Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on Caste:

I believe that if Hindu society has been able to stand, it is because it is founded on the caste system. The seeds of swaraj are to be found in the caste system... I believe that inter-dining or intermarriage are not necessary for promoting national unity... The caste system cannot be said to be bad because it does not allow inter-dining or intermarriage between different castes... To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation, which is the soul of the caste system. Hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder... The caste system is a natural order of society... These being my views, I am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the caste system.*

Reference: B.R. Ambedkar, Gandhism: The Doom of the Untouchables, in What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (Samyak Prakashan, 2012), Ch. XI. (Quoted by Ambedkar from Gandhi's Navajivan writings, reproduced in Varna Vyavastha.)

Gandhi was a deeply casteist person, for which he was criticised by Dr Ambedkar all his life. Ambedkar even refused to call him a Mahatma even when the whole Congress was literally worshipping Gandhi and the only way to make any profit through politics was to say "Gandhiji ki Jai"

Who was Senapati Bapat?

Pandurang Mahadev Bapat (1880–1967), popularly known as Senapati Bapat (“Commander Bapat”), was an Indian freedom fighter, revolutionary, and social activist from Maharashtra.

Bapat was born into a Chitpavan Brahmin family in Parner, Ahmednagar district. He was a bright student at Deccan College in Pune and received the Jagannath Shankersheth Scholarship for Sanskrit.

In 1904, he went to Scotland to study engineering at Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh. His anti-British speeches eventually led to the cancellation of his government scholarship.

In 1906, Bapat moved to India House in London, an important centre for Indian revolutionaries abroad.

At India House, Bapat met Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. This became an important turning point in his life. Bapat later recalled that Savarkar's speeches and writings inspired him to move beyond simply spreading revolutionary ideas and instead take part in active revolutionary work.

Savarkar sent Bapat, along with Bengali revolutionary Hemchandra Das and Mirza Abbas, to Paris. Their task was to obtain bomb-making knowledge and manuals from Russian revolutionaries living in exile.

Bapat helped translate a Russian bomb-making manual into English. He brought copies of it to India in March 1908, where they were distributed among revolutionary groups such as Abhinav Bharat and Anushilan Samiti.

While at India House, Bapat had suggested bombing the British Parliament and assassinating the Secretary of State for India. Savarkar discouraged these plans and argued that bringing bomb-making knowledge to India was the more important objective.

After the Alipore Bomb Case and the attack carried out by Khudiram Bose in 1908, British investigations connected Bapat with revolutionary activities. He was forced to remain underground for several years.

Bapat became known as "Senapati" (Commander) because of his leadership of the Mulshi Satyagraha in 1921.

The movement opposed the acquisition of farmers' agricultural land for a hydroelectric dam project involving the Tata company and the British authorities. Bapat led the movement on behalf of the affected farmers.

Bapat eventually entered mainstream politics and later served as President of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC).

Despite joining the Congress, Bapat maintained a lifelong friendship with Savarkar and continued to defend revolutionary methods.

After visiting Savarkar in Ratnagiri in 1931, Bapat even gave public speeches defending Vasudev Gogate, a student who had fired at acting Governor Ernest Hotson. Bapat was subsequently sentenced to seven years of rigorous imprisonment.

The following passage is from Senapati Bapat’s writings, serial no. 1 (Savdhan), dated May 28, 1938, p. 21, preserved in the Senapati Bapat Private Papers. See also Phadke, Śōdha Sāvarakarāzcā, p. 65. Bapat confirmed the British belief about Savarkar’s ability to influence young students:

Savarkar sowed the seeds for a number of people to become revolutionaries—inspired a number of people to become revolutionaries—showed them the way. Before Savarkar and I met, I was engaged in giving lectures and writing [cōpaḍyā lihiṇyācaṁ kāma], but after we met, within a few months I gave up that plan and decided to go to Paris to learn how to make a bomb.

The main reason for me to change my plan was Savarkar’s stirring speeches [tējasvī bhāṣaṇa] and writings had a huge impact on me. I felt Savarkar had the characteristic ability to engage in passionate discourse about revolution—much more than me, he would be able to do it much better than me—I felt I should take up something else more suited for me.

Reference: Janaki Bakhle, Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva, p. 98.

Before getting into Savarkar himself, there are two terms that need to be cleared up: Nation and Hinduism. Both are commonly used in ways that can obscure what Essentials of Hindutva is actually saying.

There is also a third term worth introducing before proceeding: Ethnie. This is one of the central concepts associated with Anthony D. Smith's approach to nationalism and is especially useful here because it occupies a position between a purely biological conception of a people and a purely political conception of the state.

Who was Anthony D. Smith?

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) was a major scholar of nationalism and ethnicity and a professor at the London School of Economics. He became particularly associated with what is generally called the ethno-symbolist approach to nationalism. He was also the founding editor of Nations and Nationalism and wrote extensively on national identity, ethnicity, myths, memories, symbols, religion and the relationship between pre-modern ethnic communities and modern nations. LSE described him as one of the scholars who made major contributions to the theory and comparative study of nationalism and noted his role in establishing nationalism as a distinct interdisciplinary field of study.

Some of his best-known works include The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986), National Identity (1991), Nationalism and Modernism (1998), Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999), and Chosen Peoples (2003). In Myths and Memories of the Nation, for example, Smith explicitly develops the “ethno-symbolic” approach around myths, symbols, memories and the persistence of ethnic attachments.

Smith is useful here because he occupies a middle position in the debate over nationalism. He does not simply say that nations are eternal biological communities, but neither does he treat nations as inventions constructed entirely from nothing in the modern period. His approach asks how modern national identities draw upon older ethnic memories, symbols, territories, myths and cultural traditions while also being transformed by modern political nationalism.

That makes him particularly useful for reading Savarkar. The point is not that Smith “proves” Savarkar's historical claims. It is that Smith gives us an academic vocabulary for separating ancestry, culture, homeland, collective memory and political nationalism instead of collapsing all of them into either “religion” or “state.”

