Sacred Geography

Ihid​ the covers of the books I read about Savarkar for this piece. I wanted to be able to read in public without worrying about the judgment of strangers; without looking like another affluent Hindu man being red-pilled into ancestral resentments. I was wary of being seen reading about Savarkar and wary of writing about him. The former might upset anyone who saw me; the latter might upset the Indian government. The BJP, the ruling party for the last ten years, and in power for five more, is built on the nationalist creed to which Savarkar gave a definition as well as a name, Hindutva. He is portrayed by his critics as a coward, a threat to the republic and a man who bears much responsibility for Gandhi’s murder. To the BJP he is a nationalist hero, and since Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister in 2014, his rehabilitation has been nearly complete. Most Indians know him not by his given name, Vinayak Damodar, but as ‘Veer’ Savarkar: Savarkar the Brave.

Savarkar was born in 1883 near Nashik, not far from Bombay and Pune. His family were Chitpavan Brahmins, a caste that claimed pride of place in the region of Maharashtra. As a child, he read Marathi poetry and martial epics about the Maratha kings who defied Mughal or Afghan enemies. He became a gifted poet and orator. He also acquired an early belief in the necessity of decisive, and clandestine, action, founding a secret society called Abhinav Bharat, or Young India, after the group founded by the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, on whom Savarkar modelled himself.

In 1906, when he was 23, Savarkar won a scholarship to read law at Gray’s Inn. His first books were published during his time in London: a translation of a Life of Mazzini was followed by a history of the Indian uprising of 1857. In this, his first influential work, Savarkar rejected the imperial account of a ‘sepoy mutiny’, and described the rebellion as one in which Hindus and Muslims joined in an exemplary war of independence. In London, a cell of revolutionary young nationalists coalesced around him, just as they had around him and his brothers in Maharashtra. In 1909, one of these men took out a pistol at a dinner party in South Kensington, and shot dead the aide-de-camp to the secretary of state for India. Later the same year, back in Nashik, an anti-colonial agitator assassinated the district collector, and his pistol was traced to a set of twenty Brownings that Savarkar had arranged to be smuggled into India. Savarkar was arrested, and deported to Bombay to stand trial.

Before his deportation, while in a cell in Brixton prison, he wrote a poem called ‘Majhem Mrtyupatra’ (‘My Last Will and Testament’), in which he announced his desire to die for his motherland. That feeling did not last. When his ship docked in Marseille, Savarkar squeezed out of a porthole, swam to shore and demanded asylum from a confused gendarme. He was re-arrested by the British, but there was an international rumpus: the French brought a case at The Hague over whether he should be handed back to France.

When he went on trial in 1910, Savarkar acted much as he would almost forty years later, during the trial in 1948 of Gandhi’s killer and his accomplices. In both trials, he was charged with conspiracy: although he wasn’t directly involved, and not on the scene when the shots were fired, the assassins were his followers and plainly motivated by his agitprop and faith in violence. Both times, Savarkar – faced with the repercussions of his rhetoric – pleaded not guilty and disavowed the act. Only his disciples were hanged. In 1910, he was transported to the Andaman Islands to serve two consecutive life sentences in the infamous Cellular Jail. In the 1948 trial, he was acquitted for lack of evidence. Still, he was disgraced for the rest of his life, and for quite a while afterwards. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s study of the Indian independence movement and Partition, Freedom at Midnight, published in 1975, described him as ‘the zealot whose unseen hands had controlled the flow of at least three political assassinations’.

In the wake of Modi’s triumphs, however, publishers are keen to find books that make Hindutva and its proponents palatable to a newly interested readership. Especially prized, one publicist put it to me, is a ‘neutral/sympathetic’ Savarkar biography in English. All the biographies dwell on his decade as a prisoner on the Andaman Islands, where Savarkar and the other political prisoners were punished with days in fetters, weeks in solitary confinement or the whip. These years were crucial to his self-mythology; the most famous image of him on the islands depicts him in chains, forced to turn a heavy oil press in the sun. This is the picture on the cover of the ‘Veer Savarkar’ edition of the popular children’s comic Amar Chitra Katha, published in 1984. The Cellular Jail is now a museum. Modi visited it in his first term as prime minister, kneeling in silence before a portrait of Savarkar in one of the cells.

