Hindutva concluded with cautionary examples of Armenian and Christian enemies within the Turkish nation and equally suspect ‘Negro’ inhabitants of the United States, which, he insisted, ‘must stand or fall with the fortunes of its Anglo-Saxon constituents’. This tacit endorsement of the 1915 genocide in Turkey and white supremacism in America was immediately followed by an appeal for a Hindu empire. Part of the last sentence of the book reads, ‘the limits of the universe – there the frontiers of my country lie.’
While Savarkar filled up pages with dreams of sub-Mazzini imperium and pseudo-Fichtean reflections, he was being politically eclipsed by his rival, Gandhi, who seemed during the 1920s and 1930s to speak for Muslims as well as Hindus, and had an impressive organization behind him. Gandhi drew his political imagery from popular folklore; it made him more effective as a leader of the Indian masses than any upper-caste Hindu politician who relied upon a textual, or elite Hinduism, not to mention ill-digested bits of European political theory.
Savarkar became president of a party called the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937, and busied himself with reconverting non-Hindus to Hinduism. He again offered his cooperation to the British as the latter imprisoned Gandhi in 1942. ‘The essential thing,’ he said, ‘is for Hinduism and Great Britain to be friends and the old antagonism was no longer necessary.’ Lacking a mass base, Hindu nationalist leaders had from the 1920s onwards opposed Gandhi and courted the British in an attempt to bring an anti-Muslim Hindu nationalism into Indian politics through the back door.
No immediate benefits accrued to Savarkar himself. But this was the time when ultra-nationalists and cultural supremacists were consolidating worldwide amid a global social and economic breakdown. The closest observers and keenest imitators of the manly Social Darwinists of Italy, France, Germany and Japan were often nationalists without a nation state. In 1923, Jabotinsky formed a youth group called Betar, modelled on European militant groups with its emphasis on calisthenics, brown shirts, parades, salutes, and military-style organization and discipline. Two years later a member of Savarkar’s party, the Hindu Mahasabha, broke away to form the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Like Betar, it recruited boys at an impressionable age, and a British intelligence report published in 1933 warned that ‘it is perhaps no exaggeration to assert that the Sangh hopes to be in future India what the “Fascisti” are to Italy and the “Nazis” to Germany’.
Savarkar himself supported Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy, identifying it as a solution for the Muslim problem in India: ‘A Nation is formed,’ he wrote in 1938, ‘by a majority living therein. What did the Jews do in Germany? They being in minority were driven out from Germany.’ Admiration for Nazi Germany was widely shared among Hindu nationalists at the end of the 1930s. In his manifesto ‘We, or Our Nationhood Defined’ (1939), Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, supreme director of the RSS from 1940 to 1973, asserted that India was Hindustan, a land of Hindus where Jews and Parsis were ‘guests’ and Muslims and Christians ‘invaders’. Golwalkar was clear about what he expected the guests and invaders to do:
The foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture … or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges.
Savarkar was arrested the same day, 30 January 1948, that his most fervent admirer in his party, Nathuram Godse, murdered Gandhi. During his trial, Godse made a long and eloquent speech reprising Savarkar’s themes; he was disappointed to find that his hero, eager not to return to jail, ignored him coldly in the courthouse and prison.
Savarkar himself was acquitted of the conspiracy to murder Gandhi, though Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first home minister and no mean Hindu nationalist himself, was convinced by his intelligence sources that ‘a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar’ created the conspiracy to kill Gandhi and ‘saw it through’. An official commission of inquiry into Gandhi’s death, in the late 1960s, drew on testimony unavailable at the original trial to find Savarkar guilty of leading the conspiracy.
Savarkar was dead by then. His last years had been darkened by bitterness. The rival he had helped murder was hailed as a ‘saint’; his own efforts to mobilize Hindus had come to nothing. Evidence showing his complicity with British rulers came to light after his death. It is much clearer today that his notions of Hindutva had been third-hand at best – deriving from Mazzini, who in turn had borrowed them from Mickiewicz, Saint-Simon and Lamennais, and from fin de siècle students and interpreters of Herbert Spencer.
Yet Savarkar, the archetypal mimic man, expressed early the aggressive desires of an educated upper-caste minority trying to secure an exalted place for itself in a fast-changing world: an ambitious elite that was long on education but short on political power and influence. Savarkar’s methods have returned to the centre stage of Indian politics as many members of an expanded and globalized middle class frantically assert a strong Hindu identity internationally. They have, to rephrase Bismarck on Italy, large teeth as well as a large appetite as they reactivate the fin de siècle vision of Social Darwinism, using Savarkar’s and Vivekananda’s kaleidoscopic conflations of past with future, myth with science, and archaism with technicism.
Failure to catch up with ‘advanced’ countries and gain international eminence has now replicated in India, after many other countries, the fantasy of a strongman who will heal old injuries and achieve closure by forcing the world to recognize Indian power and glory. The self-chosen mission of middle-class Hindus for India’s regeneration is tuned to the highest pitch. Back in the 1960s, Naipaul was scornful of their ‘apocalyptic’ language. Today, the bizarre lurching between victimhood and chauvinism that he noticed has an ominous geopolitical dimension as India appears to rise (and simultaneously fall), and many ambitious Indians feel more frustrated in their demand for higher status from white Westerners.