THE INVENTION OF HINDUSTAN: V.D. SAVARKAR, SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE, M.S. GOLWALKAR, AND THE MODERNIZATION OF HINDU NATIONALIST LANGAUGE ______

A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

California State University, Fullerton ______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

in

History ______

By

Christopher Chacon

Thesis Committee Approval:

Professor Robert McLain, Chair Professor Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi, Department of History Professor James Santucci, Department of Comparative Religion

Summer, 2016

ABSTRACT

In this thesis I argue that Hindu nationalist terminology, particularly the concepts of Hindutva, Samyavada, and national identity, modernized amid currents of globalization and neocolonialism in the early twentieth-century. In the theoretical section,

I examine how systems of knowledge and power in India were directly and indirectly affected by the globalization of western modernity. In the primary source analysis section, I discuss three prominent Hindu nationalists and their ideas in support of the argument made in the theoretical section. Veer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966), the philosopher of Hindutva, represented the ethno-nationalistic component to Hindu nationalism and looked to cultural motifs in order to unify the “true” people of India.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945), the militant hero who formed the Indian

National Army and outright opposed the British, contributed the aggressive discourse of nationalist rhetoric. Sarsanghchalak Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906-1973), the supreme leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), utilized Hindu nationalist rhetoric in order to mesmerize post-independence Indians and lay the foundation for the future of the RSS. Although these individuals represented a current within Indian nationalist history, their lives and literature influenced the language of Hindu nationalism.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv

THE INVENTION OF HINDUSTAN: V.D. SAVARKAR, SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE, M.S. GOLWALKAR, AND THE MODERNIZATION OF HINDU NATIONALIST LANGAUGE ...... 1

Introduction ...... 1 Theoretical Approach ...... 3 Sources and Methodology ...... 5 Modernity and the Other ...... 7 Progress ...... 9 The West and the World ...... 11 Power and Knowledge ...... 14 Public and Private Space ...... 18 Resistance, Reform, and Hybridization ...... 19 V.D. Savarkar and the Language of Hindutva ...... 24 Netaji Bose and the Battle Against Colonialism ...... 31 M.S. Golwalkar and the Hindu Extreme ...... 38 Language, the Body, and Fascism in Hindu Nationalism ...... 41 RSS Post-Independence ...... 45 Conclusion ...... 46

REFERENCES ...... 48

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To start, I would like to thank Professors Robert McLain, Jasamin Rostam-

Kolayi, and my Hinduism “acharya” James Santucci for their dedication to my ambitious thesis over the past several years. I have had the pleasure of taking numerous courses and spending countless office hours with each of you. With the completion of this thesis, you are finally free from my academic clutches.

I would also like to thank supportive faculty I encountered throughout my seven years at California State University, Fullerton. Professors Robey Callahan and Barbra

Erickson from the Department of Anthropology, Professors M. Zakyi Ibrahim, Paul

Levesque, and Bradley Starr from the Department of Comparative Religion, Professors

Daniel McClure, Nancy Fitch, Steven Jobbitt, and Maged Mikhail, from the Department of History, and all of those faculty members I have had the pleasure of meeting, working with, and learning various languages from, you all have my sincerest thanks.

Of course, my family and friends deserve substantial gratitude in the acknowledgements section. Without their love and support, I would not have been successful. To my mother Josie, my godfather Ben, my godmother Rita, and my dear

Aneri, you all have my deepest love and thanks. And to those who have departed, you will always be with me. I drive the train once again.

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Introduction

When considering la longue durée of Indian history, the metanarrative of continuity seemingly permeates every level of society. From the earliest settlements on the banks of the Indus River to the dense metropolises scattered throughout the continent, the land and its people prosper on a balance of a cultural legacy and economic development.1 The Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb created, for the most part, the shape of modern India.2 By the British era, Indians considered political stabilization and the integration of railways and telecommunication as progress towards their own nation.3

In the early twentieth-century, calls for an independent India reached its zenith.

