Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries – The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity
Author: Manu S. Pillai
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780670093656
Pages: 564

Hinduism is a constantly evolving religion. This characteristic is also a proof of its vitality. Contrary to what happened to Paganism in Greece and Rome at the end the classical period, Hinduism withstood the crushing impact of not one, but two Abrahamic religions one after the other and still survived to tell the tale. Hinduism is flexible enough to accommodate any number of gods or even to incorporate external deities somewhere on the branches of its vast mythology. It successfully employed this strategy to absorb strangers into its fold till the arrival of Islam which could not be reconciled due to its professed exclusivity and monopoly on divinity. The same thing happened with Christianity too. At the same time, the Hindus also felt compulsions of various sorts to convert them to the new ‘monotheistic’ faiths. Evidently, Hinduism had to change subtly to effectively engage with the new threat. This was felt more seriously on interactions with the Christian faith. Though the Islamic invasions were militarily brutal and materially exhausting, it proved to be intellectually bankrupt. It somewhat transformed Hinduism but never on the immense scale Christianity did. This book tells the story of how gods (reinvention of Hinduism by anchoring on its philosophical past), guns (colonial power) and missionaries (evangelical efforts at proselytization) completely reformed Hinduism in the last four centuries after the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. Manu S. Pillai is a talented, young author and this is his fifth book. You can find reviews of all his earlier works here. This book’s title involves a little bit of plagiarism with Jared Diamond’s incredibly well-written book, ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’.

Pillai begins his exhaustive survey with the practical adjustments Hinduism made on the ground even before the arrival of Semitic religions. Brahmins acted as a repository of theoretical knowledge and provided the mechanism to bend it constructively to make life easier – at least for themselves and their patrons. Brahmins bypassed awkward corners between theory and reality through the manipulation of tradition. Kings of low birth changed caste and varna by a ritual in which they symbolically emerged out of an artificial gold cow. The four-fold division of varnas – which is often portrayed as rigid and unchanging – was only an idealized aspiration of the Brahminized world that never existed in such perfection anywhere in India. Hinduism is not what Brahmins actually wanted; instead, it is the story of their negotiations with a bewildering variety of counter-thoughts and alternate visions. Change is coded into its DNA (p. xix). This book is the study of Hinduism of the last four centuries. Its motive is to survey the historical setting and emotional stimulus empowering present-day Hinduism. The author also claims that it is not a history of Hindu philosophy or of the lofty ideas of ancient sages. It deals with human actions and reactions in the context of political conquest, cultural dominance and resistance.

Hinduism met Christianity on many fronts and in different time periods. In the pre-medieval and early-medieval accounts of European travellers and merchants, India was portrayed as a heathen country where the devil was worshipped and was home to revulsive sexual practices. Hindus didn’t care. They lay diffused across the country and were nonchalant as to be concerned with what was being said of them in distant lands. But with European powers establishing trade with India and meddling in internal politics by the seventeenth century, they sat up and took notice, but still in isolated pockets. It was in response to the European portrayal of Hindus that Hinduism took its contemporary modern form, drawing pride and confidence from certain aspects of its past and shame from others. The book describes the early interactions of missionaries with Hinduism. Hindus listened to them with genuine interest and was even willing to accept their precepts as true, but stoutly refused to concede that this was the only way of knowing divinity. Hinduism always made space for ideological diversity and could not acquiesce in to claims on monopoly of truth. The Hindu philosophers never accused Christianity to be false, but that it might be adapted to the missionary’s part of the world. Quite contrary to this expression of tolerance, the missionaries thought everything else as diabolical pretension of primitive paganism. Over time, the missionaries collected and began to study Hindu texts and were gradually compelled to admit some goodness in it. One scholar grudgingly remarked that ‘even though much reeked of the dung pit, Hinduism had pearls by which white men too could benefit’ (p.56). This attitude grew with further study. In the peak of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, white intellectuals dismissed the Hindu society of the present, but romanticised its past. The formula would be amplified by Hindus in future. The Western philosophers, disillusioned with the religion at home, felt the need to idealize an alternative Hinduism which was presented as just the item with the mysterious Vedas.

