Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924

by Vikram Sampath

‘All works of history are interim reports. What people did in the past is not preserved in amber . . . immutable through the ages. Each generation looks back and drawing from its own experience, presumes to find patterns that illuminate both past and present.’

Time would be the best arbiter of a man’s significance, he adds. After all, the universe is intelligent enough to remove vestiges that serve no purpose, in order to create space for the new.

‘It is commonly said,’ wrote Temple, ‘that it was the Mahomedans whom the British displaced as rulers in India. This is true only in a restricted sense. It would be nearer the truth to say that it was the Mahrattas in the main, whom we displaced.’3

While Bombay presented a progressive, liberal and moderate viewpoint on several issues, Poona became the mouthpiece of conservative and, sometimes, extremist trends.

Accordingly, the Indian National Congress took shape and its first session was held in Bombay on 28 December 1885 with seventy-two delegates in attendance. Hume assumed the charge as general secretary and Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee of Calcutta was elected president. The Congress had no intentions of seeking independence from British rule and instead pledged unswerving loyalty to the Crown.

According to the unsigned report of the Shivaji festival held from 12 to 14 June 1897, Professor Jinsinwale, one of the prominent attendees, said in his lecture: ‘If no one blames Napoleon for committing two thousand murders in Europe, if Caesar is considered merciful though he needlessly committed slaughters in Gaul . . . many a time, why should so virulent an attack be made on Shri Shivaji Maharaja for killing one or two persons? The people who took part in the French Revolution denied that they committed murders, and maintained they were removing thorns from their path, why should not the same principle be made applicable to Maharashtra?’34

Vinayak proclaimed in both Mitra Mela and Abhinav Bharat that their true caste and religion is humanity and humanity alone.

Detectives are here. I am glad that they have come here to hear and help us in the work we are doing. We have, so to say, indirectly the sympathy of these people and brought even the police to our side. Bear in mind the commands of Ramdas and follow them in the work you undertake. We have lost everything. We have no more faith in our own religion. Try to re-establish that in India. Shed no tears for what is lost. Shed drops of blood to regain what is lost.60

To instil courage in Harnam, he narrated the story of Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth and last guru of the Sikhs. Fighting against the cruelty of the Mughal onslaught, he had lost his sons Ajit Singh and Jhujhar Singh, aged seventeen and thirteen respectively, on the battlefield. His younger sons were entombed alive for refusing to accept Islam. He himself was martyred.

Deep blue, beautiful, boundless sky! Deep blue, beautiful, deep and fathomless sea! Adorned with stars and constellations, the sky smiles enchantingly, The sea returns the same, as it is but a reflection of the sky. Where does the sea end, where does the sky begin In their vast intermingled union?6

A diehard supporter of Shyamji and Vinayak, and an avowed communist, Guy A. Aldred, brought an important Russian revolutionary to India House for an interview with Vinayak in mid-March 1909. Madan Lal Dhingra too was part of these meetings. The revolutionary was none other than Vladimir Ilich Lenin. What transpired between them is unknown and even Vinayak concealed these details till almost 1937.

I hold the English people responsible for the murder of 80 millions of Indian people in the last fifty years, and they are also responsible for taking away £100,000,000 every year from India to this country.

Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics and Bluntschli’s Theory of the State as well as Rousseau’s Social Contract.

An estimated total of 1,215,318 soldiers were sent abroad to all the war zones—Mesopotamia, Egypt, France, East Africa, Gallipoli, Salonica, Aden and the Persian Gulf.

In addition, £3.5 million was paid by India as ‘war gratuities’ of British officers and men of the normal garrisons of India. A further sum of £13.1 million was paid from Indian revenues for the war. In cash and kind an estimate of £146.2 million was India’s gigantic contribution to Britain in this effort—something that is valuated at £50 billion, or even higher, today!

The apostle of non-violence was marching from village to village in 1918 in the most interior of villages of his home province, addressing mass gatherings in recruitment centres, enlisting people for the War.

Indian revolutionaries such as Lala Har Dayal, Taraknath Das, Mahomed Barkatullah, Chandra Kanta Chakrabarti, Heramba Lal Gupta, Virendranath Chattopadhyay, Dr Moreshwar Govindarao Prabhakar, Dr Abdul Hafiz, Dr Chempakaraman Pillai, Bhupendra Nath Dutt, M.P. Tirumala Acharya, and Jodh Singh Mahajan, among several others, came together to form the Indian National Party in Zurich. They had attached themselves to the German general staff, had their headquarters at 28, Weilandstrasse, Charlottenburg, and had planned a major strike on India.