Pluralists such as Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru believed modern India’s strength depended on incorporating the voices of all Indians as they stood on the precipice of the postcolonial age. Ethnocentric nationalists such as Veer Vinayak

Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966), Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945), and

Sarsanghchalak Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906-1973) held that a strong Hindu nation was the only way to guarantee India’s security against the Muslim other and the

1 Sanjay Chaturvedi, “Representing Post-colonial India: Inclusive/Exclusive Geopolitical Imaginations,” in Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought, eds. David Atkinson and Klaus Dodds (London: Routledge, 2000), 213. The term Āryāvarta provides an excellent illustration of proto-India. This term refers to northern and central India from the Hīmālaya to Vindhya Mountain Range and is mentioned in Manu, Vasiṣṭha and Baudhāyana Dharma-sūtras as well as in later works, such as the Rājataraṅgiṇi and Abhidhānacintāmaṇi. 2 Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India, eighth edition (New York, Oxford University Press, 2009), 64, 161. 3 The term nation refers to the modern construction of a society based on its communicative integration, sociopolitical structure, and cultural identity. Although the term nation can apply to a number of societies throughout history, this author considers the modern nation-state as the subject for this study. This allows the author to recognize India’s millennia-old cultural systems while presenting an argument for a modern Indian nation based on hybridization with the west and modernization of nationalist language.

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British imperialism.4 Savarkar, the philosopher of Hindutva, wrote glorified histories of

India and its millennia-old cultural traditions.5 Bose envisaged a surge of militaristic patriotism and ethnic pride as the key to a fully independent homeland.6 Golwalkar, the supreme leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), racialized Indian politics during the last years of British rule and earliest years post-independence in order to balkanize Hindus and Muslims and guarantee Hindu hegemony in India.7 These three individuals represented a current within Indian nationalist history that influenced both twentieth-century politics and the modernization of Hindu nationalist language. In this thesis, I argue that Hindu nationalist terminology, particularly the concepts of Hindutva,

Samyavada, and national identity, modernized amid currents of globalization and neocolonialism in the early twentieth-century.8

The literature on Indian nationalism and its prominent figures, such as Gandhi and

Nehru, encompasses volumes of monographs produced since the decades following independence. The sheer number of administrative characters, geographic regions, and economic interests involved in the birth of Indian nationhood can turn any historical project into an effectively Sisyphean endeavor. Therefore, this thesis attempts to address

4 These individuals have honorific titles before their names that refer to their position as leader of their respective organizations. 5 A.G. Nooran, Savarkar and Hindutva: The Godse Connection (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2002), 1. When addressing the philosophy and adherents of Hindutva, the author will refrain from italicizing the term. When referring to Savarkar’s book, Hindutva will be italicized. 6 Samar Guha, The Mahatma and the Netaji: Two Men of Destiny of India (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1986), 4. 7 Walter K. Andersen and Shridhar D. Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 41. 8 The definition of postcolonialism for this study considers the ramifications of decolonization and the rise of nascent governments in the nonwestern world. Neocolonialism, however, points to maintained economy relationships between the western world and nonwestern countries, often lopsided in favor of the former. The foundation for the theoretical argument in this study originates from this definition. The modernization of language and national identity comes out of this inherently unequal relationship and attempts to correct this imbalance with ethnocentric nationalism and reinvigorated masculinity.

3 only a particular instrument of Indian nationalism and globalization: rhetoric.9 This study reviews primary sources and contextualizes key phrases in order to describe Hindu nationalist language.10 The author proposes a two-layered hypothesis for Hindu nationalism and uses the rhetoric of Savarkar, Bose, and Golwalkar in order to support the major and minor premises discussed in the next several paragraphs.