Savarkar’s ten years there testify to his stoicism and resourceful mind, his spirit and sense of humour – all helpfully recorded by the man himself in a memoir, My Transportation for Life, serialised in the weekly Kesari soon after his release. Denied the use of pen and paper, he wrote, he used nails or stiff thorns to scratch into the whitewashed cell walls. All the walls in that wing of the prison ‘were thus scrawled over and each constituted for me a book by itself’. On them, he wrote an outline of Herbert Spencer’s First Principles, epic poems of his own set during the Maratha-Mughal wars, or ‘all the definitions of political economy as I had learned from Mill’s work on the subject’. Each composition remained to edify the next inmate.

The importance to Savarkar of his writing emerges clearly in Janaki Bakhle’s intellectual biography, a rare piece of dispassionate criticism on its subject. Bakhle’s book is concerned mostly with the second stretch of Savarkar’s detention. In 1921, after ten years in the Andamans, he was returned to the mainland and to his home province, Maharashtra, where he later began a loose form of house arrest in the district of Ratnagiri, on condition that he renounce all political activity and writing. He lived there until his unconditional release in 1937.

Savarkar thought of himself ‘as poet first and politician second’, Bakhle says. Many readers will be surprised by this, but for Marathi-speakers he is an exalted literary figure. Bakhle examines him as a writer of nationalist histories, a social reformer involved in arguments over caste exclusion, superstition and orthodoxy, and above all, as a lyric poet. She describes Savarkar’s work and poetry without taking her eye off his parallel project as the author of his own legend. Each chapter in her book includes extensive translations and a close study of his poetics or polemical technique. In Marathi, she estimates, the biographical literature on Savarkar stretches to 250 books: a thriving cult of uncritical homage, just as he intended. Bakhle also takes seriously the gerund in her book’s title. Savarkar entered the Cellular Jail as an anti-colonial revolutionary. He left it as the chief spokesman of Hindu nationalism, and a scourge of India’s Muslims and their great friend Gandhi. What happened?

The standard answer, which leans heavily on Savarkar’s memoir, centres on his response to his prison warders in the Andamans. Many of these warders, who were also convicts, were Pathan and Baluch Muslims from north-western India. By observing them, the story goes, Savarkar became convinced of the undisguised arrogance of Muslims and the cost of Hindu timidity. The Pathans were ‘one and all, cruel and unscrupulous persons, and were full of fanatical hatred for the Hindus’, he argued. His writings would contain ever more hostile Muslim caricatures. The Pathans, he wrote, were dumb and vicious, and took any chance to harass Hindu inmates, believing themselves religiously sanctioned to do this. They were also secretly cowards: they wilted when a victim stood up for himself, or if Hindus stood together. But that rarely happened. Instead, a steady trickle of Hindus professed Islam to escape their misery. Within this neat metaphor of the nation’s history, as he saw it, Savarkar would reprise a miniature Maratha rebellion.

Savarkar also became aware of a pan-Islamic turn on the mainland, particularly after the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in October 1914. The Pathans, he wrote, could not hide their glee: Britain’s defeat would mean the restoration of Muslim sovereignty in India, under a Turkish caliph. After the Ottoman defeat, Gandhi showed his sympathy to Muslims by throwing his support behind a quixotic campaign, known as the Khilafat movement, to defend the caliph and oppose the sanctions imposed on the Ottomans by the Treaty of Sèvres. To Savarkar, the Khilafat movement was proof of the essential anti-nationalism of the Indian Muslim, imbibed ‘with his mother’s milk’, and of the preposterous lengths to which Gandhi would go to pander to Muslims.

When Savarkar was released from the Andamans, in May 1921, he had to make up for lost time. His decade in exile had cost him the chance of inheriting the position of pre-eminent Hindu leader in the national movement from his hero, Bal Gangadhar Tilak. That position now belonged to Gandhi. Essentials of Hindutva was published in 1923. The book isn’t long. Much of it is a recitation of names, things, people and places, a sentimental build-up of signifiers for a people ‘bound by blood’. One couplet from the book became ‘the cornerstone of Hindutva ideology’, Bakhle says. It is also an illustration of Savarkar’s poetic flair:

Asindhu sindhu paryanta yasya bharata bhumika
Pitrabhu punyabhushchaiva sa vai hinduriti smritaha

