Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalkar, The RSS, and India

by Jyotirmaya Sharma

184 pages, Hardcover

Published March 5, 2007

About the author

Jyotirmaya Sharma is professor of political science at the University of Hyderabad, India. In December 2010, the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study at Uppsala elected him Fellow for the Spring Semester of 2012. The Lichtenberg-Kolleg at Goettingen has also elected him Fellow for the academic year 2012-13. His recent publications include, Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (Penguin/Viking, 2003; second edition published in december 2011; it has been translated into Marathi, Telugu and Malayalam) and Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India (Penguin/Viking, 2007; translated into Malayalam). His critical examination of the ideas of Swami Vivekananda and 19th century restatements of Hinduism has now been published as Cosmic Love and Human Apathy: Swami Vivekananda's Restatement of Religion (HarperCollins, 2013). He is currently working on the thought of Gandhi. An edited volume titled Grounding Morality: Freedom, Knowledge and the Plurality of Cultures (co-edited with A. Raghuramaraju) was published by Routledge (2010). He has been a fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, and has lectured at the universities of Baroda, Hull, Oxford, and the St. Stephens College, Delhi. He was visiting professor in democratic theory at the South Asia Institute at Ruprecht-Karls University at Heidelberg in 2005. The International House, Japan, awarded him the Asia Leadership Fellow Programme fellowship for 2008. Sharma also held senior editorial positions at the Times of India and The Hindu between 1998-2006, and continues to write occasional columns for Mail Today, Hindustan Times and Outlook.

Reviews

[Mahesh · Rating 2 out of 5]

i found nothing terrifying in this book.

[Rajiv Chopra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am glad that I read this book, and this would have been a difficult book for Jyotirmaya Sharma to write, given his own discomfort with the RSS agenda. It is a short book, and gives the reader and idea of MS Golwakar’s philosophy. Sometimes, I feel that MS Golwakar did waver once or twice, or had some sort of ideological confusion, but no.

He did live by his principles, and did a lot to see them through. This is contrast to what seems to be the state of the RSS leadership today, where self-interest seems to have become more important than the ideology.

From my perspective, the vision is frightening, but Jyotirmaya Sharma has done an admirable job in keeping to a middle path when writing the book.