Theoretical Approach

The major premise states that the phenomenon of Hindu nationalism in India emerged out of the western globalization of nationalism by means of modern capitalism and neocolonialism.11 For this argument, Hindu nationalism breaks down into (a) the distinction between “to be Hindu” (politically defined) and “being Hindu,” (religious orthopraxy), (b) the abstract notion of the nation, and (c) the justification for the nation through conservative ideology.12 “Western” refers almost exclusively to the British, but also includes those western nations that participated in the transition to an integrated, modern global system (as opposed to pre-modern regional systems). When pertaining to participation, each nation functioned as a linguistic patient (rather than agent) undergoing

9 Baldev Raj Nayar, Globalization and Nationalism: The Changing Balance in India’s Economic Policy 1950-2000 (New Delhi, Sage Publications, 2001), 52. Throughout this thesis, rhetoric refers to a style of writing and speaking that attempts to persuade his/her audience over to his/her opinion. 10 Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 232-33, 240, 245. 11 This definition relies on concepts from Marxist theory on social societies and history. In this understanding of Hindu nationalism, larger economic systems promote certain types of relationships between nations. The theoretical assumption then becomes, if imperialist nations transitioned into modernity, then their relationship with the third world shifted to neocolonialism and balanced international power. This paper contends that the globalization of nationalism started during nineteenth-century nation building and took agency in the twentieth-century. 12 Arvind Sharma, “On Hindu, Hindustan, Hinduism and Hindutva,” Numen 49, fasc. 1 (2002): 1- 36.

4 structural transformations due to social and economic processes.13 This distinction avoids the binary of attributing agency to the imperialists at the expense of the colonized.

In reality, the imperialist-colonized relationship appears more complex than a simplistic, binary, top-down relation.14 Four perspectives emerge when deconstructing this binary: outside looking in, inside looking out, inside looking within, and outside looking beyond. The first case refers to orientalism, the second points to globalization, the third suggests modernization of language, and the final gestures towards western discourse. All of these aspects of a deconstructed binary carry significance when analyzing Hindu nationalism.15 Although this thesis utilizes parts of each perspective, outlook three carries the most weight for this discussion. Whereas the objective for the overall project matches perspective two, the instrument for change in the minor premise refers to aspect three.

Globalization refers to the process of commodifying (making ideas marketable and translatable) and proliferating (dispersing through economic incentive and political opportunity) ideas on an international or transnational scale.16 Neocolonialism refers to the permanent economic dependence of previously colonized nations on the modern global system brought on by systemic changes to their economic and political structures in the nineteenth-century. By referring to modern capitalism and neocolonialism through

13 Anouschka Bergmann, Kathleen Currie Hall, and Sharon Miriam Ross, eds., Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 10th ed. (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2007), 202. In this instance, a linguistic patient refers to a subject that is acted upon or manipulated to act rather than a linguistic agent, which describes a subject empowered with uninhibited, direct agency. 14 Edward W. Said, Orientalism. 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 204. 15 Said, Orientalism, 108-09. See also, John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 2nd ed. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 56-58. 16 Meera Nanda, The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 12-34. These pages provide an excellent description on how the Swatantra Party’s liberal economic ideas influenced Hindu nationalists.

5 a base-superstructure relationship, scholars can recognize how nineteenth-century colonialism evolved into twentieth-century neocolonialism (through social and economic processes) as well as describe the relationship under the more prevalent concept of modernity.17

Sources and Methodology

The minor premise investigates the development of Hindu nationalist terminology, such as Hindutva, Samyavada, and national identity, via primary source analysis. Subhas Chandra Bose, otherwise known as Netaji (respected leader), determined to remove the British from India completely and establish a strong, centralized government, provided a window into the aggressive nature of right-wing nationalism and functioned as a source of revived Hindu masculinity. V.D. Savarkar and

M.S. Golwalkar performed as symbols for the Hindu nationalist movement. The former figure articulated new language in an effort to create space between western terminology for India and the purported glorious Hindu past. By looking at the lengthy history of

Hindu identity (Hindutva) and one of the first calls for independence (The Indian War of

Independence), Savarkar promoted the image of India as Hindu and eternal.18 Golwalkar, the second leader of the RSS, provided a treasure trove of information on the psychology of Hindu nationalists as well as built upon the notion of the strong religious community.

Organizations like the RSS utilized religious symbolism in order to rally communities

17 The ideas presented in this sentence emerged from a number of influential scholars who defined postcolonial and Marxist terminology. See, McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 286-92. 18 Sneha Annavarapu, “Religious Nationalism in a Global Age: The Case of Hindu Nationalism,” SAGE Publications 31, 1 (2015): 130-31.

