The last two decades have seen a marked uptick in projects of Indian—or more broadly, South Asian—intellectual history, often using a biographical lens. While stimulating in some ways, these writings have also been surprisingly narrow in their ambitions. A significant landmark was Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (2011), by the late Cambridge historian C. A. Bayly. Published in Cambridge University Press’s celebrated ‘Ideas in Context’ series, the book attracted some attention outside the field of Indian history. But it could be argued that Bayly was not so much an innovator as the consolidator of a trend which had been emerging since the 1980s and 1990s, with the appearance of a number of works on the intellectual history of nationalism in South Asia by political theorists such as Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj, both of whom were associated with the group called Subaltern Studies. In contrast, studies of intellectual themes unrelated to nationalism in its various incarnations have been few and far between, and largely limited to the period before 1750. It apparently remains difficult to interest the larger reading public in the writings of a major fifteenth-century Telugu poet like Srinatha, or the abhanga poems and songs of Bahina Bai, the woman mystic from seventeenth-century Maharashtra. In India, as in many parts of the decolonized world, nationalism remains the regular refuge of historians, even if (as an old song goes) ‘every form of refuge has its price’.

The two books under consideration here review the career and writings of a particularly sulphurous figure in the history of Indian nationalism, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966), whose life intersected with those of many other figures in the nationalist pantheon. Hindutva and Violence by Vinayak Chaturvedi, a disciple of Bayly, and Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva by Janaki Bakhle, a former student of Chatterjee, bring contrasting approaches to the subject. Though he has long been the object of a cult-like veneration, Savarkar has become far more prominent since the rise to power of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), which sees him as one of its spiritual ancestors. This increased prominence, along with the outbreak of communal violence in Gujarat in 2002, seem in part to have led Vinayak Chaturvedi to his subject, as well as a strange autobiographical coincidence: Chaturvedi was named after Savarkar, one of whose disciples happened to be his doctor as an infant. On the anniversary of Savarkar’s death in February 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on social media: ‘India will forever remember his valiant spirit and unwavering dedication to our nation’s freedom and integrity. His contributions inspire us to strive for the development and prosperity of our country’. The man himself was not quite as anodyne as these phrases might have one believe, however. His career was one of twists and turns, which make him far more than just the father of ‘Hindutva’, a term he popularized and reinterpreted but did not invent.

Savarkar was born in 1883 in the Nashik region of Maharashtra, formerly Bombay Presidency, into a modest family of Chitpavan Brahmins. This was a regional sub-caste of warrior-administrators that had been closely associated with the consolidation of Maratha power in the eighteenth century: they had for an extended period held the key ministerial post of Peshwa and acted, not as the actual sovereigns, but as the shoguns based in Pune. After several conflicts with the East India Company, the Peshwas and their allies were diplomatically outmanoeuvred and dealt a severe defeat in the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817–19, permitting the durable consolidation of British rule in western India. Though some of the Maratha sardars accepted this outcome, others seized the occasion of the Great Rebellion of 1857–58 to mount one further stand against the Company. After the bloody suppression of this revolt, the descendants of the erstwhile elites associated with the Marathas may have nursed their grievances, but they came to terms with colonial dominance. This included acculturation into European mores and participation in the institutions of Western-style higher education that were set up after 1860. Among these was the well-known Fergusson College in Pune, founded in 1885, where Savarkar enrolled as a student in 1902.

As Chaturvedi notes, Savarkar’s early years are difficult to reconstruct with clarity; little direct evidence survives from that time and his own later writings must be treated as somewhat slanted and unreliable. It would seem that he was regarded as intelligent, possessing a remarkable memory and a gift for languages. By his later teens, he had a good level of Sanskrit and wrote a somewhat florid version of Victorian English, as well as Marathi and the lingua franca of Hindustani (it is unclear whether he learned Persian, as the Chitpavans of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often did). This early education gave him a grounding in a traditional form of philology that he would later put to use. He also read a certain amount of popular history in English, such as the ‘Story of the Nations’ series which included volumes on Greece, Holland, Mexico and so on. It was during his years at Fergusson that Savarkar became obviously politicized, joining secret societies and beginning to publish articles in Marathi that attracted the attention of prominent nationalists such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), also a Chitpavan Brahmin. Tilak and other patrons facilitated and financed Savarkar’s passage to London to study law at Gray’s Inn, where he arrived in early 1906. A clearer picture emerges of the man from his time in London, partly because he produced a flurry of writings. These included translations of the essays of Giuseppe Mazzini, a figure of fascination for Indian and many other Asian nationalists in these years, and an original work on the 1857–58 rebellion titled The Indian War of Independence of 1857 (1909) which remains one of his most widely read books, especially among Indian nationalists of various stripes. It announced Savarkar’s claim to be a historian, not one with an academic bent or an inclination to work with archives and documents, but rather a popularizer who deployed his rhetorical skills in charged emotional prose. Here was a history full of heroes and villains, but above all of ‘martyrs’ to the cause of the nation.