From the Indus (‘sindhu’) in the north to the seas in the south, the natural inhabitants of India are those who can claim it as both their fatherland (‘pitrabhumi’) and holy land (‘punyabhumi’). Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains qualified; Muslims and Christians, whose holy land was elsewhere, did not, condemned by a supposed dual loyalty. Against the territorial concept of the Congress Party, Savarkar conjured a sacred geography as a test of belonging. The real work, of course, was affective: awakening Hindus to this identity, and its corollary, an ancestral race war against the Muslim invaders. In Ratnagiri, he could dedicate himself to this task. ‘Muslims came to India and engaged in all kinds of acts,’ he wrote in an article in March 1925, the first in a series:

Lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of Brahmins were lined up and mercilessly slaughtered; innumerable women were defiled by rape. Hundreds of women and children were taken off and sold into slavery in their [Muslim] countries; thousands of Rajput women on account of their lustful cruelty repeatedly committed jauhar [collective self-immolation] – like the open jaws of a spreading volcano, into the depths of the pure fire that licked its lips they had no choice but to jump, Rajputs, Marathas, Sikhs and other lakhs of warriors who generation after generation shed their blood to protect both their religion and their country from the attacks of these violent and lustful Muslims.

In his book about the 1857 uprising, written in London, Savarkar’s heroes had included Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah, ‘a patriot of the highest excellence’, whose sacrifice showed that ‘the true believer in Islam will feel it a pride to belong to, and a privilege to die for, his mother country.’ Now he skewered anyone naive enough to wish for inter-communal friendship. Gandhi and the Khilafat had ‘enabled this religion-mad cobra to spread his hood over us and to get stronger’. The proper response, for Savarkar, was unity, reconversion and retaliation by Hindus. His only offer to Indian Muslims was ‘to live in peace with us, but dreading us’.

Bakhle translates a typical article from 1927, about an alleged rape in Bengal:

She is seventeen years old and went to get medicines and help in her neighbourhood. In such a state, one can imagine having compassion for her. Taking pity on her a devout Muslim had compassion for her in one location. In the same manner in which he had compassion for her, so did another one. As it transpired, such compassion being their creed, some six or seven ghazis got together. They took her to a deserted place and each and every one of them enacted their Muslim compassion on her.

Bakhle must have thought hard about how much of this sort of thing to include. (The worst examples – ‘graphic, blood-bathed and horrific’, Bakhle writes, are entirely absent from other biographies.) This material has rarely been read in English before, but we have seen it in proxy, in the tirades of television anchors, party spokespersons and YouTubers, whose purpose is to denounce and criminalise every aspect of Muslim existence in India. Their rubric for this is ‘jihad’. A Muslim falling in love with a non-Muslim is ‘love jihad’, buying property is ‘land jihad’, catching Covid was ‘Corona jihad’, selling fruit ‘fruit jihad’. Muslims taking the exam held by the Union Public Service Commission is ‘UPSC jihad’. In a campaign speech this May, Modi described voting against him as ‘vote jihad’. These tirades purport to be about current events, but they echo Savarkar’s voice, from the major tropes right down to the sarcasm and scorn.

In June last year Modi returned to power, but without a majority and dependent on tepid allies. A BJP campaign slogan – ‘Abki Baar 400 Paar’ – had boasted that the party would win 400 seats. It won 240. The hubris was apparent as early as January, when Modi went to Ayodhya to perform consecration rituals at a gigantic new temple: a spectacle meant to signify the renaissance of Hindu power. In June the voters of Uttar Pradesh, ostensibly the Hindu heartland, deserted the BJP. In Modi’s constituency, Varanasi, his winning margin fell by two-thirds; Ayodhya went to the opposition. Hindus’ refusal to form a disciplined voting bloc, even for Modi, was bewailed across Hindutva websites and on social media. It was expressed in a Savarkar meme, with a probably apocryphal quotation: ‘I am not afraid of Muslims. I am not afraid of Britishers. I am afraid of Hindus against Hinduism.’

