Vinayak Damodar Savarkar

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Vinayak Damodar Savarkar died on the 26th of February 1966 at his residence in Bombay, having renounced food, water, and medicine twenty-five days earlier. He called this act prayopavesha, and he had written an essay arguing that when a person's life mission is over and the capacity to serve society is exhausted, it is better to end life at will rather than wait for death. No minister from the Maharashtra Cabinet paid homage. The central government in Delhi observed no official mourning. For a man who had spent fifty years at the very centre of Indian political life, the silence was remarkable.

  His name was known across the subcontinent. His followers called him Veer Savarkar, Veer meaning brave. His critics called him one of the most divisive figures in Indian politics and the most controversial Indian political thinker of the twentieth century. He had been a revolutionary who smuggled weapons into India, a prisoner who wrote mercy petitions, a theorist who coined the word Hindutva, a political leader who allied with the Muslim League, and a man acquitted of conspiring to kill Mahatma Gandhi. What drives a person from one of those positions to another? How does a teenage boy who attacks a mosque in a small village near Nasik become the architect of a political ideology that still shapes Indian public life today? And why, in the weeks after independence, was this man sitting in Arthur Road Prison charged with conspiracy to murder the father of the nation?

• 2. The Making of a Revolutionary

  ›

  At the age of twelve, Savarkar led fellow students in an attack on the village mosque in Bhagur following Hindu-Muslim riots, and he later recorded that they vandalised it to their heart's content. That sentence, unsettling in its candour, tells us something important about the young man: he kept a record, he reflected on his actions, and he did not apologise for them. Born on the 28th of May 1883 to a Chitpavan Brahmin family in Bhagur, a village in Nasik district in the Bombay Presidency, he grew up watching two forces he regarded as enemies: Muslim neighbours and British rulers.

  By 1903, in the nearby city of Nasik, Savarkar and his brother Ganesh founded the Mitra Mela, an underground revolutionary organisation. Three years later it became the Abhinav Bharat Society, whose objectives were to overthrow British rule and revive Hindu pride. The radical nationalist leader Lokmanya Tilak noticed the young organiser at Fergusson College in Pune and was impressed enough to help him win the Shivaji Scholarship in 1906 for law studies in London. Before sailing, Savarkar led a bonfire of foreign-made clothes in the presence of Tilak himself, a symbolic protest against the partition of Bengal the year before.

  In London, Savarkar moved quickly into the circle around India House and the Free India Society. He was reading Giuseppe Mazzini closely enough to translate the Italian nationalist's biography into Marathi. He also wrote and published a book called The Indian War of Independence, about the 1857 rebellion, which the British colonial authorities promptly banned. The book was notable for one argument in particular: that Hindus and Muslims had fought side by side in 1857, united against a common colonial enemy. Within fifteen years Savarkar would reverse that position entirely. The London period also left a shadow. A fellow student named Madanlal Dhingra assassinated a colonial officer, Curzon Wyllie, in 1909. Mark Juergensmeyer later alleged that Savarkar had supplied both the gun Dhingra used and the words of Dhingra's final statement before he went to the gallows. It was also in London, shortly after that assassination, that Savarkar first met Mohandas Gandhi, who debated him on the futility of terrorism and guerrilla warfare as tools against colonialism.

• 3. Arrest, Escape, and the Cellular Jail

  ›

  On the 13th of March 1910, British authorities arrested Savarkar in London on multiple charges: procurement and distribution of arms, waging war against the state, and delivering seditious speeches. At the moment of his arrest he was carrying several revolutionary texts, including copies of his own banned books. The British also presented evidence that he had smuggled twenty Browning handguns into India, one of which a man named Anant Laxman Kanhere used to assassinate A. M. T. Jackson, the collector of Nasik district, in December 1909.

  The British decided to transport him to India for trial. He was placed on the commercial ship SS Morea with a police escort. When the ship docked in the French Mediterranean port of Marseille, Savarkar jumped from the ship's window, swam to the French shore, and asked for political asylum. The local port officials ignored his plea and returned him to his police escort. The French government then demanded he be brought back to France, and lodged an appeal with the Permanent Court of Arbitration. That court ruled in 1911 that while there had been an irregularity in Savarkar's arrest, the British were not required to hand him over again, because there had been a pattern of collaboration between the two governments regarding the possibility of his escape.

  The Bombay court sentenced him to what amounted to fifty years in the Cellular Jail, the notorious prison on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. His brother Ganesh, who had organised an armed revolt against the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, was already imprisoned there. In July 1911, Vinayak Savarkar arrived at Port Blair and entered the Cellular Jail, where he would begin writing petitions that would change the direction of his life.