London in the years preceding World War I, teeming with students and foreign visitors, was a hotbed of political activity, with Lenin visiting on several occasions. Savarkar’s base was India House in Highgate, which was frequented by a number of figures with diverse political leanings (its library, as Chaturvedi notes, contained the first three volumes of Mazzini’s collected works, which Savarkar said he devoured ‘over a single week’). It was in this setting that Savarkar engaged in a celebrated debate with Mohandas Gandhi, who had by this time emerged as a charismatic public figure after his stint in South Africa. The subject was somewhat arcane, namely their contrasting interpretations of the ancient epic the Ramayana, which Gandhi read in a spiritual mode and Savarkar more as a call to violent action against the forces of evil. Gandhi apparently also realized that Savarkar’s reading of Mazzini differed substantially from his own and even took it upon himself to try and refute Savarkar’s position (without naming him) in his work Hind Swaraj (1909), staging a dialogue between the Editor (who speaks for Gandhi) and a revolutionary interlocutor, who supports the idea of a violent struggle for independence. ‘Whom do you suppose to free by assassination?’, the Editor asks. ‘The millions of India do not desire it. Those who are intoxicated by the wretched modern civilization think these things. Those who will rise to power by murder will certainly not make the nation happy’. Besides such real and imagined exchanges, which had the effect of burnishing Savarkar’s credentials as a polemicist, he was also active in groups that supported violent anti-colonial actions both in India and in Britain. One of his associates, Madan Lal Dhingra, eventually acted on these plans, in early July 1909 assassinating a colonial official in London, as well as a Parsi doctor who intervened. Dhingra was summarily tried and hanged, but the trail took the police to Savarkar, who had already been under surveillance for some time.

This led to what might be considered the key phase of Savarkar’s life—his arrest, trial and imprisonment, which gave him the aura of a true hero (or vir) of the nationalist movement. This aura would act as a lasting shield, ensuring that more moderate nationalists flinched from dealing with him or treated him with exaggerated courtesy and deference. Savarkar was arrested in London in early 1910, then shipped to Bombay to stand trial. En route, he managed to wriggle out of a porthole and swim ashore at Marseille only to be detained again having been mistakenly handed back to the British by a local French policeman in what became something of an international cause célèbre. The French government sympathized with his cause, and his case was considered at The Hague but all to no avail. Once in India, he was tried for various offences, in particular the so-called Nasik Conspiracy, in which he was accused of shipping pistols from Europe that were used in the assassination of an English magistrate. Savarkar was sentenced to two life-terms at the Cellular Jail in the penal colony of the Andamans, an unduly harsh punishment by most accounts. He would remain there for ten years, including a substantial period in solitary confinement. The library of the Cellular Jail contained two thousand volumes, so Savarkar was at least able to read. Following repeated petitions his sentence was commuted, and he spent a longer period in a more limited form of confinement in India, first in Pune and then Ratnagiri, before eventually being released in 1937, after twenty-seven years in prison.

Savarkar returned to full-throated participation in political life. Attempts were made to bring him into the Congress Party, but he resisted, instead joining and playing a prominent role in the Hindu Mahasabha, a right-wing sectarian organization that had been founded in 1915. His view of the Gandhi–Nehru faction of the Congress Party grew increasingly hostile (on one occasion, he termed them ‘eunuchs’), as he favoured Indian participation in the Second World War; these differences also became manifest in the negotiations leading up to Indian independence, the Partition and the creation of Pakistan in August 1947. In January 1948, Gandhi was shot and killed by Nathuram Godse, also a member of the Mahasabha and a fervent admirer of Savarkar. Despite the widespread view that Savarkar was implicated in the assassination, a legal case could not be made. Nevertheless, the circumstances of the murder cast a lasting shadow on his reputation. Yet although he fell into obscurity in the 1950s, dying in Bombay in 1966 after undertaking a fast to death, there have been strenuous posthumous efforts to revive him as a figure, gaining strength in the past two decades, including romantic portrayals of him as a sort of latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel.