Trying to work up hatred as a categorical imperative, Savarkar found Gandhi’s non-violence ‘sinful’. Much of his life was defined by his antipathy to Gandhi, a ‘crazy lunatic’, as he put it, who ‘happens to babble … [about] compassion, forgiveness’. The two men knew each other in London early in their careers, and there was some talk of working on the common cause of Indian freedom. In 1906 they met at a lodging house for Indian students and aspiring revolutionaries in Highgate. In one account of their encounter, Savarkar, who was frying prawns, offered them to Gandhi. When Gandhi, a vegetarian, refused, Savarkar allegedly said that only a fool would attempt to fight the British Empire without being fortified by animal protein.
Gandhi seems to have taken due note of Savarkar’s political as well as culinary choices. The Hindu activist had friends among a range of expatriate Indian revolutionaries, who partook of the general trend of assassination in Europe and America, believing in Mazzini’s notion that ‘ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs’. One of his upper-caste disciples assassinated a British official in the first successful act of terrorism in India. In 1909, Savarkar inspired another murderous assault on a senior British official in London; he then helped set up scholarships in the name of the assassin.
Gandhi, who had arrived in the British capital a few days after the killing, condemned it as a ‘modern political act par excellence – terrorism legitimized by nationalism’. ‘India,’ he cautioned, ‘can gain nothing from the rule of murderers.’ During his stay in England, Gandhi was much disturbed by the appeal of terroristic violence among Savarkar and his associates. He may have already decided to reinterpret Mazzini in order to rescue him from the Hindu militants. In any case, on the way back to South Africa from England, Gandhi feverishly wrote, in nine days, his manifesto for Indian freedom and denunciation of modern civilization, Hind Swaraj.
In this book he devoted a whole chapter to the topic ‘Italy and India’. Gandhi, worried that Mazzini’s religion of humanity could be appropriated for sectarian ends, blended the Italian’s idea of patriotic duty and education into his own quasi-Hindu ideal of spiritual independence (Swaraj, or self-rule, as distinct from self-government). ‘Mazzini has shown,’ he argued, ‘in his writings on the duty of man that every man must learn to rule himself.’ As distinct from Savarkar’s duty, which was to kill for one’s religious community, Gandhi wrote of the necessity of a non-violent social order.
Gandhi then indulged in some historical revisionism. He blamed the violent aspects of the Risorgimento on Garibaldi: ‘He gave, and every Italian took, arms.’ As for Mazzini, he stood ‘aloof from the petty compromises’; he was superior to Cavour in realizing that ‘true liberty does not consist in the right to choose evil, but in the right to choose the ways that lead to good’. This was why Mazzini’s ambitions were unrealized in Italy and a ‘state of slavery’ prevailed there. Gandhi ignored altogether Mazzini’s faith in science and progress, or his fantasy of a Third Rome (and the Italian’s dismissive views of Hinduism). He used the Italian’s writings to cement his argument that ‘to observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions’ and that India ought not to aspire for independence through violence. The Indians who thought otherwise were ‘intoxicated by the wretched modern civilization’, which is predicated on violence.
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Savarkar and Gandhi’s paths diverged sharply after 1909. Savarkar was arrested in 1910 for his involvement in the murder of a British official in India, and condemned to fifty years in prison. After just two months at a draconian prison in the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, he was writing mercy petitions to the British – an exercise in abject self-cancellation that came to light many decades later.
In one such supplication, Savarkar described himself as a ‘prodigal son’ knocking on ‘parental doors of the government’. He promised to ‘be the staunchest advocate of constitutional progress and loyalty to the English government’ and to ‘bring back all those misled young men in India and abroad who were once looking up to me as their guide’.
As the First World War broke out, he wrote ‘I most humbly beg to offer myself as a volunteer to do any service in the present war, that the Indian government think fit to demand from me.’ Savarkar was denied his moment on the battlefield (unlike his Zionist coeval Jabotinsky, who helped found the Jewish Legion, and fought with the British during their fateful conquest of Palestine in 1917). Nevertheless, he seems to have got a vicarious ‘thrill of delight in my heart’ on hearing of Indian soldiers participating in the slaughter of the First World War: ‘Thank God! Manliness after all is not dead yet in the land.’ He pointed to the common dangers to Hindus and Christians of Turko-Afghan hordes to the north of India, writing that ‘every intelligent lover of India would heartily and loyally cooperate with the British people in the interest of India herself’. The British eventually commuted his sentence after fewer than fourteen years in prison. But they also forced Savarkar to cease his anti-imperialist activities. Interned in a small western Indian town, he was left to define the Hindu self in opposition to what it was not.
His prison library in Andaman had contained writings by Treitschke and Herbert Spencer, and the complete works of Mazzini. He deployed his obsessive readings in the Italian to write Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (1928), the book that comes closest to defining the ideology of modern Hindu nationalism. According to Savarkar, Hindutva embraced ‘all the department of thought and activity of the whole being of our Hindu race’. Closely imitating Mazzini’s imprecisions, he wrote, ‘India was the land of Hindus, their culture was Aryan, and their roots traced back to the Vedic times.’
There was a bit more clarity in Savarkar’s call to ‘Hinduize all politics and Militarise Hindudom.’ Such aims could at least appear to be achieved by identifying Muslims as the enemy within. They were undeniably alien to India: ‘Their holy land is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently, their names and their outlook smack of foreign origin.’ (Savarkar characteristically forgot that the holy places of Christian Europe are in Palestine.)
Savarkar himself had no time for any of India’s indigenous faiths or traditional ways of life. ‘He [Mazzini] savagely attacked,’ Savarkar wrote approvingly, ‘the notion of the gates of Heaven, if there be such a thing, being open to anyone who had neglected to serve the nation, whiling away his time in empty rituals of religion.’ Savarkar was as much forward-looking and scientistic as any of the fascists, communists and Zionists bred during the fin de siècle. ‘If you want success on earth,’ he wrote, ‘you must acquire earthly power and strength. If your movement has material strength you will succeed whether or not you have divine blessing for it … Has not atheist Soviet Russia become a World Power?’