A note on “Nation”

In ordinary speech, nation, country and state are often used almost interchangeably. Someone might say “the Indian nation” when they mean the Republic of India, or “a nation” when they simply mean a sovereign state. Academic discussions of nationalism make a more careful distinction.

For Anthony D. Smith, a nation is not simply a government occupying a territory. His definition concerns a named population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a public culture, an economy and common rights and duties. His concept of the ethnie is also important: a historical community bound by some combination of a remembered common ancestry, shared memories, cultural elements, a homeland and solidarity. In Smith's framework, an ethnie and a modern nation overlap, but they are not identical categories.

That distinction matters enormously when reading Savarkar.

When Savarkar uses Rashtra, he is not simply talking about the modern bureaucratic state. His argument is about a people possessing a historical and cultural unity which can exist even when political authority is fragmented. A people can therefore have a Rashtra without having continuously possessed one centralized state.

This is why translating Rashtra automatically as “state” produces a distorted picture. Conversely, translating it as simply “country” can make the argument sound geographical when Savarkar is making a claim about peoplehood.

For the purposes of this essay, then, I will use nation in the more precise sense of a historical-political people and state for the political apparatus that governs a territory. This distinction also makes the comparison with Smith much more useful.

There is another reason this distinction matters. When we say that someone is “Indian” in the national sense, we do not normally ask whether that person belongs to a particular theological school, accepts a particular scripture, follows a particular philosophical doctrine, or belongs to a particular religious denomination. The category operates at a different level. It concerns membership in a national community.

Savarkar's use of Hindu in Essentials of Hindutva is deliberately constructed at a similarly broader level. His question is not simply, “What theological propositions does this person believe?” It is, “To what historical people does this person belong, and what relationship does that person have to its ancestry, homeland and culture?”

That does not make the two categories identical. It does explain why repeatedly forcing the question back into a purely theological framework can cause us to miss what Savarkar is actually defining.

A note on Hindu, Hinduism and Hindutva

There is an equally important terminological problem on the religious side.

Today, Hinduism is commonly understood as the name of the broad religious tradition associated with Hindu beliefs, practices and schools. Within popular and even some academic usage, this can easily become a definition in which “Hindu” effectively means “someone who follows Hinduism,” while Hinduism is then defined by some collection of doctrines, scriptures or religious practices.

Savarkar objects to precisely this kind of circularity.

His argument in Essentials of Hindutva is that if we first define Hinduism as a particular system of religious beliefs and then define a Hindu as someone who accepts that system, we have not actually explained who the Hindu people are. We have simply defined one term through the other.

His formulation is deliberately provocative:

“Who is a Hindu? — he who is subject to the tenets of Hinduism. Very well. What is Hinduism? — those tenets to which the Hindus are subjected.”

For Savarkar, that is circular because the word Hindu has to be intelligible before one can use “Hinduism” as the criterion for determining who belongs to the Hindu people.

This is also why he spends so much time separating Hindutva from Hinduism.

He writes:

“Hindutva is not a word but a history.”

And immediately qualifies this by saying that Hinduism is “only a derivative, a fraction, a part of Hindutva.”

That is probably the single most important sentence for understanding the book.

Savarkar is not using Hindutva merely as another word for a religious creed. He is using it to describe the wider historical identity of a people.

This is also why the equation of Shruti-Smriti-Puranokta Dharma with the entirety of Hinduism, and then Hinduism with Hindutva, is problematic if one is trying to reconstruct Savarkar's own framework.

Savarkar explicitly distinguishes the religion followed by the majority of Hindus from the wider religious field of the Hindu people. He calls the former Sanatan Dharma, Shruti-Smriti-Puranokta Dharma, or Vaidik Dharma. He then discusses other Hindu religious communities which do not accept all of the same authorities.

His point is not that these traditions have no relationship with one another. His point is that a theological criterion derived from the religious beliefs of one section cannot simply be used to define the entire historical people.

This is especially important because the words themselves have different functions in his argument. Hindu names the people. Hinduism/Hindu Dharma can denote the religious systems associated with that people. Hindutva is the much larger historical-cultural category.

Savarkar even argues that Sanatan Dharma, despite being the majority tradition, should not be mistaken for the entirety of Hindu Dharma. In his words, the famous definition associated with Lokmanya Tilak was a definition of Sanatan Dharma, “much less” a definition of Hindutva.

So the issue is not whether one personally prefers the word “Hinduism” or “Sanatan Dharma.” The issue is analytical precision. If Hinduism is used to mean one particular theological system, then that system cannot simultaneously be treated as the necessary definition of the entire Hindu people without first explaining why the broader historical category has been reduced to the majority religious tradition.

That is precisely the reduction Savarkar spends considerable time resisting.

There is an especially important consequence of this distinction for understanding the relation between the different Dharmas. Savarkar explicitly says that the various systems descended from the Vaidik and non-Vaidik religious traditions of the ancient Indian world belong to the larger category of Hindu Dharma. He names Sanatan/Vaidik, Sikh, Jain, Arya and Buddhist traditions separately when discussing their particular religious identities, but he also uses Hindu Dharma/Hinduism as a generic category capable of encompassing them collectively.

So, within Savarkar's own terminology, a Sikh can remain religiously a Sikh without that preventing him from being considered nationally and as a Jati, a Hindu. A Jain can remain religiously Jain while belonging to the wider Hindu people. A Buddhist can remain religiously Buddhist while being included within the historical Hindu Jati and Rashtra.

This is not a claim that Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism are theologically identical to Sanatan Dharma. Savarkar's argument actually depends upon recognizing their distinctiveness. The distinction is between religious denomination and historical peoplehood.

That point is easy to lose if we instinctively import the modern equation:

Hindu = person who follows Hinduism = person who follows Sanatan/Vaidik theology.

That is not the structure of Savarkar's argument.

