In today’s India, there are few historical figures whose writing and thinking help explain the current ideological zeitgeist more than Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Despite this newfound attention, Savarkar is often viewed in black and white—as a staunch Hindu nationalist who devoted his life to expounding the virtues of conservative, Hindu majority rule.
A new book by the University of California-Berkeley historian Janaki Bakhale, Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva, paints a much more nuanced picture of the Hindutva ideologue. Savarkar was certainly a Hindu champion, but he was also an anti-caste progressive, a pioneering advocate for women’s rights, and a patriotic poet.
Bakhle spoke about her monumental new history on last week’s episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Bakhle explained that her book was an attempt to simultaneously analyse and to link Savarkar’s local, national, and global roles. “In the revolutionary world, Savarkar was either a revolutionary nationalist or a revolutionary terrorist—as the British saw him—or he was just this inspirational patriot. And then there was the Savarkar in Maharashtra,” where he was known as a poet, author, and anti-caste advocate, said Bakhle.
Bakhle’s book is unique in that she spent years immersing herself in the ideologue’s writing in Marathi. “What was truly astonishing for me that no one had read him in Marathi. And this seemed to me kind of extraordinary. I cannot image taking on the work of a figure like Rabindranath Tagore and not reading him in Bengali. But not only had no one read him in Marathi, no one had read the debates around him or in which he participated in Maharashtra,” she noted. “In Maharashtra, I was overwhelmed by how much was written on Savarkar. And all of that writing…made up the most undisciplined of corpuses. There were comic books, there were kathas, there were gathas, there were charitras, there were movie scripts, there were stutis—prayers—poems about Savarkar.”
While Bakhle delves into the roots of Savarkar’s views on Hindutva, she also dedicates substantial space to his views on caste. According to Bakhle, Savarkar turned well-known characters from Hindu epics into “weapons of caste reform.” She said his most radical claim was to argue “that if you actually looked at the Vedas and you look at the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, you have a kind of caste mixing—miscegenation—from the very get-go.” For instance, she described how Savarkar offered a “literary historicist reading of the Mahabharata that tells you that Vyas would be an untouchable.” She also said Savarkar pointedly highlighted “the number of hands from which Ram in the Ramayana will take food.”
On the question of whether Savarkar’s push for anti-caste reforms was principled or simply an expedient way of building Hindu unity, Bakhle acknowledged that while it might have been instrumental, “I would not go so far as to say: therefore, it was not principled. In part because I think all reform is instrumental.”
