We will present on Vinayak Damodar.

Savarkar Savarkar was born in 1883 in a traditional

Brahman family in Maharashtra at a time when the Indian Renaissance was manifested in
diverse interpretations of the past, present and future of the country. While a section of the
Indian society had started presenting an intellectual critique of the political and economic
dimensions of the British rule in India, certain other sections were busy in reviving and
reinvigorating the religious-cultural traditions and legacies of their people. Hence, Savarkar's
childhood appears to have been made in deep inculcation of the values of the Hindu religion
and culture, and exhortations of reviving the glorious legacies left by the great Maratha rulers
like Shivaji. Otherwise, it would not have been possible for a child of just 10 years of age to feel
so instigated at the hearing of the news of communal riots in the United Provinces that he
gathered group of dozen odd students of his school and stoned a place of worship to take an
apparent revenge for the killing of Hindus in that riot. Besides his deep pain at the beating of
Hindus at the hands of people of other religions, Savarkar was equally anguished at the
brutalities of the British rule in India which not only hanged, suppressed and exploited the
Indians but also devalued the pious and glorious religious-cultural traditions of the Hindus in the
country. He, therefore, developed a vengeful attitude towards British rule in India and expressed
his willingness to die fighting for the independence of the country. Thus, from his early
childhood, two distinct persuasions of his life appeared to be his passion: to work for the cause
of the Hindus and fight for the independence of the country.
Later in his life, instead of joining the rank and file of the Congress party to fight for the
independence of the country, he joined the Tilakite Democratic Swaraj Party, a relatively
unknown entity espousing the cause of Indian nationalism based on the lines of the radical
swaraj as advocated by Lokmanya Tilak. However, soon he found this party's activities to be
inconsequential for the future of the country and joined Hindu Mahasabha to become its
President soon and retaining the position till 1945. During the Presidency of Savarkar, Hindu
Mahasabha gained much, both in its influence on the Hindu society and 'sharpening of its
ideological commit- ments. In his presidential addresses, Savarkar extensively elaborated his
ideas on the Hindu rashtra, as presented in his previous publication, Hindutva. Hindutva, as a
political philosophy, not only reflected the firm conviction of Savarkar in the veracity and
practicability of the religious-cultural ethos of Hindus to be the infallible basis of conceptualising
India as a Hindu rashtra, but also the response of a Hindu nationalist to the prevailing
circumstances of the time.

As a spokesman of the majority interests, V.D. Savarkar formulated an ideology which could
demolish the claims of national parity made by the Muslims, negate the territorial concept of
nationhood propagated by the Congress, blunt the edge of the demands made by the
Depressed Classes and prevent further atomisation of the Hindu community.

Still, above all, it was an ideological construct to provide for the consolida tion of Hindus in India
as mentioned by Suresh Sharma in his 1990s work. It was, in fact, the full blown articulation of
the subtle idea which was simmering in the mind of Savarkar since his childhood, given his
apparent upbringing in the intellectual ambience where the cure to the ills of the Hindu society
was construed to lie in the establishment of a Hindu rashtra in India.
Savarkar began his conceptualisation of the idea of Hindutva by seeking answer to the question
as to what could be considered as Hindu. He proclaims that a Hindu could be anyone who
considered this land of Bharatvarsha, from the Indus to the Seas, as his Fatherland as well as
his holy land, that would be the cradle land of his religion. Furthermore, he envisaged three
fundamental bonds that would conjoin the Hindus as a common entity, namely, rashtra
(territory), jati (race) and samskriti (culture). Thus, territorially, a Hindu is one who feels being
attached to the geographical tract extending between the rivers Sindhu (Indus) and
Brahmaputra, on the one hand, and from the Himalayas to the Cape Comorin, on the other. This
geographical specification, indeed, becomes identical to what has traditionally been considered
to the land of India for centuries.
Racially, Savarkar considered a Hindu as the one 'whose first and discernible source could be
traced to the Himalayan altitudes of the Vedic Sapta- sindhu'. Such a racial demarcation of the
Hindu was seemingly not meant to claim any sort of superiority of Hindus in comparison to other
races in the world but to distinguish them from others. Moreover, Savarkar pronounced that the
trait of Hindutva encompassing the life of the inhabitants of this part of the land would remain
indelible, as the impulse of his Hindu blood would make him feel the pride of being a Hindu.
Culturally, Savarkar maintains that a Hindu must feel the pride and commonality of his cultural
roots with the other people of Hindustan.

Savarkar, thus, provides for a complex criterion to ordain a distinct identity and character to the
Hindus in the Indian society.