6 around an idealized state. They also supported physical strength and a nationalist education in order to advance their political and social ideology.19

The thesis breaks down into two sections, a theoretical component and a lengthy primary source analysis and discussion. Subjects for the discussion on theory include: 1) the nature of modernity, 2) the illusion of the monolith, 3) the power of language and knowledge, and 4) the globalization of a western metanarrative. The second section starts with a historiographical introduction to Indian independence and the rise of Hindu nationalist ideology. This will include a brief discussion of nineteenth-century forerunners and twentieth-century thinkers.20 The majority of the thesis will dissect the three individuals introduced earlier, their works, and their ideas in order to support the argument made in the theoretical discussion. In addition to these individuals, a final analysis of fascism and the rise of the RSS will constitute the conclusion. Secondary sources reviewed come from two areas of material: analytical and theoretical. Analytical secondary sources closely scrutinize primary source documents and provide commentary

19 Although not discussed in this project, the figure V.P. Menon (1893-1965) represented the elite in pre-independence India and how conservative values mixed with liberal economics, supporting the notion that modern capitalism and neocolonialism played a role in the foundation of the modern Indian state. Trained as a British Indian civil servant, he worked alongside Vallabhbhai Patel, the Deputy Prime Minister of India post-independence, and assisted in consolidating hundreds of princely powers into the new government. His two texts provide a first hand account of the dealings conducted during India’s transition from colony to independence. Meera Nanda’s, The God Market, traced Menon’s Swatantra Party back to the business and landowning elite who introduced the liberal economics of nationalism to India, which contributed to the strength of the modern day BJP and their community organization, the RSS. See also, Howard L. Erdman, The Swatantra Party and Indian Conservatism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 20 The subjects under review later in the thesis hold a reverence for nineteenth and early twentieth- century thinkers. A study of their works would prove beneficial. For a British perspective to the nineteenth- century, see Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996), Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, and Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth-century.

7 and context for each piece.21 Primary sources presented partially or entirely in secondary sources also fall into this category. Theoretical secondary sources, such as historiographical pieces, classical reviews, and historical theory belong to this category.22

Both sources provide a treasure trove of information on the names, dates, and events significant to any study of a particular topic as well as provide the theoretical foundation used and expanded on in subsequent works.

Modernity and the Other

When addressing modernity, scholars take one of two options, a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach. In the top-down approach, grand metanarratives and major events highlight civilizational shifts to modernity, but overlook specific details.23

In the bottom-up approach, modernity takes on the appearance of a hydra, with various heads representing different aspects and contributing factors to the overall paradigm.

Although providing a more descriptive image of modernity, the cohesiveness of the various “little histories” into a metanarrative often comes out imperfect and fails to attain the uniformity of the former approach. Therefore, modernity operates as a vague and malleable concept subject to the perspective of the historian.24 Due to its fluid and ever- changing nature, modernity functions as a matrix of sociocultural features that undergoes transformations via external and/or internal processes and emerges as an altered matrix more favorable in a new sociocultural context.

21 Prominent Hindu nationalist scholar Pralay Kanungo’s lecture documentary on the RSS stands as an example of this type of source. For this source, the minute approximation will be included in the footnotes. 22 A good example of a standard secondary source would be Lawrence James’s Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998). 23 David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 160-61. 24 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 4. The “discontinuities of modernity” precisely make this topic so difficult to describe, hence the necessity for such a vague definition.

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Historiographically speaking, the language utilized to construct Indian modernity emerged from two camps, the European orientalists and the Indian elites. Scholars today recognize that both camps possess systemic issues that muddle academic work.

Orientalists often contextualize nonwestern civilizations as monolithic or archaic, plagued by adverse cultural traits that inhibit progress and modernity.25 This criticism does not call into question the character of such scholars nor suggest all western scholars subscribe to this orientalist agenda. Rather, the issue with orientalism lies in the linguistic structure scholars rely on to project their ideas on India. The western positionality of orientalism naturally produces both the illusion of the “Other” and the illusion of the monolith.26 From a Saussurian semiology approach, terms like “India,” “South Asia,”

“Indian subcontinent,” “Hindu,” and so on all come with a contamination due to a western ontology of conservatism and a western epistemology of classification.27 When considering the illusion of the Other, orientalists established civilizational boundaries between the western world and elsewhere based on cultural distinctions and historical developments. However, these attempts at objective analysis carried subjective implications that nonwestern domains deviated from the ideal trajectory of human progress—modernity in the strictest sense—and belong in their own category, separate from the west and in contrast to the definition of the west.