Bakhle’s​ chapter on anti-Muslim rhetoric is placed, very effectively, beside one about his letters from the Cellular Jail asking for clemency and about his surveillance by Bombay police. She locates the making of Hindutva in the colonial state’s strategy for containing revolutionary uproar and turning it back on the anti-colonial movement. Savarkar wrote regular clemency petitions from prison, the first not long after he had arrived in the Andamans and every year or two after that. They were all ignored – he was still popular, and still dangerous – until 1921. At that point, the Khilafat movement had fulfilled the British Indian government’s fear that an international, pan-Islamic threat would merge with an anti-colonial uprising in India. Gandhi’s idea of combining forces had confused and exasperated his colleagues, but it worked. Masses of Indian Muslims came under the sway of the Congress for the first time. Savarkar’s petitions had always been calculating (in 1914, he promised to enlist in the army and raise troops to fight for the glory of empire), but in a 1921 letter, sent from an Indian prison, Bakhle writes, ‘every line was strategic.’ After assuring the governor general that he had left behind ‘the whirlwinds of political passions’, he added: ‘The sight of the linked Asiatic Hordes now hanging over the frontiers and who had been a hereditary curse of India – at any rate the non-Mahomedan India – leaves him [the petitioner] convinced that a close and even a loyal co-operation and connection with the British Empire are good and indispensable for both of them.’

This was what the state wanted to hear. Savarkar was eventually put under house arrest. He forswore political activity, giving this undertaking in writing, but broke his word. He lectured to huge crowds and wrote for journals, often using pseudonyms. His lurid outpourings against Gandhi, the Khilafat, the Congress and Muslims were all monitored by the Bombay police, but the authorities never moved to stop him, merely sending stern letters. Savarkar could write what he liked – populist hymns to redemptive violence – so long as he aimed at this new target, not the colonial government.

From Ratnagiri, he wrote musical plays, novels, a second history, as well as articles and speeches and a more self-flattering autobiography. Bakhle ends her story in 1937, the year Savarkar was finally released. There followed three eventful decades, in which he entered active politics as the president of the Hindu Mahasabha, and negotiated the war years, the slide towards Partition, and the assassination of Gandhi. The Hindu Mahasabha was the rival Hinduist party to Gandhi’s Congress; Savarkar became its president in 1937. His rhetoric grew sharper, with admiring references to Hitler and Mussolini, who had applied the ‘magical wand’ of nationalist dictatorship and were driving out their own intractable minority. Savarkar’s success as a poet and propagandist did not translate into a talent for party strategy. In 1942, he ordered the Mahasabha to boycott the Quit India movement, Gandhi’s popular uprising. The decision kept him out of jail, but with some loss of face and no political gain. He retired as the party president in 1943.

He moved to Bombay, where he was living when Nathuram Godse shot and killed Gandhi. Godse was a Mahasabha member and had been a disciple of Savarkar since 1929 (the newspaper Godse published had his portrait on its masthead). As part of his conspiracy charge, Savarkar was accused of having met the key conspirators beforehand to bless their mission. Godse was certainly going to his death, and Savarkar was determined to distance himself from the crime. On trial, one lawyer for the accused recalled, he never turned his head to the others, nor spoke to them, but ‘sat there Sphinx-like in silence’, even as Godse ‘yearned for a touch of Tatyarao’s [Savarkar’s] hand, a word of sympathy’. Savarkar died in 1966.

In time, as Ashis Nandy said of him, the mask becomes the face. In his last book, Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, published three years before his death, Savarkar went so far as to rue the ‘perverted virtues’ that ostensibly stopped Hindu kings from raping Muslim women – he thought this could have been a worthwhile retaliatory strategy. Channelled through him, the practical emphasis of Hindu nationalism became an enmity to Muslims and inter-communal compromise. Godse absorbed this view. So did Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, who concurred with Savarkar’s description of ‘two antagonistic nations living side by side in India’, and drove the country towards Partition.

Savarkar praised men of action (and violence), and aspired to be one; after much self-mythologising he proclaimed that he had achieved this goal. But he was a brittle, cerebral man prone to illness and anxiety; a man found at his desk the day his small child died (his wife grieved over the corpse in the next room); a poet whose lyrics are still sung today. Now India is ruled by his disciples. In some states, students celebrate his birthday in schools – putting him on the same level as Gandhi and Ambedkar in official regard. It is Savarkar’s critics who now languish in prison. Some have died there. It has become normal for writers in India to worry about their work being called seditious and the police appearing at the door.