The Strange Case of Barrister Savarkar

ON 28 MAY 2019 , a video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared on his Twitter handle. The day marked the one-hundred-and-eighty-sixth birth anniversary of Vinayak Savarkar, the demagogue and Hindu nationalist whose portrait the video showed Modi praying to. Savarkar “epitomises courage, patriotism and unflinching commitment to a strong India,” Modi said. “He inspired many people to devote themselves towards nation-building.” Modi added that “Savarkar was both a freedom fighter and poet, who always emphasised harmony and unity.”

The prime minister is not alone in this kind of hagiographic praise for Savarkar. Perhaps one of the first articulators of modern Hindutva, Savarkar has risen to the very top of the right-wing pantheon. His portrait now hangs in the Indian parliament and his image is plastered on various posters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. In March, a road in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University was named after Savarkar. (Soon after, BR Ambedkar’s name was graffitied over it, on a sign proclaiming the road’s new title.)

The deification of Savarkar has been an outcome of the constant writing and rewriting of his life to fit the Hindutva politics of the time—a project that is as active today as it has ever been, as evident in two new biographies by the writers Vikram Sampath and Vaibhav Purandare. This not only includes attempting to project his notions of a Hindu majoritarian state and how to achieve it, but also attempts to connect him to a menagerie of revolutionaries and revolutionary organisations as a way of reifying the argument that he played a crucial role in India’s struggle for decolonisation. In any rigorous academic analysis of the various struggles against the British, Savarkar played only a marginal or tangential role as an ideologue. The Hindu Right further needed to rewrite Savarkar’s legacy after various mercy petitions Savarkar had sent to British authorities were published in the historian RC Majumdar’s 1975 book Penal Settlements in the Andamans.

Much of the praise and criticism Savarkar receives necessarily connects to his ideological positions, set out in the 1923 pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva. For instance, the archival work of the academic Marzia Casolari as well as Ashish Nandy’s An Anti-secularist Manifesto draw upon this text to delve into the ideological incompatibility of Savarkar’s Hindu nationalism with the idea of a secular India, as well as to explore the similarities between Hindutva and the ideology behind fascist movements in Italy and Germany.

But Savarkar‘s political legacy—including his urge towards primal violence and the anti-intellectualism that undergirds his thinking—can perhaps be best understood in a 1926 book titled The Life of Barrister Savarkar. The book is hardly new, but in the present circumstances it begs to be re-read and highlighted. It reveals how Savarkar himself established a tradition of contortion that the Hindu right has since followed in its worship of him. Such is the strange case of Savarkar—a man desperate to convince himself and the world of his heroism, despite the facts of his life making him ill-fit for adulation even in his own esteem.

In a preface—dated February 1986—for a republication of the book, a certain Ravindra Vaman Ramdas suggested that Savarkar wrote the book under the pseudonym Chitragupta: “Who was this ‘Chitragupta’, the author of ‘Life of Barrister V.D. Savarkar’? The pen-picture of Paris appears that Chitragupta’ is none other than Veer Savarkar.” Here, Ramdas is referring to a section of the book that describes Savarkar’s internal debate in park in Paris. The descriptions of the weather, ponds, water birds and flowers are so experiential and specific that Ramdas implies it was written by Savarkar himself. “However, why Savarkar has not disclosed it even after Independence will ever remain a mystery,” he adds. The book lays bare Savarkar’s megalomania. Within the self-aggrandising and often tangential writing lies the sense of a fundamental insecurity through which we can understand the intellectual reality of Hindutva philosophy.