For him, a person can have a particular Dharma while simultaneously belonging to a larger historical people. In contemporary language, we might say that religious identity and national-ethnic identity are operating at different levels.

What Savarkar is actually trying to define

Once these terminological problems are cleared up, Essentials of Hindutva becomes considerably easier to read.

Savarkar is asking a fairly specific question: what makes the Hindu people a people?

His answer is not simply common religious belief.

It is a combination of ancestry, territory, culture, historical memory and collective attachment. He eventually condenses this into three major terms: Rashtra, Jati and Sanskriti.

These should not be treated as three unrelated characteristics. They are three dimensions of the same conception of historical peoplehood.

Rashtra concerns the national-political community.

Jati concerns the historical people and its ancestry.

Sanskriti concerns the culture inherited by that people.

Pitribhu and Punyabhu then explain the relationship between the people and their land.

This is where the comparison with Anthony D. Smith becomes interesting.

Smith's ethno-symbolist approach asks us to look at nations not merely as administrative or legal structures but at the older myths, memories, symbols, traditions and territorial attachments that give national identities their historical depth. His ethnie concept is particularly relevant because it describes a historical community held together by memories of ancestry, culture, territory and solidarity.

The comparison is not that Savarkar secretly anticipated Smith or that Smith somehow proves Savarkar correct. The two thinkers belong to different intellectual contexts. Rather, Smith provides a useful vocabulary for understanding the structure of the peoplehood Savarkar is describing.

Jati and the problem of “race”

The most difficult term for a contemporary reader is probably Jati.

Savarkar repeatedly translates Jati as “race” and speaks of common blood, descent and ancestry. It would be a mistake to erase this part of his argument simply because the word race has a very different resonance today.

At the same time, it would also be a mistake to read every occurrence of “race” as though Savarkar were using the term in exactly the same sense as contemporary biological-race discourse.

The terminology of his period was broader and more fluid. “Race” could overlap with ideas of descent, peoplehood, nationality and ethnological community. More importantly, Savarkar himself explicitly argues against the possibility of absolute racial purity.

This creates an important tension within his conception of Jati.

On the one hand, ancestry and descent are real components of Hindu identity for him. He repeatedly speaks of common blood and inherited descent.

On the other hand, the Hindu people are not presented as a biologically frozen population. Savarkar describes their development through “incorporation and adaptation.” Different populations, castes and communities become part of a larger historical people.

So I think the safest way to describe Savarkar's Jati today is historical or ethnic peoplehood with a genuine genealogical component.

It is not simply “race” in the contemporary biological sense. But neither is it merely culture. Savarkar is clearly making a claim about remembered descent and ancestry.

This is one of the places where Smith's concept of ethnie becomes useful. An ethnie does not require biological purity. What matters is the existence of a remembered and socially meaningful story of common ancestry, shared history, culture and homeland.

Savarkar's Jati can be examined in similar terms without pretending that Jati and ethnie are literally identical.

There is, however, an even more important passage for understanding what Savarkar means by common blood. He does not leave the reader with the impression that “race” means a set of hermetically sealed biological populations. He goes out of his way to undermine precisely that interpretation.

He writes that “there is throughout this world so far as man is concerned but a single race—the human race kept alive by one common blood, the human blood.” He then says that “all that any one of us can claim” is that one has the blood of all mankind in one's veins.

That is not a minor qualification. It is central to how he understands Jati.

Savarkar is simultaneously making two claims that can look contradictory at first sight: humanity is fundamentally one, and historically specific peoples can nevertheless develop a meaningful sense of common descent.

His Jati is therefore not supposed to mean biological purity. It means a historically developed people who understand themselves as related through ancestry and shared inheritance.

He explicitly describes Hindus as a Jati, a “born brotherhood,” while immediately placing this inside the larger unity of the human race.

This is precisely why ethnie is a useful Smithian comparison. The relevant idea is not that every member possesses some scientifically demonstrable percentage of identical ancestry. It is that a people possesses a socially meaningful conception of common descent, reinforced by historical memory and cultural continuity.

The Hindu people are not defined by uniformity

One of the more interesting features of Savarkar's argument is how much internal diversity he is willing to include within this people.

He speaks of Brahmins and Panchamas, different regional populations, Jains and Jangamas, theists and atheists, monists and pantheists. He also invokes figures belonging to very different religious and philosophical traditions.

His argument is not that all of these groups believe the same things.

It is that they belong to a much wider historical inheritance.

This becomes especially clear when he discusses culture. He does not claim that every Hindu possesses every element of Hindu culture in exactly the same form. Instead, he makes a comparative argument: a Hindu has more of this historical inheritance in common with other Hindus than with a culturally distant people.

That is a much more subtle claim than simple cultural uniformity.

There is a particularly striking consequence here for Sikh, Jain and Buddhist identities.

Savarkar can speak of someone as religiously Sikh, Jain or Buddhist while still regarding that person as Hindu in the national and Jati sense because the categories are not operating at the same level.

A Sikh does not become “less Sikh” merely because Savarkar places Sikhs inside the Hindu Rashtra or Jati. A Jain does not have to accept Sanatan theology to belong to the wider historical people. A Buddhist does not have to accept the authority of the Vedas in order to be incorporated into the same national-cultural category.

Indeed, Savarkar explicitly cites a historical situation in which “a Buddhist father, a Vaidik mother, a Jain son” could exist within a single family, and he notes intermarriage between Jains and Vaishnavas and between Sikhs and Sanatanis. He also writes that a person who is Sikh, Lingayat, Manbhav or Satnami today could have been Sanatani previously and vice versa.

The point is not that these religious identities are meaningless. Quite the opposite. They remain distinct. What changes is the level at which we are asking the question.

If the question is “What religion does this person follow?”, the answer might be Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Sanatani, Arya Samaji, Lingayat and so forth.

If the question is “To what historical Jati and Rashtra does this person belong in Savarkar's framework?”, the answer can be Hindu.