• 4. The Mercy Petitions

  ›

  A month after arriving at the Cellular Jail, Savarkar submitted his first clemency petition on the 30th of August 1911. It was rejected within days. His 1913 petition was presented personally to Sir Reginald Craddock, the Home Member of the Governor General's council. In that letter he described himself as a prodigal son longing to return to the parental doors of the government, and he offered a remarkable promise: that his conversion to the constitutional line would bring back all the misled young men in India and abroad who had once looked to him as their guide. He added that he was ready to serve the government in any capacity they liked.

  The petitions continued. In 1917 he submitted another, this time asking for a general amnesty of all political prisoners. After King George V issued a Royal proclamation in December 1919 offering clemency to political offenders, Savarkar submitted a fourth petition on the 30th of March 1920. In that document he distanced himself from the militant school of thought associated with Bakunin and even from the peaceful anarchism of Tolstoy, and he stated that he had already informed the government in earlier petitions of his firm intention to abide by the constitution.

  The British colonial government rejected that petition on the 12th of July 1920, but its internal reasoning was revealing. The government contemplated releasing his brother Ganesh but keeping Vinayak in custody. The stated rationale was that if Ganesh were released and Vinayak retained, the latter would become in some measure a hostage, ensuring that Ganesh's own misconduct did not jeopardise his brother's future chances. Vinayak Savarkar eventually signed a statement endorsing his trial, verdict, and British law, and renouncing violence. On the 2nd of May 1921, the Savarkar brothers were transferred from the Andaman Islands to mainland India. Vinayak was sent to a jail in Ratnagiri. It was there, in 1922, that he wrote the pamphlet that would define his legacy.

• 5. Hindutva and the Ratnagiri Years

  ›

  Confined to the Ratnagiri jail in 1922, Savarkar wrote Essentials of Hindutva, the pamphlet that formulated the political ideology of Hindutva. In it, he defined a Hindu not primarily as a follower of a religion but as a patriotic inhabitant of Bharatavarsha. He described Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism as one tradition while placing Muslims and Christians outside the scope of authentic Indian identity. His argument rested on geography: the holiest sites of Islam and Christianity are in the Middle East, not India, and therefore the loyalty of Indian Muslims and Christians to India is divided.

  On the 6th of January 1924, Savarkar was released from jail but restricted to Ratnagiri district. The colonial authorities provided him with a bungalow, allowed visitors, and paid him a pension of sixty rupees a month. Nathuram Godse, who would later assassinate Gandhi, met Savarkar for the first time in 1929 as a nineteen-year-old. During these years of restricted freedom Savarkar became a prolific writer. His publishers, however, were required to include a disclaimer stating that they were wholly divorced from politics. He wrote the Hindu Pad-pada-shahi, a book documenting the Maratha empire, and My Transportation for Life, an account of his arrest, trial, and incarceration, as well as a collection of poems, plays, and novels.

  At the same time he held positions that complicated a simple reading of his Hindu nationalism. In his 1931 essay Seven Shackles of the Hindu Society, he called the caste system one of the most important injunctions of the past that deserved to be thrown in the dustbins of history. He opposed the caste system while also, in 1939, assuring the Hindu Mahasabha would not compel entry of untouchables into old temples beyond what custom already permitted. He also described himself as an atheist, treating Hindu identity as cultural and political rather than religious. Savarkar remained restricted to Ratnagiri district until 1937, when the newly elected government of Bombay presidency released him unconditionally.

• 6. Wartime Politics and the Two-Nation Theory

  ›

  At the 19th session of the Hindu Mahasabha in Ahmedabad in 1937, Savarkar declared that India could not be assumed to be a unitarian and homogenous nation; there were two nations living side by side, Hindus and Muslims. This position put him in direct agreement with Muhammad Ali Jinnah. On the 15th of August 1943, in Nagpur, Savarkar stated plainly that he had no quarrel with Jinnah's two-nation theory and that Hindus and Muslims were two nations by historical fact.

  This alliance between the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League was not merely rhetorical. In 1939, after the Indian National Congress resigned en masse in protest against Britain declaring India a belligerent in World War Two without consulting the Indian people, a political vacuum opened. Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha joined hands with the Muslim League and other parties to form coalition governments in several provinces. In Sindh, Mahasabha members joined Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah's Muslim League government. In the North West Frontier Province, Mahasabha members joined Sardar Aurangzeb Khan of the Muslim League in 1943, with Mehar Chand Khanna serving as Finance Minister. In Bengal, the Mahasabha joined the coalition ministry of Fazlul Haq in December 1941.

