Decades after his death, the very mention of V D Savarkar sparks controversy. Actor Randeep Hooda’s claim while releasing the teaser of his first directorial venture Swatantrya Veer Savarkar that Savarkar was the inspiration behind Netaji Subhas Bose, Bhagat Singh and Khudiram Bose sparked outrage days ago.
The Forward Bloc, founded by Bose in 1939, has called out Hooda for “factual inaccuracy”, arguing that Bose and Savarkar represented opposite world views. Many on social media have accused him of distorting history to peddle a Hindutva agenda.
However, the many afterlives of Savarkar — hero to some and an abominable figure to others — are less about the historical Savarkar than about the need to service present-day politics by endorsing or rejecting him. It is this politics that needs unravelling.
Indeed, the claim made by Hooda amounts to hyperbole. While it is obvious that most freedom fighters till about 1920 would have had respect for Savarkar, he would not necessarily be their “inspiration”. For instance, Bhagat Singh considered Ghadar revolutionary Kartar Singh Sarabha his inspiration, and Sachindranath Sanyal and Chandrashekhar Azad his mentors.
However, facts alone aren’t important when it comes to Savarkar, as his very mention routinely polarises public discourse. Behind this acute polarisation is the question of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Hindutva as a claimant to being a nationalist force in India.
History writing
For decades, historians close to Congress saw the national movement as synonymous with the freedom struggle. To qualify as being nationalist within this frame, a movement had to have a legacy in the freedom struggle. This definition made Congress the “natural” claimant of Indian nationalism. Further, school textbooks argued for decades that being “secular” was the hallmark of being nationalist in a multi-religious society, and that anyone practising communitarian politics could not be nationalist.
The conclusion of such a reading of Indian nationalism was that Hindutva organisations were not nationalist for two reasons: One, they were not active in the freedom struggle and, two, they were “communal”.
This was a paradigm that bestowed and denied legitimacy to historical movements and figures and was primarily used to target the BJP and the RSS. The paradigm fails to explain how Pakistan was formed out of a process that was neither secular nor anti-imperialist and thus has serious limitations.
Savarkar became a controversial figure within this framework for understanding modern India. He had been a prominent freedom fighter in his early political career, but had shifted entirely to Hindutva politics and away from the freedom struggle in his later career. To celebrate even his early career would mean offering legitimacy to Hindutva by association, an idea his 1923 text publicised. So, the focus shifted to his clemency appeals to the British from the cellular jail in Andamans and to his break with anti-British activity in his second phase as a public figure.
For votaries of Hindutva, he remains an ideologue who must be defended. And for many people in Maharashtra, Savarkar remains a regional icon to be respected.
The predictable clamour to condemn Savarkar whenever his name is mentioned ends up benefitting the BJP, as common people, generally Hindu, think that he is unfairly attacked by the Opposition and liberal opinion in general.
The many lives of Savarkar
The early Savarkar was indeed quite an iconic figure among Indian revolutionaries in London. Emily C Brown describes in her biography of Har Dayal, the Ghadar Party ideologue, the impact Savarkar would have on young Indians when he addressed them at Shyamaji Krishna Varma’s India House.
The most illustrious among the revolutionaries Savarkar groomed was Madan Lal Dhingra. Savarkar first came across Dhingra when the latter and some other young Indians were partying in a segregated corner of a club where Indians were supposed to sit, as they were not allowed to mingle with British customers. Savarkar walked up to Dhingra and his friends and admonished them for lacking self-respect. Dhingra was acutely impacted and turned up at India House to hear Savarkar speak. He got converted to the revolutionary cause. Later, Dhingra assassinated British Indian army officer Willam Curzon Wyllie and was sentenced to death. Asked about his last wish in court, Dhingra said that as a believer in multiple births, he would like to embrace the same death for India in the next 100 births.
It should not be surprising that most Indian nationalists looked up to Savarkar in this phase of his life. However, Savarkar changed his approach during his long incarceration in the cellular jail. He sought clemency and transformed from a revolutionary to the foremost ideologue of Hindutva, who argued that only those who saw India as their fatherland and holy land could be Hindus. He became deeply critical of Islam in this phase and, as the leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, was willing to do business with the British.
This phase of Savarkar is often evoked to cancel him out. And it is this that generates acute polarisation each time. Not that Savarkar was alone to take this trajectory. Syed Ahmad Khan, the reputed educationist, also turned from a believer in pluralism to someone who thought Hindus and Muslims had fundamental differences by the 1890s, much before Savarkar’s communitarian turn. Allama Iqbal, who wrote ‘Saare Jahaan Se Achha’ in his early phase, also turned to a very Muslim-centric worldview in his later phase. Yet another person who took a similar turn was M A Jinnah himself.
Savarkar’s critics are unable to convince common people that he was “evil” because it’s commonly believed that participation in the freedom struggle was not the sole contribution a person could make. Iconic figures like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and B R Ambedkar are widely respected for other contributions that did not lie within the ambit of the freedom struggle. So, trying to prove that Savarkar broke with the freedom struggle or wrote clemency appeals is not going to diminish his stature. Rather, it ensures that he stays in the debate, thus acquiring greater stature, and his worldview of Hindutva also stays in discussions.
Vacuous debates
Discussing whether the Hindu Mahasabha or the RSS took part in the freedom struggle or not also makes little sense. For they were not set up with that objective. The question is as absurd as asking how many freedom struggle martyrs Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, Ramakrishna Mission, Aurobindo Society or the Scheduled Caste Federation have. The Congress would naturally boast more freedom fighters than any of these organisations, as its stated purpose was to provide a platform for anti-colonial struggle. In that sense, the Congress can be compared to the HSRA — except for the difference in their methods of struggle — and not to a socio-cultural organisation, when it comes to the freedom struggle.
In fact, individuals joined multiple organisations, depending on their stated objective. Lala Lajpat Rai and Madan Mohan Malaviya, for instance, were leaders of the Congress as well as the Hindu Mahasabha. Rai was clear that as an Indian against colonialism, he was a Congressman, and as a Hindu, he was also active in the Mahasabha. As a social reform-oriented person, he was an Arya Samajist.
Even RSS founder K B Hedgewar was, as a follower of B S Moonje, active in Congress in Nagpur in his early years. John Zavos’ book Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India says that the RSS uniform was first used when Hedgewar led volunteers tasked with organising the 1920 session of Congress in a uniform that would five years later become the RSS uniform. The overlap between Congress and Hindu Mahasabha ended in 1937 when the former decided that people active in “communal” organisations could not be part of the Congress. However, informal relations stayed till independence and much after that too.
Given the complexities of the past, which binaries can’t capture, the obsession to endorse or cancel historical figures to score political points today has limited purchase in the real world. History is messier than we think, and lacks the power to solve problems of today. We do learn from it, but the learning depends on how we read and write history itself.
The Savarkar polarisation helps no one. It just increases the bitterness in India’s public discourse. Perhaps the best way to address the Savarkar question now is to let it rest. He had his moments of glory as well as his serious failures. But these are best left to history departments in universities to study, as they add little value to political discourse in India beyond the bitterness they generate.
Pathak is a writer and media educator. He did his PhD in modern history from JNU. The views expressed are his own
