Savarkar – Echoes from a Forgotten Past

Title: Savarkar – Echoes from a Forgotten Past 1883-1924

Author: Vikram Sampath

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9780670090303

Pages: 575

 

The struggle for India’s independence contained two distinct streaks from the very beginning. One stream followed a conciliatory approach towards the rulers by petitioning and putting gentle pressure through influencing public opinion. The other followed violent means, often physically eliminating top-ranking bureaucrats and sowing terror in the minds of administrators. The British naturally favoured the former and brutally suppressed the other. The Indian National Congress followed the nonviolent path and revolutionaries like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Aurobindo or Bhagat Singh strode the violent one. Not that the Congress protests were always peaceful. But the big difference was that the officials who were killed by Congress workers were always small fry – like the ordinary policemen at Chauri Chaura who were burnt alive – and hence expendable for the British. The revolutionaries targeted the big fish like district collectors, police superintendents and even the viceroy himself. So the British crushed the revolutionaries and sapped their spirit. Savarkar was transported to Andamans with fifty years of hard labour, Aurobindo was exiled and Bhagat Singh sent to the gallows. Finally, they handed power over to Congress and left India. Then came the strangest part. Congress, which virtually got power on a platter, assumed monopoly rights over the freedom struggle cleverly erasing and airbrushing the revolutionaries and falsely inflating the contributions of the Nehru dynasty. Savarkar was one such fighter who was relegated to the footnotes of fabricated official histories. This book tells his story and is the first part of a two-volume series. Vikram Sampath is a Bengaluru-based historian and author. He has doctorate degrees in history and music and is currently a senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

 

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar is the intellectual fountainhead of the ideology of Hindutva and also one of the most contentious political thinkers. Accounts of his life oscillate between glorifying hagiographies to reproachful demonization. However, his thoughts on social structure were highly progressive. He was an atheist and staunch rationalist. He opposed the caste system and dismissed cow worship as mere superstition. Savarkar advocated unification of Hindu society. However, he stoutly opposed unreasonable Muslim demands and became a sore thumb for the Muslim League in pre-partition days and for the Left-Islamist ecosystem in independent India. His ideology did not involve hatred for the enemy. He considered the British as enemies only till the time they subjugated India. Once India was liberated, they should be accepted as friends and fellow beings. Similarly, the animosity between Hindus and Muslims was necessitated in the past when Muslims were aggressive invaders and rulers and the Hindus the submissive ruled. But in the present situation, the equation changed to that of brotherhood. Both are the children of the soil of India. While driving home this point, Savarkar insisted that religion should not be above country.

 

Savarkar’s early activities are given due prominence in the book. He founded a revolutionary outfit called ‘Abhinav Bharat’ which professed violent struggle to achieve freedom from the foreign masters. It demanded total independence – purna Swaraj – in the first decade of the twentieth century which preceded similar demands from the Congress by three full decades. The organisation was modelled on the revolutionary groups in Ireland and Russia. All the members were not known to each other to prevent leakage of personal details. Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian nationalist who strived for the unification of Italy, was Savarkar’s hero. He translated Mazzini's biography to Marathi as an inspiration to young men. The similarities between India and Italy were manifold. Like our country, Italy was also divided into several kingdoms under the suzerainty of Austria.

 

In 1906, the young Vinayak managed to obtain a scholarship offered by Shyamji Krishna Varma and sailed to London. He took up residence in India House which was the favourite dwelling place of other revolutionaries. Sampath presents a detailed view of Savarkar’s activities and the minute attention he gave to exploit every loophole provided by British law and custom. Britain celebrated the suppression of the 1857 Rebellion with much fanfare on its fiftieth anniversary in 1907. Large gatherings and adulatory speeches filled the air, but Savarkar shocked them all by convening a parallel meeting at India House and exalting the rebel leaders who were demonized in the British narrative. In fact, Savarkar coined the term ‘First War of Independence’ for the 1857 struggle. Taking sustenance from the spirit of 1857, he preached Swaraj and Swadharma – love for one’s country and religion – as the two cornerstones of Indian revolution. This conceptualization was at variance with Marxist hypothesis and made him different among other European revolutionaries. His work made him a target of surveillance by secret police.