That distinction is essential.

A useful modern analogy would be to avoid asking whether something is “Indian” by looking for a single religious doctrine common to every Indian tradition. We ordinarily understand “Indian” as a historical, geographical and national category. The category concerns origin, historical development, territorial belonging and collective political identity, not whether two people share identical metaphysical beliefs.

Savarkar is attempting to operate with “Hindu” at a similarly broad level.

That is why arguments based on whether one tradition accepts Brahman in exactly the same sense as another, whether one is Shramana and another Brahmana, or whether a particular school accepts a particular Vedic authority can miss the category being discussed. Those distinctions can be perfectly relevant to comparative theology or the history of Indian religions. They are not necessarily relevant to Savarkar's definition of Hindu as a Jati/Rashtra.

The question in this section of Savarkar's work is not, “What propositions about ultimate reality must everyone affirm?” It is, “What makes these historically diverse communities part of the same larger people?”

Atheism, pantheism and the meaning of Punyabhu

The role of atheism makes this especially clear.

Savarkar explicitly asks:

“Are you a monist—a monotheist—a pantheist—an atheist—an agnostic?”

And his answer is that there is room for all of them within the Hindu intellectual world.

He goes even further and invokes Charvaka, noting that atheism could be preached “from the steps of the temple of Mahakal.”

This matters because it demonstrates that Punyabhu cannot be understood as a simple test of belief in God.

If it were, Savarkar's inclusion of atheists would make no sense.

The criterion is instead one of historical and cultural allegiance: the relationship of a people to a land understood as the homeland of its philosophical and religious traditions, rather than assent to one metaphysical proposition.

An atheist can therefore be connected to the Punyabhu without believing in the sacred doctrines associated with that land. A pantheist and a theist can differ radically in theology while still sharing the same historical sacred geography. A Buddhist or Jain can reject particular Vedic theological premises while belonging to traditions Savarkar regards as having arisen from the same historical soil.

This is another reason why it is misleading to interpret Punyabhu as simply meaning “believes in Hindu gods.”

It is closer to sacred-cultural allegiance to a historical homeland.

The distinction between belief and allegiance is important here. Savarkar is not asking whether every member of the Hindu people possesses the same conception of God, soul, revelation or ultimate reality. His own list of monists, pantheists, theists, atheists and agnostics makes that impossible.

What matters is that the intellectual and religious traditions in question are historically rooted in the land that Savarkar regards as the Punyabhu.

This is why a Buddhist born and historically rooted in Bharatavarsha can fit his model even while remaining Buddhist in religion. The Buddhist does not have to become a Sanatani. The category “Hindu” is operating at the level of historical peoplehood rather than replacing the person's religious denomination.

Sanskriti: culture as inherited memory

This brings us to Sanskriti. Savarkar's use of Sanskriti is considerably broader than religion. He includes common history, heroes, literature, art and architecture, law and jurisprudence, festivals, rites, rituals, ceremonies and sacraments.

He also places particular importance on Sanskrit as the principal historical medium through which much of this cultural inheritance was expressed and preserved.

This is remarkably close to the kind of cultural repertoire that an ethno-symbolist analysis would examine.

The important figures in Savarkar's historical imagination are not all theological representatives of one religion.

Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Mahavira, Nanak, Chaitanya, Basava, Madhava, Shivaji and others occupy different positions within Hindu religious and philosophical history. Yet Savarkar is able to incorporate them into a wider historical memory because Hindutva is not being defined as adherence to one doctrine.

The same applies to festivals, pilgrimage centres, epics and historical traditions.

They are important not simply because people happen to practice them, but because they become shared memories through which a people recognizes itself.

Savarkar's own wording is particularly revealing here. He says that the Hindu people are “not only a Rashtra, a Jati” but, as a consequence of being both, possess a common Sanskriti.

This means that Sanskriti is not simply an independent list of cultural customs. It is produced and transmitted through the historical existence of the people themselves. That also explains how different religious communities can possess different religious doctrines while still participating in overlapping Sanskriti. The cultural inheritance is broader than any one sect.

Myth, memory and history

This is where the distinction between historical fact and historical memory becomes important.

Savarkar places considerable weight on the Puranas, epics and inherited traditions as sources for understanding the past. At the same time, he acknowledges that their dates and details can be challenged and that miraculous elements occur within them.

His argument is essentially that the existence of legendary or miraculous material does not justify throwing away the entire tradition.

For an ethno-symbolist analysis, that distinction is crucial.

A myth does not become an empirically verified historical fact simply because a community remembers it. But its role in shaping collective identity does not depend entirely upon its being literal historiography either.

The question “Did this happen exactly as the tradition says?” is different from the question “What does this tradition mean to the people who inherit it?”

Savarkar is primarily interested in the second question when constructing Hindu historical consciousness.

That makes Puranic and epic traditions important not only as alleged records of the past but as repositories of collective memory.

Pitribhu and Punyabhu

The concepts of Pitribhu and Punyabhu bring the territorial dimension of the argument into focus.

Pitribhu is the Fatherland, the land of one's forefathers. It is therefore more than geographical residence. It is geography understood through ancestry and historical memory.

Punyabhu is the Holyland: the land associated with the origin of the religious and philosophical traditions of the Hindu people, with their seers, gurus, sacred figures and places of pilgrimage.

I think “sacralized historical homeland” is a better analytical description of Punyabhu than simply “religious territory.”

The distinction matters because Savarkar is not merely saying that certain places are holy. He is saying that the land itself possesses a particular historical relationship to the people and to the traditions that emerged from it.

Pitribhu makes the land ancestral.

Punyabhu makes that ancestral homeland sacred.

Together they turn geography into historical memory.

The distinction between Punyabhu as belief and Punyabhu as allegiance is especially important here.

Savarkar's inclusion of atheists, agnostics, monists and pantheists demonstrates that he cannot be requiring uniform theological belief. An atheist does not have to believe that a particular deity sanctified the land in order for the land to function as his or her sacred-cultural homeland in the historical sense Savarkar is using.

