Janaki Bakhle, Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva. Princeton Univ Press 2024, pages xv+501, Price INR 999/-
In the extremely polarised era in the India that we live in, a biography of a contentious person, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966) is bound to attract substantial attention. This is not limited to the popular domain of public history but also in the scholarly domain. Historian Janaki Bakhle (Columbia University) has intervened in this sphere, first with two of her long, well-researched essays in 2010. These essays created a temptation among academics and expectations from Bakhle that she brings out a comprehensive biography of Savarkar. The wait took long. Eventually, this large volume has come out. In terms of methodological rigour, the book is indeed an extraordinarily impressive work.
This is perhaps for the first time that Savarkar has been studied not in a hagiographic account but with extraordinary scrutiny of a multitude of sources and evidence: the thick files of police and intelligence reports and a deep engagement with the range of Marathi language sources. This awe-inspiring volume inevitably impresses a discerning student of history with the range of the facets of Savarkar: his anti-colonial revolutionary activities, his anti-Muslim hatred, his radical caste reformism, his Marathi language oeuvres in prose and poetry (creative and rhetorical), the way he looked upon and weaponised history, and the ways he adapted to fashion himself into a legend in his own time through both mythologization and sacralization. In this segment, Janaki Bakhle looks into all hagiographical accounts (around 250 tracts) on and by Savarkar, mostly in the Marathi language. Bakhle says that between 1924 and 1937 Savarkar wrote around 300 essays on various issues, in Marathi, and therefore she makes it clear (p. 423) as to why did she has looked so deeply and closely into Savarkar’s Marathi writings, hitherto untapped by historians:
In this book I have kept in mind Theodor Adorno’s aphorism that one must be steeped in a tradition to hate it properly. By hate, Adorno meant critique, which I take to mean both appreciation and analysis. I have steeped myself in the traditions that surround Savarkar so I could present a new view, scholarly and dispassionate, but also embedded in the traditions and milieu that spawned his life and his legends. I have tried to present Savarkar as a man of intense nationalist passion who was seen as extraordinarily dangerous (hence important and influential) by the colonial authorities, yet who was used (perhaps unwittingly) at the same time by them to further their own agenda.
Janaki Bakhle’s study doesn’t go beyond 1937, even though, while evaluating Savarkar’s “historical” and performable writings, his 1963 account, Six Glorious Epochs has also been subjected to scrutiny and analysis. By terminating the study in 1937, Janaki Bakhle skips the story of Savarkar’s alleged roles in plotting the assassination of Gnadhiji wherein he was acquitted owing to lack of sufficient evidence. The critics of Savarkar may argue that a further trial based on “circumstantial evidence” may have culminated into a different end result This continues to intrigue many as to why neither Nehru, Sardar Patel (who barely spoke against the RSS before January 30, 1948) and Morarji Desai (whose 1974 autobiography hints at something) and other such leaders in power pursued this case further? Was it because such a judicial pursuit may have created administratively unmanageable revulsion from the admirers of Savarkar? Did Savarkar really carry a strong charisma among a section of his fellow castes in parts of his home province?
A close reader of the last three chapters of Bakhle may get some hint/clue about the answers to the last question. In fact, just as a powerful fiction leaves readers thinking for long after having finished reading the story, Bakhle leaves her discerning readers thinking on so many aspects of Savarkar. Bakhle’s relevant chapters clearly suggest that Savarkar, the poet-politician, rhetorical essay-writer, and playwright, the “nation’s bard”, was a sort of cult among a section of the Marathi literary world (for communalisation of this segment of Marathi population, see T C A Raghavan’s 1983 essay). Thus, Savarkar’s pre-Cellular Jail life when he was fiercely anti-colonial revolutionary, and his post-1924 life when he fashioned himself first and foremost as a poet and Marathi litterateur besides a rationalist anti-caste social reformist, helped him become quite a charismatic figure for a section of the Marathi-speaking population. That he “was not sporadically or episodically anti-Muslim; he was deeply and systematically anti-Muslim” (p. 148) could be no less significant factor in his popularity among certain quarters.
The first two chapters rely much upon a critically insightful examination of intelligence reports of the colonial police. The author rightly says that Savarkar spent all his public life under state surveillance (even after independence too). Bakhle is very clear about (a specific contention around Savarkar) that his anti-Muslim hatred always existed and that it had nothing to do with the rumour that he turned anti-Muslim only after he received maltreatment at the hands of a Muslim in the Cellular Jail. However, Savarkar’s anti-Muslim hatred became much more pronounced with the start of the Khilafat Movement, and it served the colonial interest very well. He looked upon Khilafat agitation as an “international conspiracy to steal Hindu sovereignty”.
Bakhle deals with colonial motives in great detail while detailing the Savarkar-Gandhi-Khilafat issue. It provokes scholars of the field to re-look into the hitherto untold impact of the pan-Islamist Khilafat agitation upon a section of Hindus. Apprehensions of Lala Lajpat Rai (Intezar Husain’s 1999 Urdu biography of Hakim Ajmal Khan, Ajmal-e-Azam, records it) were not far different from those of Savarkar on the issue. The colonial power-play of pitting the two religious communities of India against each other is brought out very deeply and comprehensively by Bakhle. Bakhle, quite rightly, makes it a point to mention that many eminent Muslim leaders and scholars were not for the institution of Khilafat, such as, Sir Syed (1817-1898), Ashraf Ali Thanwi (1863-1943), Ahmed Riza Barelvi (1856-1921), Shibli Numani (1857-1914) and Anwar Shah Kashmiri of Deoband. Despite this, by the time the World War-I began, Indian Muslims became so agitated in favour of the Khilafat keeping themselves quite oblivious to the anti-Caliphate upsurge of the Turks at home in Turkey. This aspect needed little more detailed treatment, in order to understand the sentiments of those segments of Hindus who were apprehensive about pan-Islamist “designs” of Indian Muslims. Yet, Gandhiji extended unconditional support to them in the early 1920s.
