AS the progenitor and most eloquent theoretician of political Hindutva, Savarkar formulated his entire world-view in terms of well-entrenched, non-negotiable, binary oppositions. His universe is strictly divided into ‘friends’ and ‘foes’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’, ‘Hindus’ and ‘non-Hindus’, ‘righteous’ and ‘wicked’. In a rare advaitic vein – for Savarkar had little time for philosophic schools of Hinduism and was deeply suspicious of advaita – he talks of the nature of the ‘Self’ as something that was ‘known to itself immutably and without a name or even a form.’ This abstract notion of the ‘Self’, however, gets transformed the moment ‘it comes in contact or conflict with a non-self.’ At this juncture the ‘Self’ requires a name in order to communicate with the non-self.

The self and the non-self in Savarkar’s case were invariably in conflict and in an antagonistic relation. In his scheme of things, it was inconceivable for the self and the non-self to share a creative and happy relationship. The more Savarkar engaged in formulating the contours of his ideal of Hindutva and giving it a political edge, the greater was the proliferation of the non-selves. Islam and ‘Mohammadans’ constituted the primary definition of the non-self. Later, it was the English and Christianity. Curiously enough, the Buddha and Buddhism and Mahatma Gandhi and ahimsa were eventually added to his rogue’s gallery of non-selves.

Apologists of Savarkar’s brand of Hindutva have often argued that all his utterances ought to be seen in the context of Indian nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries. They argue that Savarkar should be viewed as a patriot and a revolutionary nationalist determined to secure India’s freedom from the British. While Savarkar was certainly part of the nationalist movement, his commitment to the creation of a Hindu Rashtra superceded the goal of political independence for India. The very definition and conception of Hindu Rashtra depended entirely on its relation with its primary non-self, the Muslims.

Before the Muslims invaded India – Savarkar uses the words Hindusthan or Sindhusthan or Saptasindhu – it was a land of peace, plenty and a sense of false security. There were internal differences of regions, identities and castes but these were welded together in a great synthesis, a tremendous ‘mahamilan’. The coming of the Muslims disturbed this idyllic picture:

‘At last she was rudely awakened on the day when Mohammed of Gazni crossed the Indus, the frontier line of Sindhusthan, and invaded her. That day the conflict of life and death began. Nothing makes [the] Self conscious of itself so much as a conflict with [the] non-self. Nothing can weld peoples into a nation and nations into a state as the pressure of a common foe. Hatred separates as well as unites.’

Savarkar saw this as a ghastly conflict that continued ‘day after day, decade after decade, century after century’ till such time as Shivaji established a Hindu Empire, a Hindu-Pad-Padshahi.

The conflict with the mlechhas and yavanas – the ‘outcastes’ and ‘outsiders’ – defined Hindu identity and constituted the Hindus as a nation. In the course of this conflict, ‘our people became intensely conscious of ourselves as Hindus and we were welded into a nation to an extent unknown in our history’. What brought about this unity was the presence of the ‘enemy’:

‘The enemies hated us as Hindus and the whole family of peoples and races, of sects and creeds that flourished from Attock to Cuttack was suddenly individualized into a single Being… For it was one great issue to defend the honour and independence of Hindusthan and maintain the cultural unity and civic life of Hindutva and not Hinduism alone, but Hindutva – i.e., Hindu dharma – that was being fought out on the hundred fields of battle as well as on the floor of the chambers of diplomacy.’

 

 

All territory from the river Attock to the Indian Ocean was to be freed from the hands of the Muslims. The goal of the Hindus was the same as that of Shivaji: Re-acquire territories, rehabilitate religion, preserve Vedas and Shastras, protect cows and Brahmins, establishment of suzerainty and diffusion of Hindu fame and glory. These were the sentiments expressed in a letter Govindrao Kale wrote to Nana Fadnavis, which for Savarkar was the truest expression of Hindu history.

There are various ways to understand Savarkar’s attitude towards the Muslims. There are several instances in his works where this ‘struggle of life and death with the Muhammadan power’ is relegated to merely a question of remembering the past and documenting it truthfully. In his author’s foreword to Hindu-Pad-Padashahi, Savarkar sports an extremely liberal attitude when he says, ‘It would be as suicidal and as ridiculous to borrow hostilities and combats of the past only to fight them out into the present, as it would be for a Hindu and a Muhammadan to lock each other suddenly in a death-grip while embracing, only because Shivaji and Afzalkhan had done so hundreds of years ago.’ The anti-Muslim rhetoric after 1937 can also be seen as a reaction to Congress politics and the politics of the Muslim League. None of these instances, however, explain sufficiently Savarkar’s obsessive preoccupation with Islam and the Muslims.

 

 

The truth is that Savarkar greatly admired the Muslims. For him, they represented all that was deficient or missing in the Hindus. While Savarkar would remain committed to a Hindu God or Dev, and a Hindu Rashtra or Desh, he greatly admired the political and religious fervour of Islam. In Hindu-Pad-Padashahi, subtitled ‘A Review of the Hindu Empire of Maharashtra’, Savarkar speaks about the first Muslim invasions in India:

‘At the time of the first inroads of the Muhamadans, the fierce unity of Faith, that social cohesion and valorous fervour which made them as a body so irresistible, were qualities in which the Hindus proved woefully wanting.’