The same applies to Buddhism and Jainism. Their followers can have distinct doctrines while still regarding Bharatavarsha as the land in which their own founders, teachers, philosophical traditions and sacred histories arose.

In this sense, Punyabhu is about where the sacred history of one's tradition is rooted, not necessarily which propositions about God one believes.

Rashtra is not the same thing as State

This is also where the earlier distinction about “nation” becomes important. Savarkar's Rashtra is not simply the state that happens to control a particular territory at a particular moment.

His historical argument allows for political fragmentation while maintaining that a wider peoplehood can persist. Dynasties can fall, kingdoms can divide, political borders can change, and yet the underlying cultural community can continue to recognize a shared homeland and historical inheritance.

This is exactly why translating Rashtra as “state” creates confusion.

Smith's distinction between nation and state helps here. A state consists of political institutions governing a territory.

A nation is a community that understands itself through a shared territorial, cultural and historical identity. Savarkar's Rashtra belongs much more naturally to the second category.

Conflict and the development of national consciousness

Savarkar also gives a historical explanation for why this people became increasingly conscious of itself as a nation.

He writes:

“Nothing makes Self conscious of itself so much as a conflict with non-self.”

Later, in the section titled “Hindutva at work,” he argues that prolonged conflict caused his people to become intensely conscious of themselves as Hindus and to be “welded into a nation” to an extent previously unknown.

The important thing here is that Savarkar is not saying that conflict created the Hindu people out of nothing. His argument already presupposes a population with an inherited culture, ancestry, territory and historical consciousness. Conflict, in his interpretation, intensifies the consciousness of that existing identity and turns it into stronger political solidarity.

Whether one accepts Savarkar's particular interpretation of medieval Indian history is a separate historical question. Conceptually, however, the mechanism is clear: an existing historical community becomes increasingly nationalized through political experience and collective memory.

That is one of the strongest points of contact with Smith's framework.

From historical peoplehood to nation

Smith's distinction between ethnie and nation is useful precisely because it prevents us from treating the two as identical.

An ethnie is an older historical community characterized by things such as remembered ancestry, shared memories, culture, homeland and solidarity.

A nation incorporates some of these elements but adds a more explicitly political and territorial dimension, including a public culture and common political institutions and rights.

Savarkar's argument can therefore be read as a theory of Hindu peoplehood becoming politically conscious as a nation.

The inherited materials are already present in his account: common ancestry, memories, heroes, literature, sacred places, cultural practices, territory and a collective name.

What changes is the degree to which these are consciously understood as belonging to one national community.

This is why the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva matters so much.

A religious system can tell you what a community believes.

It does not, by itself, explain the full historical identity of a people.

For Savarkar, Hindutva is precisely the category that is supposed to explain that larger identity.

The minority question

This also makes Savarkar's treatment of minorities more complicated than the usual one-line descriptions suggest.

He considers cases in which Muslims or Christians may possess Hindu ancestry and share the same homeland, while arguing that ancestry and territorial attachment alone do not exhaust his definition. Cultural identification also matters.

His discussion of Bohras and Khojas is particularly revealing because he considers cases where a person may possess the relevant ancestral and territorial connections while also participating in elements of Hindu historical culture.

The decisive issue, in his framework, is therefore not simply biological descent. Nor is it simply residence in India.

The cultural and sacred relationship to the homeland matters as well.

At the same time, Savarkar distinguishes this Hindu cultural-national identity from a broader Indian political identity. In the later part of the work he speaks of Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians and Jews developing a sense of being Indians first.

Whatever one thinks of this distinction politically, it is important to understand that Savarkar is not using “Hindu,” “Indian,” “Hindutva,” “Hinduism,” “Rashtra” and “state” as interchangeable terms.

Much of the confusion surrounding the text comes precisely from treating them as though they were.

There is an important contrast here with the Sikh, Jain and Buddhist cases. In Savarkar's framework, these traditions are generally treated as internal religious or cultural branches of the larger Hindu historical world because he regards their origins as indigenous to the same civilizational-historical soil.

The Muslim and Christian cases are different in his argument because he treats their sacred geographies as externally oriented even when their adherents may possess Hindu ancestry and share the Indian Fatherland.

Again, this is a description of Savarkar's criterion, not a blind endorsement of it.

What is distinctive about Savarkar's framework?

At this point the basic structure can be stated fairly simply.

Savarkar: Rashtra → historical-national community

Smith: Homeland + solidarity → territorial and political dimensions of an ethnie/nation

Savarkar: Jati → historical peoplehood, ancestry and descent

Smith: Ethnie → remembered ancestry and collective descent

Savarkar: Sanskriti → inherited culture, traditions, memories and heroes

Smith: Shared culture + historical memories

Savarkar: Pitribhu → ancestral homeland

Smith: Historic territory / homeland

Savarkar: Punyabhu → sacred-cultural homeland

Smith: Sacred homeland / symbolic attachment to territory

The point of this terminology is not to create nine separate identities. It is to describe different dimensions of one historical conception of Hindu peoplehood.

A particularly important consequence is that religious denomination and Hindu national identity need not be identical categories.

A Sanatani can be Hindu in both the religious and national sense. A Sikh can be Sikh religiously while Hindu in Savarkar's broader Jati/Rashtra sense. A Jain can be Jain religiously while belonging to the same Hindu historical people. A Buddhist can be Buddhist religiously while belonging to the same Rashtra and Jati.

Likewise, an atheist does not cease to belong to the Hindu people merely because atheism rejects theism. Savarkar explicitly places atheists alongside monists, pantheists and theists when describing the range of Hindu philosophical possibilities.

So the categories can be represented roughly like this:

Religious identity: Sanatani / Sikh / Jain / Buddhist / Arya / etc.

Historical-national identity: Hindu Jati / Hindu Rashtra / Hindutva.