Savarkar writes that the "ism of the Hindus; and as the word Hindu has been derived from the
word Sindhu, the Indus, meaning primarily all those who reside in the land that extends from
Sindhu to Sindhu, Hinduism must necessarily mean the religion or the religions that are peculiar
and native to this land and to these people” However, a mischievous parochial construction of
the idea of Hinduism confines it as the religion of the majority of people, leaving aside a vast
number of people outside the fold of Hindu religion.

[a]nd thus we find that while millions of our Sikhs, Jains, Lingayats, several Samajis and others
would deeply resent to be told that they-whose fathers' fathers up to the tenth generation had
the blood of Hindus in their veins-had suddenly ceased to be Hindu!

But Savarkar points out that they, indeed, are the part and parcel of Hinduism, as they, despite
following numerous shades and schools, consider this land of Hindus as their fatherland and
holy land. 'So to every Hindu form the Santal to the Sadhu this Bharat bhumi, this Sindhusthan
is at once a pitribhu anda punyabh fatherland and a holy land". Applying this canon, therefore,
Savarkar asserts that the converts to Christianity and Islam could not be considered as Hindus
despite sharing common culture and lifestyle due to the fact that though they regard Hindusthan
as their fatherland, they do not regard it as their holy land

By delineating the twin criteria of who could be a Hindu and who could not be so. Savarkar
appeared to be advancing his interrelated agenda of bringing about broad-based Hindu
sangathan on the one hand, and preclude the believers in other religions from such a
sangathan, on the other. He, therefore, was categorical in pointing out the identicalness
between the notions of Hindutva and Indiannes As he declared,

A Hindu patriot worth the name cannot but be an Indian patriot as well. To the Hindus,
Hindustan being fatherland and holy land, the love they bear to Hindustan is boundless. What is
called nationalism can be defined as in fact
the national communalism of the majority community Thus, in Hindustan it is the Hindus,
professing Hindu religion and being in the overwhelming majority, that constitutes the national
community and create and formulate the nationalism of the nation.

In substance, the ideology of Hindutva, as propounded by Savarkar was, rooted in the vision of
Hindu solidarity. It was, in fact, a political construct whose antecedents lay in the cultural ethos
of the Hindus. He maintained that despite having numerous external differentiations, internally,
Hindus are bound together by certain distinct cultural, historical, religious, social and linguistic
commonalities which have been brought about by centuries of assimilation and association with
each other. To Savarkar, in the making of the Hindu rashtra, what counted more than anything
else was the cultural, racial and religious unity of the people. In his perception, a nation would
have been a political formation having people living in a contiguous and adequate landscape
with a common national identity, marked by the internal cohesion brought about by subtle
cultural and racial affinities. As the Hindus consisted of all these characteristics, they
undoubtedly constituted a nation in the nature of a Hindu rashtra.

In such a Hindu rashtra, Savarkar offered the minorities some degree of freedom and right to
participation in the affairs of the state provided they accept a position of non-aggression to the
interests and rights of Hindus. He, therefore, opposed the demand of Muslims for the grant of
separate electorate in India. He claimed that by being bestowed with such preferential
treatment, Muslims would probably be handed down the right of exercising the political veto on
the legitimate rights and privileges of the majority and call it Swarajya. Thus, on the question of
minority rights, the approach of Savarkar was in consonance with his broad conceptualisation of
the philosophy of Hindutva.

The life and thoughts of Savarkar have drawn criticism from a number of quarters. He has been
branded for providing the intellectual input for the present day right wing extremism in the
country. Jyotirmaya Sharma in his critic of Savarkar bemoans that Savarkar politicised religion
and introduced religious metaphors into politics. He pioneered an extreme, uncompromising and
rhetorical form of Hindu nationalism in Indian political discourse. His life exhibited an
unwavering pursuit of a single ideal: to establish India as a Hindu nation. Even today, Savarkar
remains the first, and most original, prophet of extremism in India.
He has also been charged as being an ideologue whose theoretical constructs failed to cut
much ice with the people in the country.
Dixit writes tha Savarkar's ideology failed to realise its political goal because it lacked the
strength that comes from the mass support. His unidimensional approach to politics-protection
of Hindu interests against Muslim encroachment had no relevance for the Hindu masses'.
Notwithstanding the attacks on the thoughts of Savarkar from both theoretical as well as
practical perspectives, the fact cannot be denied that his intellectual explorations have gone to
enrich and give newer dimensions to the body of political thought in India. His theorisation on
the notion of Hindutva might appear to be against the spirit and ethos of the composite culture
which has been the hallmark of the Indian civilisation for many centuries, it undoubtedly
reflected the perspective of certain sections of the society in a particular context and time.