The illusion of the monolith, in tandem with the aforementioned illusion, highlights suspected commonalities within non-western societies while simultaneously silencing their differences. The formation of both illusions originated primarily in

25 Said, Orientalism, 116-17. 26 Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 325. 27 References to Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics. See, Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), for a good discussion on Saussure in the initial introduction and first chapter of the book.

9 nineteenth and early twentieth-century anthropological, sociological, and linguistic commentaries on India and the “Orient,” although deeper sentiments reach back into the very foundation of western ontology.28 During this period of academic advancement, scholars traversed the world in search of common modalities within human variation and proposed theories on shared ancestry and socioeconomic structures ranging from

“primitive” to “industrialized.” Modernity witnessed its birth through this process of intellectual proliferation. Western structures of epistemology described boundaries and cultures with the notion that nonwestern societies such as India possess a timeless ethno- national identity defined by its similarities to its neighbors and its differences with western identity.29 In more general terms, the language orientalists use to describe India appears problematic from its inception due to a western fetish for identifying and systematizing human boundaries. Despite the informational power connected to the “etic” perspective of Indian modernity, progress as defined by Indian nationalists and the religious right suggests an equally significant “emic” point of view to history, arguably one that mirrored western orientalist discourse in some ways.30

Progress

The concept of favorability within modernity does not function as sociobiological randomness or biological adaptation.31 Instead, the subject of modernity orientates around the Enlightenment belief that human societies pursue perfection in the form of

“progress.” Modernity and progress go hand in hand when constructing a theoretical

28 Paul A. Erickson and Liam D. Murphy, A History of Anthropological Theory, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2008), 39-41. 29 McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 126-27. 30 “Emic” and “etic” refer to a concept within anthropology that creates a distinction between perspectives. Emic looks at how local people perceive their world and etic looks at how others, particularly ethnographers in the case of anthropology, may perceive a local group’s worldview. 31 Nineteenth-century anthropology and twentieth-century fascism orientated around the race argument. In more “considerate” works today, modernity has taken a step away from its racist past.

10 approach to human societies. In the traditional sense of modernity, progress takes on the appearance of the unfinished pyramid, always in the pursuit of completion and inclusion.32 Responses to alien forms of progress appear detrimental and erode cultural structures. Such types of traditional modernity best apply to groups affected by colonialism. Western so-called progress, although contributing significantly to state formation and globalization, robbed numerous societies of their agency and self- determination. As mentioned above, the study of Hindu nationalism falls into this category. Postmodernity takes a unique approach to this topic by undermining the absolute nature of tradition and suggesting that progress is unattainable.33 In a sense, the trajectory of society, or tradition, appears disjointed and makes progress relative to positionality and ultimately impossible to achieve. Knowledge and power undergo a deconstruction of their societal value and become little more than patterns within political and economic situations. Under the guise of postmodernity, human potentiality becomes progress for any society.34

When pertaining to India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modernity and responses to modernity encapsulate the idea of nationalism. Classical modernity considers India’s long history and attempts to construct an avenue of continuity between the Mughal period and British era up to the present.35 The rise of secularism, Indian centralization, and economic prosperity present a strong case for modernity in South Asia

32 Scholars have long criticized modernity and the idea of progress for its lack of social inclusivity and unattainable promises. Although the racial aspects of progress have existed for decades (and for good reason of course), the “spirit of progress” still contains some authority today. 33 McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 56-57. 34 Although fascinating, postmodernity will not be the focus of this paper. However, human potentiality deserves a mention alongside postmodernity for its deconstructed and decentralized components. 35 In order to distinguish between modernity, modernities, and postmodernity, classical modernity will refer to the initial, positivist modernity.