He goes on to praise the single-mindedness of Muslim religiosity and sense of solidarity:

‘[I]t must be clearly mentioned that in whatever manner the absolute merits or demerits of a militant church be judged from the point of view of expansion of political and religious conquests, the community that is out for the propagation of their faith and is taught the fierce doctrines of believing other religions as passports to hell and all efforts to root out these satanic strongholds by force or fraud as highly meritorious is, other things being equal, better fitted to fight and vanquish its opponents and rule over them when opposed to a community which belongs not to a militant church at all, condemns the use of force, nay going further, would not like to receive back into its fold even those who were forcibly carried away from its bosom, which prizes individual worship more than a public one and thus develops no organ or organization for a common defence of their faith as a church and which, lacking thus in the cohesion and the public strength that it engenders, fails to replace it by any other principle like love for the common motherland or, common race, or a common kingdom, or a state powerful enough to weld them all into an organic whole and render them dedicated to its defence and glory with as fierce a fervour as their opponents put forth.’

 

 

The Muslims possessed qualities that made them unassailable whereas the Hindus suffered limitations handed over to them by metaphysics and tradition:

‘The Muhammadans when they came, found a source of irresistible strength in the principle of theocratic unity, indissolubly wedded to a sense of duty to reduce all the world to a sense of obedience to theocracy, an Empire under the direct supervision of God. The Hindus wedded to individual liberty and philosophic views of life and the ultimate cause of causes, fallen a prey to the most decentralizing and disabling institutions and superstitions, such as the one that prevented them from crossing their frontiers and thus threw them always on the defensive and whose political organizations were more personal than patriotic, had naturally from a national point of view degenerated into a congerie of small states bound together but very loosely by a sense of common civilization, were more conscious of the differences that divided them provincially, sectionally and religiously, than of the factors that bound them and marked them out as one people.’

 

 

The Hindus had to learn a great deal from them about building a commonly shared national life and consolidating the place of faith in their commonly shared lives:

‘As an individual to an individual, the Hindu was as valorous and devoted to his faith as a Moslem. But community to a community, people to a people, the Muhammadans were fiercely united by a theocratic patriotism that incited them to do or die under the banner of their God and invested every effort to spread political rule over the unbelievers with the sanctity of a holy war. But as years and even centuries rolled by, the Hindus too learnt the bitter lesson and under the pressure of a common danger, became more conscious of those ties that united them as a people and marked them out as a nation than the factors that divided them. They too began to feel as Hindus first and everything else afterwords and sadly realized the weaknesses that had crept into their national life by an inherent tendency to isolate thought and action, a general lack of community of feeling and pride and national sympathy. Slowly they absorbed much that contributed to the success of the Muhammadans.’

It would be instructive here to recapitulate Savarkar’s central thesis regarding what made the Muslims so ‘irresistible’. The Muslims had a unified church, which was lacking in the Hindus. This made them better equipped to take on their opponents. They had a sense of community that ultimately helped in bringing about a sense of national unity. In sharp contrast, the Hindus were hopelessly divided in terms of schools of philosophy, debilitating metaphysical propositions, castes and a surfeit of conventions masquerading as tradition. Muslims acted under the direct command of God, had a notion of theocracy, which helped their militant campaigns against the kafirs. The Hindus were left to reconcile doctrines such as the Karma theory and principled opposition to use of force, all of which lead to a disjuncture between theory and practice.

 

 

In short, the ‘self’ had ‘absorbed’ a great deal of the non-self, leading it to redefine itself. The tormentors had proved to be teachers. A great deal of what Savarkar had learned from the Muslims would ultimately determine his conception of political Hindutva. He had to accept the brutal embrace of the intimate enemy.

While the Hindu ‘Self’ had ‘learned’ and ‘absorbed’ several attributes of the non-self, it could not allow the non-self to emasculate its identity completely. The ‘Self’ had to remain distinct and have autonomy of its own. Having begun on a premise that Hindus were deficient in several respects when compared to the Muslims, Savarkar now had the task of distancing himself from too close a comparison with the traditional adversary. After all, the Hindus and Muslims were, according to him, locked in a life and death battle with each other over centuries.

It was, therefore, important for Hindus to prove their strength and ‘seek retribution for the wrongs done to them as a nation and a race’. Any attempt to extend a hand of friendship to the Muslims, or accept a hand extended by the Muslims, had to be based on perfect equality. This, for Savarkar, was accomplished when the forces of ‘Hindudom’ entered Delhi triumphantly in 1761 and ensured that ‘the Moslem throne and crown and standard lay hammered at the feet of Bhau and Vishvas.’ This event singularly heralded the possibility of an honourable unity between the Hindus and the Muslims. This would have been impossible, asserts Savarkar, without conquering the conqueror and dethroning the enthroned. But the principle was clear: No retribution, no friendship.

Savarkar’s portrayal of the establishment in 1761 of Hindu-Pad-Padashahi, the Hindu Empire, was an instance of Hindus regaining a sense of self-possession and parity with Muslims. It was, however, only a theoretical possibility and remained firmly entrenched in the realm of history writing. In another instance of history writing, Savarkar comes close to exhibiting that Hindus and Muslims, after all, were ‘blood brothers’.

 

 

His account of the War of Independence of 1857, written while he was in England, several years before Savarkar wrote Hindu-Pad-Padashahi, makes a strong case for ‘feelings of mutual friendship’ between the Hindus and the Muslims. He started writing this extended essay in 1907. There is acknowledgement in it of the enmity between Hindus and Muslims but that is brushed aside as being ‘born out of ignorance’. In fact there are lyrical passages in it where Savarkar talks about members of the two antagonistic faiths partaking of the ‘same milk of the breasts of the Motherland’ and becoming one. There is little in this text, which prepares the reader to comprehend Savarkar’s subsequent outbursts against the Muslims in works like Hindutva and in his speeches at the annual sessions of the Hindu Mahasabha.

 

* Extracted from Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism, Penguin-Viking, 2003, with permission.