 

Savarkar’s life in England for four years was the last in his life as a free young man. This part of the book makes for poignant reading. He continued to write incendiary articles and smuggle modern weapons to India. He also prepared a manual to make and use bombs. Ganesh Savarkar – Vinayak’s elder brother – was also an eager member of his revolutionary society. He was arrested in India on charges of involvement in subversionary activities and awarded transportation for life to the Andamans. The bomb manual was also recovered from him. Meanwhile, an Indian youth named Madan Lal Dhingra shot dead Curzon Wyllie in London because this officer was suspected to be snooping on Indian revolutionaries (He is not to be confused with Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India). Savarkar’s hand was seen in this incident also. In 1909 Arthur Jackson, district collector of Nashik, was shot dead by an Abhinav Bharat activist which was thought to be in retaliation for Jackson’s involvement in sentencing Ganesh Savarkar. Vinayak was arrested in London and extradited to India. He escaped from the ship while it berthed at Marseilles, France, but the French policeman who caught him handed him back to his pursuers. This caused a great diplomatic hue and cry. Savarkar was eventually punished with double transportation for life which meant fifty years of incarceration. All his property was forfeited and auctioned, including his spectacles and personal copy of the Bhagavad Gita. These were later ‘mercifully’ returned to him to use as government property.

 

The foremost accusation leveled against Savarkar today is that he had sent several mercy petitions to the government in which he regretted his revolutionary work and pledged loyalty to the government in future. This book approaches this touchy subject in an objective manner. The author admits that Savarkar had indeed behaved in a way that smacked of a weak spirit during his prison term that dragged on for years and years. The book suggests two reasons for this. It is quite evident that being locked up in a jail on a remote island with no prospect of release before death, this was the language to be used in order to obtain remission or release. It is obviously no use reiterating revolutionary credo in a mercy petition. Savarkar had no intention of honouring these pledges to a colonial master taken under duress. So liberals portray it as a sign of cowardice while it could be a tactical move to get out of jail. Jail history shows that even after the petitions, he continued strikes in prison and given punishment for it. This does not indicate the temperament of a man who was willing to cooperate with the British. He was given back-breaking work such as grinding oil mills. The prisoner was held in the place of a bullock and forced to go round and round to extract coconut oil. Jailers treated him as the ‘father of unrest’ in the Andaman and he was forced to continue the same work routine even after years of prison life when other prisoners’ conditions were slightly relaxed and they began to earn some money.

 

The author has been eminently able to bring forward Savarkar’s transformation from a radical revolutionary to a sober organizer of Hindu society during imprisonment. The Hindu community was poorly organized and disunited that it was very easy to subjugate them. They were perpetually divided along caste lines which made them doubly vulnerable to attacks. This was most painfully obvious in the Cellular Jail. On entry into the cell, the first act that was committed for a Hindu prisoner was to cut his sacred thread while Muslims were allowed to keep their beards and the Sikhs their hair. The Hindu prisoners were kept under the most bigoted Muslim warders and jamadars, most of them Pathans who were actually thrilled to brutalize a kafir (p.272). The warders forbade Hindu prisoners from reading their religious scriptures pronouncing them indecent and dispersed the gathering that read such books. Religious conversion of prisoners also went on in the sly by threat of torture or coercion. Savarkar returned several of them back to the Hindu fold.

 

Savarkar coined the term ‘Hindutva’ which is the guiding principle of BJP which rules India at present. Sampath spends some time in lucidly explaining the concept to readers. Hindutva is beyond mere religious adherence. Hinduism is only a derivative, a fraction of Hindutva. Inability to understand this difference has given rise to much misunderstanding among sister communities. Adherents of foreign religions can also become a part of Hindutva if they love this land not only as a pitrbhu (fatherland) but also as a punyabhu (holy land). This was a test Muslims supporting the restitution of the Khilafat failed. The Ottoman sultan was a religious leader of the Muslims, but the Khilafat campaign also betrayed the supra-national allegiance Islam claimed from its believers. Hindutva, on the other hand, is a term of ethnic nationalism and the name matters a lot to Indians that can even be identified as the first layer of Indian identity. It has immense relevance for Indian society. Those who subscribe to this concept are one; they can intermarry without caste considerations. Savarkar quoted many examples from mythology to prove that inter-caste marriages were common in ancient times.

 

This book is the first of two volumes in the series, covering the period from his birth in 1883 to release from prison in 1924 after spending 14 years behind the bars. But this was not freedom, rather a change to house arrest. The book contains a good sampling of his writings and poems. A notable feature is the author’s level-headed handling of the narrative. It is definitely not a eulogy. Sampath does not stoop to uncritical adulation. The character-traces are objective and logical. Having completed the first part, readers feel the anticipation for what is in store in the second and final part when Savarkar begins his real work in India. A lot of research has gone into the making of this book. A curious thing to note is that Savarkar subscribed to the Aryan invasion theory which was quite fashionable in his time and supported by British-sponsored academia. The book is easy to read though a bit large.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star