  When the Congress launched the Quit India Movement in 1942, Savarkar actively opposed it. He wrote a letter titled Stick to your Posts instructing party members who served in municipalities, local bodies, legislatures, or the armed forces to remain at their posts and not join the movement. He advanced the slogan Hinduise all Politics and Militarise Hindudom, and the Hindu Mahasabha organised Hindu Militarisation Boards to recruit soldiers for the British war effort. Savarkar believed military training was essential for Hindus regardless of who was directing the war.

  His statements on Germany and Nazism during this period were unambiguous. In a speech before about twenty thousand people in Pune on the 1st of August 1938, he said Germany had the right to adopt Nazism as suited to its national conditions. He expressed consistent support for Hitler's position on Jews. By the end of 1939 he was directly equating Indian Muslims with German Jews, describing both as groups suspected of harbouring extra-national loyalties. Nazi Germany assigned a point-of-contact person to engage with Savarkar, and he was eventually presented with a copy of Mein Kampf. As late as the 15th of January 1961, he spoke favourably of Hitler's Nazism in contrast to what he called Nehru's cowardly democracy.

• 7. Gandhi's Assassination and Its Aftermath

  ›

  On the 30th of January 1948, Nathuram Godse shot and killed Mahatma Gandhi. Godse was the editor of Agrani, a Marathi daily from Pune, and had invested in the publishing company that ran the newspaper alongside figures including Jugalkishore Birla and Bhalji Pendharkar. Savarkar had invested fifteen thousand rupees in that company. Police arrested Savarkar on the 5th of February 1948 at his house in Shivaji Park and held him in Arthur Road Prison in Bombay on charges of murder, conspiracy, and abetment to murder. The mass of papers seized from his house revealed nothing that could be directly connected with Gandhi's killing, and he was ultimately acquitted for lack of evidence.

  The case did not close there. According to the approver Digambar Badge, on the 17th of January 1948, Godse and a man named Apte visited Savarkar in Bombay before the assassination. Badge testified that when they came out, Apte told him that Savarkar had blessed them with the words Yashasvi houn ya, meaning be successful and return, and had predicted that Gandhi's hundred years were over. Badge's testimony was rejected because it lacked independent corroboration. However, in the last week of August 1974, Manohar Malgonkar spoke with Badge directly, and Badge told him he had put up a valiant struggle against testifying against Savarkar before ultimately agreeing to do so.

  The matter was reopened by the Kapur Commission, appointed following a 1964 revelation at a gathering in Pune celebrating the release of Gopal Godse, Madanlal Pahwa, and Vishnu Karkare. That gathering was presided over by G. V. Ketkar, grandson of Bal Gangadhar Tilak. A retired Supreme Court judge, Jevanlal Kapur, eventually chaired the inquiry. The commission received testimony from two of Savarkar's close aides: his bodyguard Appa Ramachandra Kasar and his secretary Gajanan Vishnu Damle. Both had given statements to Bombay police on the 4th of March 1948, but those statements had not been presented at trial. They testified that Godse and Apte visited Savarkar on or about the 23rd or the 24th of January 1948. Justice Kapur concluded that all the facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than a conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group. After his acquittal and release, Savarkar was arrested again for making Hindu nationalist speeches and released only after agreeing to give up political activities.

• 8. Legacy

  ›

  The airport at Port Blair, capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, was renamed Veer Savarkar International Airport in 2002. A commemorative postage stamp was released by the government of India in 1970. A portrait of Savarkar was unveiled in the Indian Parliament in 2003. The Shiv Sena party has demanded that the government posthumously award him the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award; Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray repeated this demand in 2017 and suggested that a replica of his prison cell be built in Mumbai.

  One of the blue plaques affixed to India House in London, placed by the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, reads: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, 1883-1966, Indian patriot and philosopher lived here. That plaque sits on the same building where, more than a century ago, Savarkar circulated banned books, influenced the thinking of Madanlal Dhingra, and debated Mohandas Gandhi on the uses of political violence.

  In 1956, Savarkar opposed B. R. Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism, calling it a useless act. Ambedkar, who had chaired the committee that drafted India's constitution, responded publicly by questioning whether the honorific Veer, meaning brave, was justified. A biography published in 1926, two years after Savarkar's release from prison, listed its author only as Chitragupta. A second edition appeared in 1987, and in its preface Ravindra Vaman Ramdas concluded that Chitragupta was none other than Veer Savarkar himself. He had, it seemed, begun writing his own legend before he had finished making it.