The eighteenth century saw the dawn of a fresh chapter in Hindu-Christian relations with the entrenchment of British power in Bengal and North India. Warren Hastings and William Jones researched on Indian law and literature respectively. The aim was to reformulate ancient Hindu law so that the present society could be administered on its basis. But the law they painstakingly unearthed had no universal applicability. Customs of caste, region and sect were what guided people’s lives. It only suited the empire’s purposes to have a set of rules of whose legitimacy the subject people could not challenge. Intellectual emphasis focussed on scripture above custom and the enthroning of philosophical Hinduism as more legitimate than the ‘lower’ form. Pillai also amusingly notes how Victorian morals censored portions of open sensuality in Indian texts. While on one occasion Kalidasa describes Shakuntala as sweaty, it was translated into English as ‘glowing complexion’! When faced with such censure of their ancestors’ tastes, natives unnecessarily developed feelings of shame. All in all, Indian confidence ballooned as an unforeseen by-product of Orientalism. Its retrieval of past heroes and celebration of Indian accomplishments injected pride into the colonial subjects. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, the British oscillated between promoting traditional learning and introducing Western ideas through school education in English.

The nineteenth century saw another marked shift in the religious equation. Having successfully set up a colonial regime and also keeping internal security on a firm footing, the colonial masters again took on an aspect of complacent disdain on the native religion. Meanwhile, Hindus felt the days of Sanskrit education was over even though it was supported by the colonizer. A Hindu college to teach Western literature and science was set up in Calcutta in 1817 by Indians and dissenting British men who collected Rs. 1,13,000 locally, while the entire government budget for education in Bengal was only Rs. 1,00,000. The Orientalists objected to this, but the transition from Sanskrit to English was most pointedly expressed in the mid-1830s when state funding was reserved only for modern education in English. Meanwhile, the missionaries encouraged vernacular education, the only target being the conversion of pupils. The author cites a geography textbook in one of these schools that urged ‘the people of India’ to ‘accept the message of Christ’ and ‘endeavour to spread it’. By 1850s, British political power reached the zenith and even the son of the ‘Lion of Punjab’ Maharaja Ranjit Singh, named Duleep Singh, was converted to Christianity. Viceroy Dalhousie was restless to spread the Christian faith in India. It was he who cleverly stage-managed the conversion of Duleep Singh. A prominent cleavage in the conception of India among the British society became very evident at this point. Orientalists praised the glories of India, its ancient philosophies and Sanskrit literature, while the evangelists were producing material that cast Hindus as a class of ‘infant-murdering, wife-burning debauchees, in desperate need of reform’ (p.177). With the East India Company’s charter amended to accommodate evangelical work in 1813 and 1833, officials’ attitudes stiffened. Patronage extended to temples was withdrawn. In 1857, however, India responded with a full-blown revolt that forced the British to adopt a technically neutral stand on the issue of religion in future. In 1790 itself, Governor General Cornwallis had written that the company’s security rested on native troops and to meddle in the religion would jeopardize security. The book however keeps silent on the religious aspects of the 1857 rebellion's causes. The issue of greased cartridges was only the fuse that lit the fire, while the powder had been accumulating for years. Anyhow, I am fairly sure that the current breed of Indian secularists, including the author, would accuse the rebels of narrow-mindedness and communalism for their refusal to handle cartridges lubricated with the fat of cows and pigs.

After the Rebellion, the religious kaleidoscope shifted once again. Reform movements sprang up everywhere to give a facelift to the ancient religion. Demands for equality for the oppressed lower castes followed close on its heels. At the peak of these two, nationalism blossomed – both of the secular and cultural varieties. Pillai finds a strain of resemblance between the Protestant movement in England and the Hindu reformers. Like Protestants, Indian reformers placed scripture over custom and accumulated tradition. They parked blame for Hinduism’s decline from unparalleled purity on the Brahmins, just like the Protestant battering of Catholic priest craft. Ram Mohan Roy was vocal in denouncing Brahminic obfuscation of Vedic ideas on monotheism. This blunted the Christian threat to Hinduism as the Catholic Church’s liturgy differed not much from full-blooded idolatry. But very few Hindus practised what they preached and ordinary temple worship thrived as vigorously as before. Dayananda Saraswati’s Arya Samaj began venerating the cow as a formative rite to unite Hindus. The author deliberately hints here that cow worship began at this point, while in fact it was followed from very early times. Reconversion back to Hinduism through ‘Shuddhi’ was also developed. By the latter half of nineteenth century, untouchables began to assert their identity. Jyotiba Phule repudiated everything Hindu, from Vedas to idol worship, while Narayana Guru of Kerala accommodated some degree of Sanskritization, himself a Sanskrit scholar. Guru’s reforms lay in rejecting Brahminism as a social practice, while democratising Brahminic Hinduism (p.253).