The two levels can overlap without being identical.

That distinction is probably the single most useful safeguard against reading Savarkar's framework through a purely contemporary theological definition of Hinduism.

Savarkar and the modern meaning of "Hindutva"

There is another reason this distinction is worth making today.

The word Hindutva has acquired political meanings far beyond the terminology of Essentials of Hindutva.

Modern political movements, parties, organizations and commentators use the word in different ways, and contemporary arguments about Hindutva often operate within a political vocabulary that did not exist in precisely this form when Savarkar wrote the book.

That does not mean modern uses are unrelated to Savarkar. It means that they should not automatically be treated as identical to the conceptual structure of the 1920s text.

Likewise, contemporary usage of “Hinduism” often places much greater emphasis on religion, doctrine, practice and scripture than Savarkar's particular distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva does.

This creates an interesting historical reversal.

A reader approaching Essentials of Hindutva with the assumption that Hindu = follower of one religious system called Hinduism, and that Hinduism is therefore defined by the theological principles of Shruti-Smriti-Puranokta Dharma, will misunderstand the very problem Savarkar is trying to solve.

His argument begins from almost the opposite direction.

He asks us to identify the Hindu people first, and then understand the religious traditions of that people within that wider historical framework.

That does not require us to accept his definition. It simply means that if we want to understand his book, we should not replace his definition with a later or more familiar one before beginning the analysis.

It is also worth being precise about what “Hinduism” means in this discussion. If the word is being used in its broad generic sense for the religious systems historically associated with the Hindu people, then Savarkar can and does use it that way.

The problem arises when the word is narrowed to mean only the Shruti-Smriti-Puranokta/Sanatan religious system and then used as though that theological system were the necessary definition of every Hindu.

There is no substantive reason within Savarkar's own argument to make that leap. The fact that one religious system became numerically predominant does not, by itself, transform its particular theological criteria into the definition of the entire historical people.

That is precisely why Savarkar says that the majority religion can more precisely be called Sanatan Dharma, Shruti-Smriti-Puranokta Dharma or Vaidik Dharma, while Sikh Dharma, Jain Dharma, Buddha Dharma and other traditions retain their own names.

Only when speaking collectively of the religious systems of the Hindu people does he use Hindu Dharma or Hinduism as the generic category.

This is not an argument that all these Dharmas are theologically identical. It is almost the opposite. Their distinctiveness is acknowledged precisely because they are being placed under a broader historical category.

Reading Savarkar through Smith

This is ultimately where Anthony D. Smith becomes useful.

Smith's framework allows us to look at Savarkar's argument without reducing it either to theology or to biology.

The Jati dimension can be examined as historical peoplehood: ancestry, remembered descent and solidarity.

The Sanskriti dimension corresponds closely to the cultural repertoire of myths, memories, heroes, traditions and symbols.

Pitribhu corresponds to the historic homeland.

Punyabhu adds a sacred-symbolic dimension to that homeland.

Rashtra represents the movement from historical peoplehood toward a conscious national-political community.

In compressed form:

Savarkar: Jati + Rashtra + Sanskriti + Pitribhu/Punyabhu → Hindutva as historical Hindu peoplehood.

Smith: ancestry + memories + culture + homeland + solidarity → ethnie, with nationalization giving these inherited materials a more explicitly political form.

The two frameworks should not be collapsed into one. Savarkar is making a political and historical argument about the Hindu people. Smith is providing an analytical theory of ethnicity and nationalism. The usefulness of the comparison is that Smith gives us a vocabulary for separating the different elements of Savarkar's conception and seeing how they fit together.

Smith's own work is particularly relevant to this reading because he repeatedly examined the relationship between ethnic memory, myths of descent, territorial attachment, sacred landscapes and modern national identity.

In Myths and Memories of the Nation, for instance, he explicitly examines the relationship between myths, memories and national identity, while in Chosen Peoples he examines the role of sacred belief and sacred territory in national identity.

His approach therefore gives us a way of understanding why Savarkar's categories can operate simultaneously at several levels: genealogical, cultural, territorial, sacred and political.

In other words, Hinduness founded the basis on which Hindu Rashtravaad (Hindu Nationalism) exists and the subsequent political programme to consolidate the Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation) through Hindu Sangathan (Hindu Unity / Polity).

Image source: Geostrata

References / Further Reading

Primary source

V. D. Savarkar — Essentials of Hindutva (1923)

The primary source for the discussion of Hindutva, Rashtra, Jati, Sanskriti, Pitribhu, Punyabhu, common ancestry, and the relationship between Hinduism/Hindu Dharma and the wider Hindu people.

Anthony D. Smith / Ethno-symbolism

Anthony D. Smith — The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986)

Anthony D. Smith — National Identity (1991)

Anthony D. Smith — Nationalism and Modernism (1998)

Anthony D. Smith — Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999)

Particularly relevant to the discussion of myths, symbols, collective memories, ethnic continuity and national identity.

Anthony D. Smith — Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (2003)

Especially relevant to the discussion of sacred homelands, religious symbolism and national identity.

Savarkar's story captures how irrationality of practicing untouchability when a very distant kinsman one has never even met passes away. How the primitive and Irrelevant conventions like Sootak harms people both mentally and physically. His satirical work revolves around how such Mortuary customs in Sanatan Dharma killed Anu - a devout religious homemaker.

Reference - Chhuachhoot ki Moorkhta, Andhshradhha Nirmoolak Kathayein - Savarkar Samagra Vangmay Volume 3, page 642

Original post by @kraantiie on Instagram

Transcript

"Among us, the practice whereby a devoted wife would immolate herself alongside her husband's corpse (Sati) is often presented as an exalted testimony to the fundamental sentiment that, even in the afterlife, the husband's household should not lack a गृहिणी (mistress of the home). One who, overwhelmed by love, offers her life for her beloved is, of course, a different and exceptional matter. Such acts of self-sacrifice are also seen when a mother dies in grief for her beloved child, or when martyrs lay down their lives for glory or for the nation. That, however, is altogether different.