The widely held narrative is that the Jallianwala Bagh massacre led to the birth of the Non-cooperation movement. But as the facts present themselves above, in the Amritsar Congress held in 1919, barely five months after the genocide, Gandhi himself advocated complete cooperation with the British in the wake of the reforms initiated in the royal proclamation and the Government of India Act, 1919.

The seeds of Pakistan, it seemed, were sown three decades before it actually materialized.

‘Mahatma Gandhi is a shrewd bania. You do not understand his real object. By putting you under discipline, he is preparing you for guerrilla warfare. He is not such an out and out non-violencist [sic] as you all suppose.’40 ‘I was shocked,’ said Shraddhanand, ‘to hear all this from the big brother and remonstrated with him, which he treated with humour.’

He even advocated three slogans for Hindus and Muslims alike, to be chanted one after another in every congregation: ‘Allaho Akbar, Bande Mataram/Bharat Mata ki Jai, and Hindu-Musalman ki jai.’

They did exactly what was feared they might—invite the Amir of Afghanistan to invade India for the pan-Islamic cause. In his misguided enthusiasm, Gandhi went to the extent of even supporting such a move: ‘I would, in a sense, certainly assist the Amir of Afghanistan, if he waged a war against the British Government. That is to say, I would openly tell my countrymen that it would be a crime to help a government which had lost the confidence of the nation to remain in power.’49 Even his most ardent supporters were shocked by such statements that had no roots in pragmatism or practicality.

On reaching Anand Bhawan, Pandit Motilal Nehru’s Allahabad residence, Muhammad Ali took Shraddhanand aside and taking out a paper from his handbag, gave him a draft of a telegram to read. ‘What was my astonishment,’ noted Shraddhanand, ‘when I saw the draft of the selfsame telegram in the peculiar handwriting of the Father of the non-violent cooperation movement!’53 Gandhi reached Anand Bhawan the next day and when asked by Sharaddhanand about this matter, did not remember to have sent any such telegram.

With a mantra on his lips that he made the others repeat, Vinayak bid adieu to the torture cell that had been his home for a decade: One God, one country, one hope, One caste, one life, one language, We stand by these.

It is possible that your Ladyship is not fully appraised of all the horrors and atrocities perpetrated by the fiendish rebels; of the many wells and tanks filled up with the mutilated, but often only half-dead, bodies of our nearest and dearest ones who refused to abandon the faith of our fathers; of pregnant women cut to pieces and left on the roadsides and in the jungles, with the unborn babe protruding from the mangled corpse; of our innocent and helpless children torn from our arms and done to death before our eyes and of our husbands and fathers tortured, flayed and burnt alive; of our hapless sisters forcibly carried away from the midst of kith and kin and subjected to every shame and outrage which the vile and brutal imagination of these inhuman hell-hounds could conceive of; of thousands of our homesteads reduced to cinder-mounds out of sheer savagery and a wanton spirit of destruction; of our places of worship desecrated and destroyed and of the images of deity shamefully insulted by putting the entrails of slaughtered cows where flower garlands use to lie, or else smashed to pieces . . . we remember how driven out [of] our native hamlets, we wandered, starving and naked, in the jungles and forests.

However, Vinayak mildly settles for the AIT and seems to indicate that the Aryans came from Persia and thereabouts. He inferred that upon coming to this land they felt a deep sense of oneness and belonging to the river that sustained them. They began to call this land Sapta Sindhu or the land watered by seven rivers and presided over by the Sindhu, or Indus. The people who belonged to this land came to be known as the Sindhus, which gradually changed to ‘Hindu’ given the way Sanskrit terms were mispronounced. He quoted the Zend Avesta to corroborate this, wherein the people here were called Hapta Hindu—again a corruption of the syllable ‘S’ with ‘H’. This was what the contemporaneous ancient Persians called the people of this part of the world.

He contested the popular narrative that the subcontinent was merely a disparate mass of warring kingdoms and nationalities and that it was the British who had welded them together to give us a sense of nationhood. Quoting from one of the eighteen Mahapuranas—a genre of ancient and medieval texts of Hinduism—the Vishnu Purana, he states: ‘We have met with no better attempt to define our position as a people than the terse little couplet in the Vishnu Purana, “The land which is to the north of the sea and to the south of the Himalaya mountains is named ‘Bharata’, inhabited by the descendants of Bharata.”’

Buddhism, he stated, had nothing to offer against violence and thus the Indians had to go back to the Vedic ‘fire’ to make steel to fight.38 Non-violence, he opined, was answerless when pitted against ‘people inferior to Indians, in language, religion, philosophy, mercy, and all the soft human attributes . . . but superior to them in strength alone—in fire and sword’.