The book’s final chapter, ‘Drawing Blood’, is reserved to heap scorn and mockery on Tilak and Savarkar, the two glowing figureheads of Hindu nationalism. A reasonably true biography of both are given, but interspersed with skewed and derisively paraphrased quotations. It seems the author’s pique against the duo is for the fact that they tried to unite the Hindus socially, perhaps for the first time ever in Indian history. This might be going against the grain of Western philosophical theory that could not comprehend the coming together of such diverse peoples under a common banner. This book is part of the anti-Hindutva movement and is relentlessly chipping away at its roots. Pillai does not mention this openly, in variance to what Charles Allen openly confessed in his recent book, ‘Aryans – The Search for a People, a Place and a Myth’ (reviewed earlier here). Tilak started the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals to gather people together as a means to move political work forward. Fun and play were the vehicles to impart political awareness among grumbles of turning faith into spectacle. The author nit-picks on Tilak’s speeches in order to find snippets against untouchables. With this in mind, he quotes a little known research paper at an obscure Canadian university to claim that Tilak made a disparaging remark about two communities as “which have no job avenues left other than thieving” (p.282). The source of this discovery is only a paper by Amar Khoday submitted at Manitoba University, but this information is concealed deep in the thick jungle of notes at the end of the book.

The book is very big at 564 pages, 238 of them nothing but notes totalling 2308 which are thoroughly researched entities that appears as a corporate effort rather than of a single person. However, Pillai has not acknowledged it. A very large number of books and papers have been consulted obviously but unusually for such an effort, no bibliography is given at the end. This is somewhat strange, forcing the reader to go through each and every note to find the sources. Quotes from Wendy Doniger and Audrey Truschke are given prime spots of accommodation though – or because of? – they are outspoken critics of Hinduism. Some parts of the book are recycled from the author’s previous works. The activities of the monk Roberto de Nobili who dressed, worked and lived like a Brahmin, wearing even the sacred thread, to convert Hindus can also be found in Pillai’s book, ‘The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin’ (reviewed earlier here) and stories about Serfoji II of Tanjore are in ‘False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma’ (reviewed earlier here). The book includes early sketches of people and events starting from the sixteenth century and sourced from rare collections in Europe and the USA. Islam makes only a cameo appearance in the book, but when it does, the author treats it with kid gloves unlike what he does with the others. He remarks that Brahmins ordered the world into castes while Islam proposed egalitarianism. Instances of proper justice meted out to Hindus in the Mughal period, however rare, are unearthed from little-known works to generalize it. The sentence construction in the book is a bit laboured with lots of commas, hyphens, semicolons and brackets that affect readability. Of course, some may enjoy them. Even though the author’s views on the making of modern Hinduism are not agreeable to most readers, he has provided a lively survey of the encounter between Hindus and the Europeans in their various avatars as missionaries, orientalists and colonial administrators.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Hindus in Hindu Rashtra

Title: Hindus in Hindu Rashtra – Eighth Class Citizens and Victims of State-sanctioned Apartheid

Author: Anand Ranganathan

Publisher: BluOne Ink, 2023 (First)

ISBN: 9789392209475

Pages: 135

 