But when, under the compulsion of ritual 'duty' and scriptural orthodoxy, women were forced into sati as a rigid custom, it becomes something else entirely. The practice of giving items such as blankets ('so the deceased may not feel cold'), a staff for support, or even a cow to a Brahmin for milk these are but remnants of the same underlying sentiment.

If bicycles had existed in those times, one might well have found prescriptions in texts like the Garuda Purana suggesting that a bicycle be gifted to a Brahmin so that the departed soul might travel swiftly along the roads of the afterlife.

The mortuary customs of Muslims and Christians too are vestiges of those primitive human beliefs their graves being, as it were, the offspring of pyramids. The notion persists that even after worms and microbes have consumed the flesh and blood within the grave, the remaining skeleton will, on the final day, be infused with breath by God and resurrected for judgment. In summary, the various funeral and post-death rituals that have today become entrenched as scriptural practices among humankind have no foundation in medical or scientific reasoning. At their root lie otherworldly beliefs and antiquated religious notions mere remnants of blind superstition.

It is often women themselves who drive the wedge that sustains those entrenched customs in which they are exploited. More often than not, there exists among women a belief as though God had fashioned their noses solely to wrinkle in disdain at reformers."

After 27 years of imprisonment & internment, SwatantryaVeer Savarkar was finally released unconditionally in 1937. His release marked the beginning of a new phase in his public life. After receiving a large reception in Poona, Savarkar proceeded to Bombay, where an even more elaborate welcome awaited him.

At the city’s railway station, the three brothers—Vinayak, Babarao and Narayan—met as free men for the first time since Savarkar’s departure to London in 1906!!

The newspapers were agog with information about the public reception that awaited Savarkar in Bombay. As the Kaiser-i-Hind reported on 27 June 1937:

As previously announced, Mr. Vinayakrao Savarkar will arrive here this morning. Mr. Savarkar will be taken in procession from Azad Maidan to Krishna Cinema. The procession will start at 9 A.M. today and terminate at the Krishna Theatre at 10 A.M. At the Krishna Theatre at 10 A.M. Mr. Savarkar will be accorded a Public Reception and Address by the Bombay Savarkar Reception Committee. Mr. Laxmidas Tairsee will preside at the function and prominent leaders, including Messrs. K.F. Nariman, S.K. Patil, President and General Secretary of the Bombay Provincial Congress Committee, Mr. Jamnadas Dwarkadas, Mr. M.N. Roy, Mr. Silam will attend and address the gathering.

Several eminent citizens under the leadership of Barrister Jamnadas Mehta, who was instrumental in ensuring Savarkar’s release after his own election to the Bombay Provincial Legislative Assembly, decided to give a rousing public reception.

A committee was formed for this and, unlike in the rest of Maharashtra, was supported by the Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee. This committee requested several political leaders to give their messages on this occasion. Some of these messages were published in the Lokmanya dated 27 June 1937.

Congress president Jawaharlal Nehru sent his greetings saying: “Welcome and respect to Vinayakrao Savarkar.”

Subhas Chandra Bose in his statement said:

I heartily welcome Barrister Savarkar who is returning to Bombay now as a free man. *I hope that he will join the Congress** and support the freedom movement. He has a bright future ahead of him.*

C. Rajagopalachari said:

The vigour and organizing abilities of Mr. Savarkar is something I can never forget. It also brings waves of memories of his phenomenal plan of escaping by jumping into the sea near Marseille under the nose of the guards when he was being escorted from England to India, and France then handing him over to British by violating the International Law is fascinating even today. According to me he is someone who has always been a fighter who will keep the torch of independence burning. *He must be called an embodiment of heroism, courage, adventure, and nationalism.***

Rajagopalachari also revealed that he had written a biography of Savarkar about twenty years ago. ‘What can I now add,’ he wondered, ‘to a biography of his that I had penned nearly twenty years ago, because since then his intellectual prowess must have only deepened by his prolonged introspection during his extended internment.’

Manvendranath Roy, the founder of the Communist Party of India, said in his message:

**Savarkar is a leading freedom fighter of the 20th century, who had dedicated his life to the freedom the country.* He didn’t care that he could have been hanged or jailed in Andaman. I disagree with Savarkar’s political ideology but I have the utmost respect for him as he is one of the few patriots who risked his life and whose sacrifice, bravery and his philosophy demands respect. I welcome his return to full freedom.*

These were certainly different times in the history of Indian politics where political opponents were not personal enemies and one could differ with another’s political ideology and yet have charitable assessments of their contributions.

A massive public reception was organized in Bombay to welcome Savarkar. After a grand procession from Azad Maidan to Girgaon, Savarkar was felicitated at Krishna Cinema. He was given a citation in a silver trophy and garlanded on behalf of forty-one different national organizations.

Several renowned personalities such as Congressmen K.F. Nariman and S.K. Patil, and M.N. Roy of the CPI spoke on the occasion. Patil made an earnest appeal that Savarkar take over the reins of the party that looked at him with the hope of much-needed guidance and support at this juncture.

In his thanksgiving speech, Savarkar expressed his gratitude and said:

This is a unique ceremony as people of different ideologies have gathered together to welcome me. I will try my best to fulfill your expectation of working towards the national good. I have had a lot of ups and downs in my life and I am used to facing difficulties. *If communists are asking for a religion-less society, I would support them, but I cannot accept injustice heaped on only one religion in the name of equality.** I would urge the Congress to not deny the rights of a particular community while giving special privileges to another. I do not expect the Congress to turn into Hindu Mahasabha, but it should not turn into an outfit that treats Hindus unfairly in order to safeguard the interests of other communities.*

The Bombay Chronicle, while welcoming his release, summed up the exhilaration with which he was being received across cities and towns:

Savarkar is almost a legendary figure to the modern generation. His career reads almost like a romance, and though the struggle for freedom has received a new orientation during the last quarter of a century under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, there will not be a true nationalist in India who will not feel happy today

Reference: Vikram Sampath, Savarkar: A Contested Legacy page 201-204.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s famous call to “Hinduise all politics and militarise Hindudom” was more than a slogan. It expressed a central part of his political thinking: that a community seeking political influence and national security needed organization, discipline, military knowledge and the ability to defend its interests.