11 and throughout the Third World.36 Reponses to modernity have varied, however, ranging from welcomed to despised. Those against modernity ponder the consequences of shifts in society’s discursive currents and question the “benefits” of progress. Individuals such as Savarkar, Bose, and Golwalkar represented a hybridization of the two types of responses and demonstrated the versatility of cultural structures.37 Indians today inherited both the western hegemonic usurpation of their natural sociocultural development as well as their deeper, cultural identity.

The West and the World

Western hegemony and conservatism represents the missing component that allowed for the formation and development of Hindu nationalism. India possessed a conservative current of its own before western imperialism, particularly during the several centuries of Muslim rule that produced ethnic tension between the two socioreligious groups.38 From a cultural-religious standpoint, the Brāhmaṇical Hindu-

Muslim divide initiated a unified underclass dominated by Muslim rule.39 The Brahmin caste identified distinctions between Hindu purity and Muslim contamination, which often appeared proto-nationalistic and provided a template for future Hindu nationalist

36 Sumit Sarkar, “Nationalism and Poverty: Discourses of Development and Culture in 20th Century India,” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 3 Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms (2008): 431-32. 37 Sarkar, “Nationalism and Poverty,” 438. The term hybridization describes a gradient of discursive shifts between western and Indian thought. In some cases, as in footnote 120, hybridization contextualizes the experiences of Anglicized Indians, both culturally and “racially.” In a more theoretical sense, hybridization is a “rubbing” of two imagined communities by which each affected group undergoes some form of transformation or “shift.” Cultural subjugation, cooperation, and transformation are all possible outcomes of hybridization. 38 See, Wolpert, A New History of India, for a summary of Muslim-Hindu relations during Muslim rule in India. Chapters 8-14, in particular, discuss this lengthy history. 39 al-Biruni’s Kitab al-Hind documented Muslim and non-Muslim communal distinctions recognized by the ruling Muslim class. Early depictions of a Hindu identity can be traced to the Bhagavad- Gītā, alluding to the concept of a “will to tradition,” discussed in the following paragraph.

12 leadership in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.40 Yet, India’s traditional system of inclusivity meant that the subcontinent lacked a strong nationalistic sense of Hinduism until after the arrival of the British, due to the rise in communication, publication, and the ability to juxtapose between the two civilizations.41 Certainly, charismatic Hindu figures during the Mughal period embodied a strong sense of masculinity and political prowess.

However, these figures only represented proto-nationalist causes, often with the sole aim of driving out Muslim tyrants but keeping the sociopolitical structure intact. Only with the introduction of the unassimilated British post-1600 CE and their growing influence after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 CE did Indian nationalism—and by extension Hindu nationalism—gain the space to materialize. Therefore, Hindu nationalism indicated a response to a new Other rather than something previously experienced.42 Educated by the west and molded through state formation via colonialism, Hindu nationalists are an inevitable product of western conservatism with fierce nativist rhetoric.

The western metanarrative has undergone at least three significant shifts that display a transformative process. In times of antiquity, European civilization gravitated around a “will to tradition,” Greco-Roman philosophy, and paganism.43 With the birth of

Christianity, the European metanarrative orientated itself around the Church’s authority structure, doctrines of faith, and religious centralization. However, with the introduction of Protestantism, science, and colonialism, Europe slowly shifted towards a third

40 Another group during this period, the Sants, distinguished themselves from both Brahmins and Muslim “Turks.” The Sikhs of India also consider themselves a separate non-Hindu people. 41 See Nicholas B. Dirks’ forward in Cohn’s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. The pages ix-xi in particular discuss this issue of state formation and the role the British played in inventing an India. 42 Subhas Bose described this distinction as the real conquest of India. See, Bose, The Indian Struggle 1920-1942, 3. 43 David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001), 150.

13 modernity.44 This modernity, formulating during the Italian Renaissance up to the French

Revolution of 1789, finally wrested power away from the Christendom model in the nineteenth-century. In order to appreciate the European individualism and potentiality of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one must look back to these forerunners in order to indicate when the modern shift took place.