The Left-Islamist cabal in India is nowadays adamant on creating a narrative of the nation turning into a Hindu Rashtra where the religious minorities face extinction and democracy in danger. They ignore the inconsistency and illogicality between trumpeting in mass-media that democracy is in danger and the government doing nothing to stifle such content. No authoritarian state would permit such wild allegations to be made in public, but our propagandists hope that the public won’t notice the discrepancy. Putting that aside for a moment, if we examine whether India had really transformed into a Hindu Rashtra only because a Hindu-nationalist party was in power for a decade, what do we find? Have the Hindus mobbed all avenues of power and marginalized the minorities? Are the minorities trembling in fear of being forcibly converted to Hinduism? But wait a moment. Aren’t these the same people who opposed a bill in the previous Karnataka legislature that sought to ban religious conversions by surreptitious means? Why the minorities oppose a legislation that bans conversions if they really feel threatened? If you get confused at these contradictions and suspect that there is more to it than meets the eye, this book is right for you. On the other hand, if you are comfortable with the fiction that secularism was diligently practiced without discrimination in post-independent India till 2014, you better avoid this book. This book analyzes the position of Hindus in today’s India and how the cards are decked against them under the guise of secularism. Anand Ranganathan is a scientist and author. He is very active on social media and this is his first non-fiction book. Ranganthan discusses eight specific topics which are claimed to form a state-sanctioned apartheid against the majority community which in effect transformed them towards the lowest levels of reckoning – eighth class, as the author pityingly attests.

 

Ranganathan identifies that the stage had been set for discrimination against Hindus much before independence and pinpoints it to Gandhi’s taking control over the nation’s pulse in the 1910s. Minority appeasement then began on an unprecedented scale. Many of his appeals lacked any sense of reality and approached the level of being plain silly. He advocated the Hindus not to harbour anger against Muslims even if the latter wanted to destroy them and should ‘face death bravely’. On the Jewish question in Germany, he suggested the same idea to the victims of Nazi holocaust. But unfortunately, every single time the minorities were appeased, it had only emboldened their leaders and political fronts for further extortion and blackmail. Thus, the trait of discrimination was in the nation’s DNA when free India took birth in 1947. It is the discrimination or apartheid in our constitution, policies, legal framework, society and psyche that makes Hindus not only second class, but eighth class citizens. The author presents his evidence in the chapters following this assertion.

 

Ranganathan cites government control of Hindu temples as the first and foremost mark of discrimination. This seems to be absolutely true. Why should a country which takes pride in being secular keep on controlling the religious institutions of only one religion? Natural justice demands that either it should control all or none at all. The state control of temples invariably leads to political intervention. In Kerala, communist leaders who proudly proclaim themselves as atheists have no qualms in sitting in the administrative councils of temples just because they were born to Hindu parents. The resulting inefficiency leads to dismal realization of revenue from temple property. Hence the money which should have been spent on opening Veda pathsalas, schools, colleges, scholarships, orphanages and cultural centres go wasted whereas the other religions are free to use their own money in the way they choose. The author criticizes the government headed by Narendra Modi too in doing little to correct this injustice. He suggests that instead of spending Rs. 339 crores on grand corridor projects like Kashi, it should take steps to free temples. Ranganathan then suggests public listing of the temples as a company as an alternative to state control. This would be a company whose product has not changed in a millennium and never will. People should be able to buy shares in it and public trading is also advocated. He has no objection to the government taxing its wealth. But readers would find this proposal not a bright one. Apart from the moral dilemma of designating a spiritual abode as a commercial entity, the problem of how less profitable temples can survive is not addressed. Also, if the temple’s shares are traded in public, how can you prevent them going into the hands of hostile interests?

 

Some of the harsh remarks in the book are reserved for the Hindu genocide and ethnic cleansing in Kashmir in the 1990s. In a matter of a few months, the entire Kashmir Valley was swept clean of Kashmiri Pandits through arson, murder and rape. The sad fact is that this gruesome tale of bigotry and violence is not widely reported in the media and not discussed in society. 700,000 people were displaced from Kashmir of which only 500 were repatriated after taking away Kashmir’s special status in 2019. Of these five hundred, 25 have been killed already in targeted assassinations. Tourists are safe in Kashmir as the local people don’t want to scuttle their livelihood and economy. In this way, tourism is alleged to be paying for jihad. The author laments that Kashmiri Hindus are the Jews, but unfortunately, India is not Israel. The judiciary is also shirking from its duty to render justice to the victims citing the long time that has elapsed since. The author also accuses the judiciary of selective intervention in bringing about religious reforms. It is hell-bent on focusing on Hindu customs as it is the path of least resistance. A secular state which removes discriminatory practices from one religion turns a blind eye to egregious customs such as polygamy, dissolution of marriages at the whim of the husband and discrimination against women in parental property in another. The book concludes that such a nation is not a secular state, but rather a scared state (p.72).