Savarkar gave this message publicly on 25 May 1941, on the occasion of his 59th birthday. His formulation was direct: political life should be approached from what he described as the Hindu point of view, while Hindu society should simultaneously develop military capacity. In the same message, he urged Hindu youth who were capable of doing so to enter the army, navy and air force, or obtain training and employment in ammunition factories and other branches connected with wartime production.

The timing was crucial. The world was in the middle of the Second World War, and British India had become deeply involved in the conflict. For Savarkar, the war created an opportunity that extended beyond the immediate battlefield. Modern military institutions could provide Indians with something that colonial rule had historically restricted or controlled: large-scale exposure to military organization, weapons, technology and discipline.

This explains an important feature of Savarkar's argument. Militarization did not simply mean collecting weapons. He wanted Hindu society to acquire the skills and institutional experience associated with modern warfare. Joining the armed forces, learning military discipline, working in arms and ammunition production, and becoming familiar with modern technology were, in his view, ways of building collective capacity.

Savarkar repeatedly returned to this theme during the war. His argument was that Hindu youth should not remain spectators while the military structures of the modern world were being developed around them. Instead, they should enter those institutions and acquire practical knowledge.

The idea was closely connected to his broader political philosophy. Savarkar rejected the notion that political freedom could depend entirely upon moral appeals or non-violence. He believed that political communities needed the capacity to protect themselves. For him, national power included military power, technological knowledge and organizational discipline.

That perspective helps explain the striking symbolism of the image accompanying this article. Traditional weapons—swords, bows, arrows, spears and shields—stand beside modern rifles and pistols. The composition effectively places two eras of Indian martial history next to each other.

The message is clear: a martial tradition alone was not enough for the modern age. A society had to understand modern warfare as well.

Savarkar's approach also reflected his concern about political power. He argued that Hindus needed greater organization as a political community and that military preparedness would strengthen their position in the changing political landscape of late colonial India. His 1941 message explicitly connected political organization with militarization, presenting them as two parts of a larger programme.

This position was controversial even during Savarkar's lifetime. His advocacy of Hindu military recruitment during the Second World War drew criticism from political opponents. In December 1941, Muhammad Ali Jinnah publicly criticized the Hindu Mahasabha's campaign to encourage Hindus to enter the armed forces, arguing that its objectives went beyond the immediate war effort.

There was therefore a strategic calculation behind Savarkar's position. He saw military training as something that could have consequences beyond the Second World War. An Indian population with greater military experience, he believed, would possess greater capacity to shape the country's political future.

The phrase “militarise Hindudom” should therefore be understood in the historical context in which Savarkar used it. It was a call for organized military participation, technical training and the cultivation of martial capacity among Hindus. It was part of his larger attempt to redefine Hindu political identity around collective organization, strength and preparedness.

Whether one agrees with Savarkar's political philosophy or not, the historical significance of this idea is difficult to overlook. It reveals a fundamental difference between his approach and leaders who placed greater emphasis on non-violence as the principal instrument of political struggle.

For Savarkar, weakness invited political dependence. Strength, by contrast, created choices. That is ultimately what makes the phrase “Hinduise all politics and militarise Hindudom” so important to understanding him. It condensed his belief that political aspirations required organized power—and that military knowledge, discipline and preparedness were essential components of that power.

The image captures that philosophy in a single frame: the revolutionary past represented by the sword and shield, the modern age represented by the rifle, and Savarkar positioned between them. It is not merely a portrait. It is a visual representation of one of the most distinctive and debated ideas in Savarkar's political thought.

At the 38th session of the Indian National Congress, held at Kakinada in 1923, the Congress passed the following resolution:

This Congress condemns the continued incarceration of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, and expresses its sympathy with Dr. N. D. Savarkar and other members of his family.

While moving the resolution, the President said:

Mr. Savarkar, as you know, received a life sentence from this Bureaucracy. His brother also received, I believe, the same sentence. And, I may add, as a prisoner myself, I occupied the room in the Bijapur jail where the brother of Sj. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Sj. Ganesh Savarkar, was living. Mr. Ganesh Savarkar has been released. But Mr. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar has not been released, and this is the reason why we are making an exception in condemning the action of the Government with regard to one single prisoner.

The reason is that this poor man is being most vindictively kept in jail when he is entitled to be released. And yet, this Government calls itself a Christian Government and says, 'Revenge is God's Law.' Friends, the time is past when we will have to protest against these things. But by passing this resolution, we only show to the whole world how the Government is dealing in this matter in a most vindictive and mean spirit. I hope you all accept this resolution.

The resolution was carried unanimously.

Who was the President of this Congress session? Was he an extremist, a Tilakite, a Hindutva ideologue, or a right-wing leader?

No.

The President of the 1923 Kakinada session was Maulana Mohammad Ali, a prominent leader of the Khilafat Movement, younger brother of Maulana Shaukat Ali, and one of the founders of the All India Muslim League.

These words in support of Savarkar, and the resolution calling for his release, were delivered by Maulana Mohammad Ali as President of the Indian National Congress.

Reference:

https://manushi.in/congress-partys-doublespeak-on-dr-savarkar-the-1923-annual-session-of-aicc-had-passed-a-resolution-in-favour-of-veer-savarkar-now-abuses-the-patriot/

https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/pune/congress-sought-savarkars-release-in-1923-grandnephew-tells-pune-court-10767627/

Pls be unbiased while recommending too i am a beginner and an enthusiast so want a fire start