A further engagement with Azmi Ozcan’s 1997 book, Pan Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain, 1877-1924 would have further enriched the book under review. Ozcan makes it clear that Indian Muslims turned sympathetic to the Turkish Caliphate only in the 1870s, when the Ottoman-British relations began to deteriorate. Otherwise, the Ottomans and Mughals were not on good terms. There are indications that the former remained in apprehension that Mughals might snatch away their Caliphate. Mughal princess and writer Gulbadan Begam (1570s; see Rumer Godden’s 1975 biography), Sikandar Begum of Bhopal (1861) and the Tonk State administrator (1871) faced hostilities of the Haj administrators under the Ottoman Caliphate (see Ziauddin Sardar, 2014, Mecca: The Sacred City). Janaki Bakhle however does benefit from Naeem Qureshi (2014) who explains the Ottoman anxiety and insecurity, as they were the first Caliphs to have been non-Arab and non-descendant of the Prophet Mohammad (p. 91).
Bakhle misses to note that, not only Savarkar, long before that, since 1877-1878, Indian Muslim leaders too, were under colonial surveillance for their growing sympathies with the Ottomans. Just two decades back, in 1857, the Mughal state had already been liquidated. It would be pertinent to note that Turkish Cap became a fad in the MAO College of Aligarh (which was founded in 1877). Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hameed II (1876-1909) was reclaiming the Caliphate, calling himself, Imam-ul-Muslimeen, which had receptivity across Asia, Africa, including British India. Soon after Hameed, India’s Pan Islamists would form Anjuman-e-Khuddam-e-Kaba (Society of the Servants of Kaba) in 1912-13.
The colonial intelligence reports about India’s Khilafat leaders and Savarkar’s vitriol against the same carry some degree of resemblance in tone, tenor and vocabulary. She devotes considerable number of pages on the evolution of colonial policing and surveillance, which is quite useful for evidence-based historical research.
Savarkar’s deep antipathy against the Ali Brothers is understandable. While the former looked upon Kemal Ataturk as a secular saviour, the later was agitating passionately about the preservation of Caliphate. Interestingly, Jinnah too displayed a limited, essential resemblance with Savarkar on this specific issue. Also, in the post-Tilak phase of the nationalist mass movement both Savarkar and Jinnah developed an antipathy against Gandhiji. Contrary to assertions from some circles, at least for once, by 1927, we do find Savarkar speaking against Jinnah. In Savarkar’s understanding all Muslim leaders were for enhancing Muslim numbers through conversion, and that they bargained to obtain concessions from Hindus, issuing a threat that “whatever demands Muslims make, all of them have to be immediately granted by Hindus, otherwise with the help of Afghanistan or some other Muslim country we will establish Muslim rule in India” (p. 124).
Subsequently, like Savarkar, Shaukat Ali too (in 1933) would seek clemency from the colonial state to secure his pension to be restored from 1919, rather than from 1933 (something Janaki Bakhle has ommitted). Nonetheless, with meticulous and detailed surveillance reports obtained about Savarkar from the colonial state, helps Bakhle conclude almost irrefutably that the Colonial state always looked upon Savarkar as a tool to be used for creating Hindu-Muslim hostility (p. 423) and made a greater use of him after 1937.
Janaki Bakhle brings out the merits of Savarkar’s caste reformism, something which has remained largely unacknowledged among the non-Marathi readers. She however doesn’t gloss over the limitations of Savarkar’s reformism. “[H]e never developed a critique of caste that acknowledged its deep connections to structures of power, access, and wellbeing” (p. 151). This chapter makes comprehensive engagement with the positions of Gandhi, Ambedkar and Savarkar on the issues of caste and untouchability. Savarkar’s pathologically obsessive pursuit of ethno-nationalism wanted to convert caste (jati) into Hindu ethnicity through an upper-caste Brahminic lens (p. 153). However, on this count, for a more informed critique of Ambedkar and its divergence as well as convergence (in terms of anti-Muslim utterances) with Savarkar, an engagement with Keith Meadowcroft’s works could have proven more useful.
Savarkar’s ethnonationalist project is analysed quite brilliantly in each chapter. He wanted to cure his “nation” of the “narcoleptic sleep disorder”, suggests Bakhle (p. 352). Scrutinizing him as “nationalist historian” she looks into his 1963 text, Six Glorious Epochs as a “defensive tract about the Hindu Mahasabha, which had held itself aloof from Gandhi and the INC-led Quit India Movement [of 1942]”, and where he “appears both angry and tired”.
This is a commendable work not only to know of many lesser known aspects and psyche of her subject (Savarkar) but also to learn much more about the divisive power-play of the British, the crucial decades of the nationalist movement during the 1920s and 1930s, and it unpacks new layers of Hindu anxiety around the Pan-Islamist Muslims of India. Janaki Bakhle’s historiographic rigour, insight (and beautiful prose) uncovers the genesis behind contemporary resurgence of Hindutva. A must read both for the specialists as well as popular reading which settles many contentions of public history on the subject.
Related:
Political History of India’s Two Muslim Universities since 1947