 

This book’s discussion on the huge amounts of land designated as Waqf (Islamic religious property) and the overarching powers granted to its administrative body called the Waqf Board are both illuminating and horrifying. Once a property is marked as Waqf, it remains so ever after and the Board has powers to evict the actual inhabitants of that land even after the expiry of any amount of time. Waqf is the third largest landowner in India after Defence and Railways. 77% of Delhi is Waqf land as effected by the give-and-take between the British and Muslims. In March 2014, just two months before his demitting office, the then prime minister Manmohan Singh withdrew the government’s claim on 123 prime Central Delhi properties which in effect gifted them to the Waqf. If the Waqf Board claims a property as its own, the cost of surveying it must be borne by the state and its higher officials are given the power of a civil court by the Waqf Act of 1995. Moreover, the Supreme Court in 2019 ruled that a civil court has no jurisdiction in the matter of a dispute pertaining to Waqf property. Only a Waqf tribunal is entitled to examine the case. Section 28 of the act makes it mandatory for district magistrates to carry out the orders of Waqf Board. In short, if this Act is not amended considerably or revoked outright, it sets the stage for the eventual and complete takeover of the country once the percentage of Muslim population crosses a critical threshold. If this argument is factual, it forecasts a scary predicament for non-Muslims in this country.

 

In this vein, the author discusses eight issues on which the Hindus are discriminated against. Many of the subjects were earlier shared in Ranganathan’s social media forums where he argues his points with conviction and verve in a booming voice. He ridicules the Indian custom of honouring the invaders who killed and raped their ancestors. Bakhtiyarpur in Nalanda is named after the warrior who destroyed that ancient university. Many roads and places are named after Aurangzeb who is reported to have killed 4.6 million infidels. Similar is the case of Tipu Sultan in the south. Ranganathan then mockingly asks whether there will ever be a Hitler Road in Tel Aviv in Israel. The book is very informative and a must-read for all Indians. The text is sandwiched between an excellent foreword by J. Sai Deepak and a worthy afterword by Vikram Sampath. The author’s writing style is very evocative and in a manner which feels like the author is directly talking to the reader. The language is powerful throughout the narrative and appears more like that of a propaganda leaflet. The book also assigns on readers the moral responsibility of verifying the veracity of Ranganathan’s claims for themselves. If they find them to be true, they must ask themselves why nobody had told these hard truths before and why.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star

Savarkar – A Contested Legacy

Title: Savarkar – A Contested Legacy 1924 – 1966

Author: Vikram Sampath

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9780670090310

Pages: 691

 

This is the second and final volume of Vikram Sampath’s definitive book on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. The first volume, ‘Savarkar – Echoes from a Forgotten Past’ was reviewed earlier in this blog. This volume seamlessly picks up the narrative from where the first book left it with Savarkar’s transfer from Andaman to a jail on Indian mainland. He continued in preventive detention for thirteen more years and was released only in 1937 after serving twenty seven years in detention. Savarkar became a controversial leader after his release from captivity. He strongly objected to the nonviolent gimmicks of Gandhi and also the violent demands of Muslims for Pakistan. Savarkar never minced his words, especially in exposing the religious bigotry beneath the Pakistan demand even though it was couched in seemingly innocuous, westernized jargon of nationhood. After Pakistan was conceded, Gandhi was severely chastised by Hindu leaders. Savarkar was implicated in Gandhi’s murder carried out by two members of the Hindu Mahasabha which he led as its president. Even though the trial and appeal courts honourably acquitted him, Savarkar is still stigmatized by vested interests for the alleged association with the convicts. We read about all these issues in this volume. Savarkar and Gandhi fought for the nation’s freedom but an ocean separated their outlooks. Savarkar stood for modernity and science, separation of ritualistic religion from politics, militarization of Hindu society and dismantling the caste system. Gandhi, meanwhile, spoke of faith, religion and ahimsa, approved of the caste system in principle and had not much time or appetite for science. This volume caps Vikram Sampath’s timely and brilliant effort to examine a renowned freedom fighter such as Savarkar in a light unshaded by Left-Islamist perspective.

