By Dr. Satish C. Aikant
On 3rd January Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for a new Delhi University college in Delhi named after V D. Sarkar, thus consolidating the institutional memory of the controversial Hindutva ideologue. Savarkar’s role in the Indian freedom struggle has been an ideological point of contention between the Sangh Parivar and several other historians and political leaders who have flagged his multiple mercy petitions to the British colonial masters while he was undergoing the prison sentence in the Andamans as well as his subsequent role after his release.
Gandhi is seen in sharp contrast to Savarkar both in his objective and the modus operandi to achieve it. The inspiration for autonomy and nationhood was provided by what is by far the most significant document, Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, first published in 1909, which was also Gandhi’s manifesto for ideological independence. Gandhi repeatedly insisted that the country must rid itself not only of the British rule but also of the traditional forces of domination, such as untouchability, as well as tame the forces of modernity, which, he believed, left millions of Indians unemployed and destitute.
The attainment of swaraj was the immediate task facing colonial India. But here Gandhi draws a subtle distinction between swaraj as self-rule and swaraj as self-government or home rule. Swaraj as self-rule is the rule of the self by the self. More precisely it is the rule of the mind over itself and the passions – the passions of greed and aggression. As swaraj is something that is capable of being experienced within oneself, the inner experience of self-rule enables the citizens to reinforce their political ethics.
Gandhi valorizes traditional India for as much as it was able to maintain a certain openness of cultural boundaries that allows new influences to flow in and be integrated as a new set of traditions. These two processes of inflow and outflow, rather than a rigidly defined set of practices, determine Indian culture at a given point of time. Simply because something is ancient does not mean that it is beyond criticism or remains necessarily worthwhile. There is this need to continuously pass judgement on the central tenets of a tradition, sometimes to praise them, sometimes to reformulate them, and sometimes to condemn them. Gandhi holds that the problem with contemporary Hinduism is that it has departed from its core principles. It has become moribund and weak, maintaining its presence through symbol and ritual, and retains little of the animating force that helps people morally orientate themselves. As a corrective, Gandhi wants a reformed tradition to confront modernity.
Gandhi’s Hinduism is usually juxtaposed against V. D. Savarkar’s Hindutva, which is clearly a political ideology. Gandhi’s Hinduism follows a plural tradition. Savarkar defined Hindutva in terms of racial identity. The seminal text of Hindu nationalism is Hindutva, written in 1923 by Savarkar. To his own query, ‘Who is a Hindu?’ Savarkar’s unequivocal answer is: a Hindu was someone who considered India to be his motherland (matrbhumi), the land of his ancestors (pitrbhumi) and his holy land (punya bhumi). India was a land of the Hindus since the Hindu faith originated in India. Islam and Christianity, born outside of India, were therefore out of his schema of a ‘Hindu nation.’ Swami Vivekananda’s prescriptive notion of ‘an Islamic body and a Vedantic heart’ would be an anathema to Hindutva followers. Savarkar’s early enthusiasm for communal harmony was superseded as he shifted his arguments for ‘Indians’ to a primary focus on ‘Hindus.’
Though Hinduism is difficult to define there is a clear distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva. In the 1986 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica the article on Hinduism says: ‘In principle, Hinduism incorporates all forms of belief and worship without necessitating the selection or elimination of any. The Hindu is doctrinally tolerant … Hinduism is, then, both a civilization and a conglomeration of religions, with neither a beginning, a founder, nor a central authority, hierarchy, or organization.’ There is no singular authoritative scriptural source out of which definitive doctrines can be extracted as fundamental to the Hindu tradition. Hinduism in this sense is all-encompassing and subsumes Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism and other native Indian religious traditions.
Gandhi’s idea of Hinduism was syncretic and eclectic rather than sectarian, and he respected all other religions. It was his life’s mission to undertake relentless campaign for interfaith harmony. His views were shaped by the wisdom-traditions of the East and the West where cultures, though different from each other, shared the same moral universe and were therefore mutually related. Gandhi never was a regular temple-goer, and like many Hindus he did not think that visiting temples was an obligatory devotional act. He would stay away from the glitter and pomp of communal celebrations. Even so Gandhi led campaigns to allow the entry of ‘untouchables’ into temples.