He finds sanction for such inter-caste marriages even in the holy epics and scriptures of the land. From the characters of Karna, Babhruvahana, Ghatotkacha, Vidura and others to historical figures such as Chandragupta Maurya who married a Brahmin to beget Bindusara, Ashoka who married a Vaishya and Harshavardhana who gave his daughter to a Kshatriya despite being a Vaishya are examples he uses to illustrate the fluidity with which the caste system operated.

Some of us were Aryans and some Anaryans; but Ayars and Nayars—we were all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us are Brahmans and some Namashudras or Panchamas; but Brahmans or Chandalas—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us are Daxinatyas and some Gauds; but Gauds or Saraswatas—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us were Rakshasas and some Yakshas; but Rakshasas or Yakshas—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us were Vanaras and some Kinnaras; but Vanaras or Naras—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us are Jains and some Jangamas; but Jains or Jangamas—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us are monists, some, pantheists; some theists and some atheists. But monotheists or atheists—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. We are not only a nation, but a Jati, a born brotherhood. Nothing else counts, it is after all a question of heart. We feel that the same ancient blood that coursed through the veins of Ram and Krishna, Buddha and Mahavir, Nanak and Chaitanya, Basava and Madhava, of Rohidas and Tiruvelluvar courses throughout Hindudom from vein to vein, pulsates from heart to heart. We feel we are a JATI, a race bound together by the dearest ties of blood and therefore it must be so.

In a section titled ‘Foreign Invaders’, Vinayak traces the advent of the several hordes of Islamic invaders who ravaged the country and termed this as a civilizational clash. He lamented that the ‘pressure of a common foe’, and the unity that hatred towards a common object can bring, was never utilized by Sindhustan to forge herself ‘into an indivisible whole as on that dire day, when the great iconoclast crossed the Indus’.

He bemoaned how the conquest continued for centuries thereafter. ‘Arabia ceased to be what Arabia was,’ Vinayak explains. ‘Iran, annihilated, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Tartary—from Granada to Gazni—nations and civilizations fell in heaps before the sword of Islam of Peace!’ He adds that India had to face a multitude of marauders, from the Arabs, Persians, Pathans, Baluchis, Tartars, Turks and Mughals.

Aasindhu Sindhu paryanta yasya Bharata bhumika Pitribhu punyabhushchaiva sa vai Hinduriti Smritah. One who considers this vast stretch of land called Bharat From the Sindhu to the Sindhu (Indus to the Seas) as his fatherland (or land of one’s ancestors) and holy land is the one who will be termed and remembered as a Hindu.

The social coalition of Hindu religions naturally fulfilled all the criteria postulated by Vinayak. Vinayak’s hypothesis of identification for a Hindu was someone who looked upon this land of his forefathers as his holy land; someone who inherited the blood of the race of the Sapta Sindhus; and one who expressed a common affinity to the classical language, Sanskrit, someone who shared common history, culture, art, laws, jurisprudence, rites, rituals, ceremonies, sacraments and festivals. Common nation (rashtra), common race (jati) and common culture (sanskriti) were the definitive markers of Hindutva.

Are you a monist—a monotheist—a pantheist—an atheist—an agnostic? Here is ample room, oh soul! Whatever thou art, to love and grow to thy fullest height and satisfaction in this temple of Temples . . . Ye, who by race, by blood, by culture, by nationality possess almost all the essentials of Hindutva . . . ye have only to render whole hearted [sic] love to our common Mother and recognize her not only as Pitribhu but even as a Punyabhu and ye would be most welcome to the Hindu-fold. This is a choice, which our countrymen and our old kith and kin, the Bohras, Khojas, Mamons, and other Mohamedan and Christian communities are free to make—a choice again which must be a choice of love.

Just as it is my duty to repeatedly tell the Hindu nation to abandon its silly religious customs, observances and opinions in this age of science, so I will also tell Muslim society, which is an inevitable part of the Hindustani nation, that it should abandon as quickly as possible its troublesome habits as well as religious fanaticism for its own good—not as a favour to the Hindus, not because the Hindus are scared of your religious aggression, but because these practices are a blot on your humanity, and especially because you will be crushed in the age of science if you cling on to an outdated culture.

You should abandon the belief that not even a word in the Quran can be questioned because it is the eternal message of God, even as you maintain respect for the Quran. But the norms that seemed attractive to an oppressed but backward people in Arabia at a time of civil strife should not be accepted as eternal; make a habit of sticking to only what is relevant in the modern age.