 

After completing fourteen years in different jails, Savarkar was transferred to detention in Ratnagiri district for five years under stringent conditions not to involve in political activity. The place was cleverly chosen as it had no rail lines or telephones in 1924. He was subjected to the strictest surveillance on every spoken or written word. The visitors were also trailed. Every sentence or word that came from him was dissected and analysed by several government departments keen to rescind his release. He had to obtain permission from the highest circles even to travel to his home district of Nashik occasionally. The detention was extended four times of two-year duration after the initial five-year period ended and Savarkar was fully released only in 1937 after spending 27 years in captivity. He was 27 years old while going to jail and was 54 while coming out of it, having sacrificed the prime of his youth in incarceration. Finding a means of livelihood in the period of house arrest was a serious task as the government had seized all properties of Savarkar and his father. His degrees – Bachelor of Arts and Law – were revoked. All his books were banned thereby eliminating the chance of getting royalty on its sale.

 

Once he was barred from political activity, he devoted his time to strive for reforms of the Hindu society. It was the aroused Hindu consciousness in the wake of the communal riots after Gandhi’s Khilafat agitation that Savarkar utilized as a crucible for his experiments on social reforms. He hit upon ending untouchability of the lower castes as the start of his grand program. The untouchables were not allowed entry to public places nor permitted to draw water from public wells. Savarkar earnestly instituted the practice of inter-dining and persuaded upper castes to allow children of the lower castes to study along with their own kids. In 1929, the Vitthala temple of Ratnagiri allowed entry of untouchables inside the temple for worship. Still, many Brahmins did not open their temples, claiming it to be private property. Savarkar constructed the Patit Pavan Mandir in Ratnagiri as a fitting reply which was open to all classes and had a Dalit as its chief priest. Progressive upper castes also prayed there. On the third day of its opening, he arranged an inter-dining program. He also operated a café in Ratnagiri which was open to all castes. Savarkar attacked the scriptural underpinnings of untouchability too. He asked that if the four varnas are the bedrock of Hinduism, how is it that we have defied this maxim and created a fifth class of untouchables. Thus, those who have already destroyed the Chaturvarna system are crying foul about the collapse of Sanatan Dharma. The book includes a prescient comparison of the views of Gandhi, Ambedkar and Savarkar on how untouchability should be ended. Gandhi wanted the pace of a snail, Ambedkar desired that of a cheetah and Savarkar’s was in the middle of them!

 

A good part of the criticism of Savarkar in contemporary society derives its origin from the perceived anti-Muslim rhetoric that is seen in his writings and heard in his speeches. However, the virulence of Savarkar’s opposition to the Muslims during his years as the head of the Hindu Mahasabha would need to be seen in the context of the times where the vivisection of the country on communal lines was being vociferously demanded and pushed through by the leaders of that community. His advancement of the ‘Hindu Rashtra’ was another point of contention. But Savarkar’s conception of a Hindu was devoid of the narrow religious underpinnings of the term. A Hindu is one who considers this vast stretch of land called Bharat from the Indus to the sea as the land of one’s ancestors and holy land (pitrbhu and punyabhu). The Hindu Rashtra does not envisage any preferential treatment or prerogative for the majority community. The problem arises when people examine the treatment meted out to religious minorities in all Islamic states and fear that it will be repeated against minorities in a Hindu Rashtra too. Of course, there will be no special favour for the minority and the democratic idea of ‘one man, one vote’ will be put in place. No enhanced weightage will be extended to a citizen’s vote based on his religion. The foreign policy will be set purely based on the nation’s interests and academic-political ideologies like communism, Nazism or fascism would have no place in it.