While Gandhi’s Hinduism was premised on inclusion and eclecticism Savarkar’s and Godse’s Hindutva was premised on exclusion and ethnic nationalism. Savarkar was an advocate not of Hinduism but of Hindutva, a militant and political ideological version of Hinduism. In reply to a question ‘What is your religion?’ Gandhi said: ‘My religion is Hinduism which, for me, is Religion of Humanity and includes all the religions known to me.’
Savarkar was a staunch critic of the idea of ahimsa. He found it as one of the reasons for the defeat of the Indian nation at foreign hands. For him the idea of nonviolence was a weakness of the Indians. He accused Gandhi for preaching nonviolence, which in turn damaged the material strength of the nation. He failed to comprehend the unique praxis of Gandhi’s political instruments. For him, the ‘righteous war’ cannot be considered as a form of violence. Independence of the nation can be gained only through the means of righteous war when the nation had to be defended against the unjustifiable aggression by aliens. Savarkar, being baptised in an ideology in which violence was privileged, would never have approved the Gandhian principle of ahimsa as capable of winning independence for India.
Alluding to a band of Indian revolutionaries including Savarkar, Gandhi in a significant comment on Hind Swaraj explained that ‘this text was written . . . in answer to the Indian school of violence and its prototype in South Africa. I came in contact with every known Indian anarchist in London. Their bravery impressed me, but I feel that their zeal was misguided. I felt that violence was no remedy for India’s ills, and that her civilization required the use of a different and higher weapon for self-protection.’
In Savarkar’s reasoning religion and nation are intertwined. For him nationalism of the Hindus was not a modern phenomenon, but primordial. He characterized India as historically a nation since Vedic times. Foreign invasion was an important push for national unity in the later period. While commenting on foreign invasions in India, he writes, ‘Nothing makes Self conscious of itself so much as a conflict with non-self… Hatred separates as well as unites.’ His idea of nation is not exclusively cultural in its nature. It has political and territorial connotations in it: ‘Hindustan meaning the land of Hindus, the first essential of Hindutva must necessarily be this geographical one.’ A Muslim (or for that matter a Christian), argued Savarkar, could never be part of Hindutva because he belonged to an alien cultural matrix. Incidentally, Savarkar was not everybody’s idea of a practising Hindu. Just as Jinnah was not a practising Muslim. The homology could be extended further. Savarkar was an atheist, abjured rituals and liked to eat prawns and egg curry and drank a glass of whisky occasionally. For him cow was not a ‘sacred animal’ but a ‘useful animal.’ Conceptually speaking, what Mohammed Ali Jinnah was to the Muslim League, Savarkar was to the Hindu Mahasabha and later Hindu nationalist outfits. In other words, similar to Jinnah who applied a nationalist logic to defend India’s partition, Savarkar advanced exactly the same argument to develop a Hindu nationalist project.
Savarkar and Gandhi differed from each other not merely over their chosen mode of conceptualizing nationalism but over their ideological predilections which were strikingly different. Savarkar designed a model of Hindu nationalism by emphasizing the critical importance of cultural unity in creating a viable nationhood. The Hindu Rashtra is more of a territorial than a religious nationalism.
Why is Gandhi still so relevant? Because, most certainly he provided a signpost for moral living, leaving us with some valuable insights about the way life should be oriented so as not to become dysfunctional to the self, society or the world at large. While Savarkar seeks to challenge power through violence, Gandhi’s narrative employs categories that would avoid brutalization of our societies. It goes beyond liberation to emancipation not only of the victim but also of the perpetrator.
The antidote to Hindutva is Hind Swaraj.
(The author is former Professor and Head of the Department of English, H.N.B.Garhwal University and former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla)
