to Hindutva to treat India as a holy land. As per this definition, the Muslims and Christians can also be a part of it, if they impart the same respect they bestow on places in Arabia or Israel on an equal measure to India too. However, this argument is rather untidy and one is left to wonder if Savarkar indeed wanted them out of his domain – in spirit, and not in the physical sense.

 

This book explains the factions among freedom fighters and indicates Savarkar’s locus standi. In 1906, there were moderates and militants among the people who opposed the British. The first wanted to appeal to the better nature of the British, while the second felt that passive resistance would achieve their aim. Neither party was concerned about the British military might as they never had any plans to engage them on the battlefield. The revolutionaries distanced themselves from the other two and opted for violent conflict with arms. They knew the consequences too well. They were going to fall victim to the bullets and bayonets and their families are to be ruined. Still they held firm and Savarkar belonged to this group. Savarkar warned his own members that they would have to forego their houses, property, pleasures of life, reputation, affection of the beloved or even face death. The Revolutionaries demanded absolute political independence when the others were not even requesting for dominion status.Moderates tried armchair politics and considered it to be appropriate and honourable. Savarkar was involved in the murder of Sir Curzon Wyllie, a British MP, by Madanlal Dhingra and also in the assassination of A M T Jackson, the collector of Nashik. Savarkar was arrested for abetting the crime and also for illegal transportation of weapons.

 

The author gives only a cursory glance on Savarkar’s work in England. He organized Indian youth, inspired and converted them to the revolutionary path by individual dialogue. He delivered public speeches, wrote books and trained in making and using explosive devices. His literary career is as illustrious as his political work. He produced a biography of Mazzini, the revolutionary Italian leader of nineteenth century whose work liberated Italy out of the Austrian empire. The British promptly banned the book which was revoked only four decades later in 1946, on the eve of independence when Congress assumed control of the provinces. Savarkar’s greatest contribution to Indian historiography is his deep research into the 1857 rebellion and projecting it as a war of independence rather than a petty mutiny, as pejoratively called by the British. Till that time, even educated Indians had thought that the native soldiers who fought in 1857 were brutes and a disgrace to Indian culture by killing innocent Englishmen and violating their women. The hardworking and kindhearted English government was leading India in the path of progress and these stupid, fanatical sepoys created a great obstacle in that path. This was the common reading of the 1857 events. Savarkar undid the web of lies by thoroughly studying the original records available in the India Office library in London. The moment the librarian came to know of his real intention, he was thrown out of the institution. This book was also proscribed and later editions of it were published by such eminent personalities as Bhagat Singh and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

 

Left historians and social media portray Savarkar as a Hindu fundamentalist fanatic. They would be astonished to learn that he was a rationalist. He denied divinity in the scriptures and argued that they should be understood only in consonance with present conditions. He was dead set against caste based discrimination and untouchability. In a revolutionary move, he exhorted all Hindus to marry across caste! He wanted those religious vows that have no material benefit and are solely popularized on the basis of Puranic fables to be reinvented and given a different form. He claimed that in ancient times, certain incidents and lifeless objects were considered as living gods purely due to ignorance regarding the science of creation. Those vows which were popularized merely to appease such gods should be considered worthy of rejection in the present time. In a rhetorical flourish, Savarkar asks that if we thank god for saving us from a calamity, we should also consider who had brought that calamity on us in the first place (p. 238). Savarkar’s progressive mind is revealed in his assertion that a custom that brings only harm on humanity instead of benefitting it even to the slightest extent is adharma. He demanded the conservatives not to raise the bogey of sanatana dharma to stall reform (p.240). Changing a tradition is not an insult to our forefathers. On caste, Savarkar raged incandescent, asking to discard those 5000-year old superstitions of untouchability and scripture-based caste discrimination and also unshackle the bonds that stem from literalist belief in shrutis, smrutis and Puranas that hinder one’s duty (p. 245). He built a temple called Patitpavan Mandir at Ratnagiri which was open to all Hindus irrespective of caste.

 

This book does not serve its purpose as a biography of Savarkar. Its only saving grace is his writings quoted verbatim for nearly two-thirds of the volume. Scant attention has been given to the content. Running against the general trend of the narrative, unnecessarily sharp criticism against the protagonist is also seen at two places which could well be sabotage considering the overall carelessness and pathetic proof-reading of the author and publisher respectively. Sharma claims that Savarkar’s literary work is an ‘extraordinary embodiment of utter mediocrity’ and that the literary corpus does not suggest a creative mind (p.13). After this scathing remark, he revises his opinion a few pages later saying that Savarkar was a great scholar full of originality (p.36). Pages 12 to 18 include undiluted criticism that is incompatible with the spirit of the book’s arguments. Overall, the book looks like it was written by several novices with little communication between them as seen in the multiple repetitions of ideas and total absence of a viable structure for the book. This book is also not well researched.

 

The book is recommended only to those who want to read a summary of Savarkar’s thoughts in his own words as this volume has simply copied many of them intact.

 

Rating: 2 Star