 

The book narrates in unequivocal terms that though ideological rivalry existed between Gandhi and Savarkar, it never degenerated into personal enmity. Savarkar severely criticized Gandhi’s absolute nonviolence. Adherence to nonviolence is laudable as a principle, but Savarkar always maintained that one is required to take up arms for a just cause. Acting otherwise is impractical monomania and sheer insanity. The Mahasabha encouraged youths to militarize themselves by joining the army and getting trained. As the Second World War loomed, the British abandoned their practice of recruiting only the martial races. Several Hindus joined the army and the percentage of Hindus in the army went up.

 

Savarkar coined the term ‘Hindutva’ and the proponents of Hindutva revere him today. However, the Mahasabha and the RSS were not on very cordial terms for a considerable length of time. Sampath devotes a few sections to explain and analyse this fratricidal animosity. Excessive generalization and formulaic definition of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hindutva’, however rational and logical it might have been, alienated several sections from accepting Mahasabha’s viewpoint. Savarkar was on very friendly relations with RSS founder Hedgewar, but it was not so with Golwalkar, his successor. Slowly, the Sangh and Mahasabha drifted apart from each other. Mahasabha always took on hero worship while the Sangh was ideology-based. Moreover, Savarkar’s outspoken criticism alienated other leaders too. As a tactic of political expediency, Mahasabha members in the provincial legislative assemblies allied with Muslim League and served in their ministries in Sindh and Bengal. But the reticence of their allies did not detract the League from passing Pakistan resolutions in the assemblies. Mahasabha members were then accused of opportunism in holding on to power even at the cost of honour and patriotism. Syamaprasad Mukherjee became the president of Mahasabha, but he joined the Nehru cabinet. Eventually, the Mahasabha became irrelevant in Indian politics.

 

Savarkar turned notorious the moment he was accused as a conspirator in Gandhi murder. Both Godse and Narayan Apte, those who were sentenced to death for killing Gandhi, were workers of the Mahasabha and personally known to Savarkar. Exploiting this link to the hilt, Savarkar was falsely implicated as the master brain behind the murder. No credible evidence or witnesses were there to convict him and so the police was forced to fabricate them. Savarkar was taken from judicial custody and photographed along with Godse and other accused so as to create an insinuation of guilt. But concocted evidence could not stand judicial scrutiny. Gopal Godse, brother of Nathuram Godse who was Gandhi’s assassin, mentions that not a part of his body was free of bruises of custodial torture to elicit confession. Digambar Badge turned approver and testified against Savarkar. The investigation and trial became an opportunity and excuse for witch-hunt to settle scores with political opponents. Police believed that ‘someone up there’ would be highly gratified if Savarkar could be implicated. This was a veiled reference to none other than the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The book covers the trial in some detail at the end of which Savarkar was acquitted. The government went in appeal and Godse made a brilliant speech defending his action. Justice G. D. Khosla of the Punjab High Court who had heard the appeal remarked after Godse’s testimony that ‘had the audience on that day been constituted into a jury, they’d have brought in a verdict of ‘not guilty’ by an overwhelming majority!

 

The book boldly attempts to describe the planned anti-Brahmin riots that took place in the aftermath of Gandhi assassination. Just like the Congress workers who attacked Sikhs in Delhi after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, Congress workers chanting ‘Gandhiji ki jai’ attacked the persons and property of Maharashtrian Brahmins just because the killer happened to belong to that community. This episode was put under wraps by the succeeding governments even though hundreds of people were killed in what practically amounted to genocide. In continuation with the first volume, Sampath treats his protagonist with no superhuman attributes nor attempts to whitewash every behavioural trait. It really looks like Savarkar was uncomfortable with spending long prison terms and tried every strategy to get out, including writing humiliating mercy petitions. When Nehru government incarcerated him, the conditions they put forward for his release were strange: Savarkar should abstain from politics for a year, or the 1952 general election should be over, or the start of the Third World War, whichever occurred first. This was adding insult to injury, yet Savarkar agreed. The book provides only a very short account of Savarkar’s rationalism and that too, portraying him as somewhat insensitive at the demise of his much devoted wife. The book serves its purpose well even though the frequent and long quotations from other books affect readability.

 

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

 

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