Furthermore, the relationship and interaction between the west and the Orient go back millennia.45 Military and economic exchanges during the Greco-Roman and Persian era initiated a struggle for dominance and prestige. With the advent of Christianity and

Islam, religious wars intensified between the two massive civilizations. Centuries later,

European proto-states set out in waves of exploration in order to undermine the economic power of Oriental empires despite owing much of their renaissances to Arab and Persian, and by extension Indian, scholars. Finally, tensions between western imperialists and

Oriental despots gave birth to the modern hostilities taking place today.46 Although India functions as a special case in the discussion of Orientalism, the discriminatory attitudes held by European imperialists and their disruptive policies over food supplies and governance earned India a place next to Persia and Arabia for shared experiences.47 The distinction between the Middle East and India lies primarily in the religious disunity and regional autonomy seen in India. Whereas the Middle East faced western infiltration with

44 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 25-8. 45 See, Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1997), for a detailed discussion on civilizational contact between the west and the Islamic Orient world. Certainly, Edward Said and Samuel P. Huntington disagreed tremendously on this issue of civilizational conflicts. 46 Said, Orientalism, 221-23. 47 This best reflects on a Saidian argument that western imperialism transformed some aspects of Oriental society and destroyed others, with or without the consent of the local populations. See, Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 172-73.

14 religious homogeny, the divide between Hindu and Muslim princes in India opened the door for the west’s systematic racism and conservative language to infect Indian modernity and create Hindu nationalism as a by-product.48

Power and Knowledge

When conceiving of a matrix of sociocultural features, a Nietzschean-Foucauldian understanding of power and knowledge clarifies the theory of modernity. On the foundational level, this matrix of ideas and beliefs gravitates around a “will to tradition.”49 Tradition, in this sense, illustrates a core of conservatism within a perceived geographical boundary, outlining the imagined community. The boundary and space within appear sacred and distinct, radiating power and knowledge and satisfying the conditions for a civilizational community akin to a psychological manifest destiny. In the case of Hindu nationalism, sub-continental India represents the sacred space out of which cultural power and knowledge emanates.50 Although technological and scientific progress from beyond the boundary incorporates into the Hindu metanarrative, deeply planted cultural truths remain unaffected. Instead, a revival of religious symbols and legends from a distant golden age materialize in the language used to illustrate technological innovations and sociopolitical entities.51 All three nationalists discussed in the thesis participated in this reinvention of Indian history and language.52 These symbols and

48 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Modernity and Ethnicity in India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 17, special issue (1994): 151-52. 49 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (Mineola, NY: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2004), 65. 50 Romila Thapar, Imagined Religious Communities?: Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity (New Delhi: Critical Quest, 2005), 25-26. 51 Celebrations by conservative groups due to successful Indian nuclear tests represent an example of this type of revival. 52 Chandler, Semiotics, 20-21. See also, Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Translated by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), for a deeper discussion on the connection between signs and symbols and how they transform into cultural myths.

15 legends empowered Hindu nationalist discourse and were incorporated into representations of the modern nation, such as in the military, politics, and economy.

Knowledge, emerging out of and contesting with tradition, made up the space in between the core regime of tradition and the imagined boundary of the community.

Knowledge arose out of tradition since it represented the language and experience utilized to describe subconscious cultural truths.53 In a sense, knowledge represents a unit of information containing cultural markers that suggest a place of origin. Knowledge contests with conservatism when it escapes the influence of the core beliefs for the boundary or when it becomes hybridized with another imagined community. For the most part, the weight of knowledge orbits closely to tradition, such as in political and economic social systems. However, fringe and marginal knowledge approaching the boundary of the imagined community challenges traditional truths.54 When possessing enough momentum, contestable and tangential knowledge can create a shift in modernity.

This shift then resets the structure and prevents systemic collapse and fragmentation into several imagined communities.55

For this thesis, knowledge came in the very language created by Hindu nationalists in the early 1900s. These innovative narratives interacted within the cultural marketplace of ideas and possessed value according to their proximity to traditional truths.56 In other words, the more recognizable the language, the more value it wielded in

53 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 82-3. 54 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 6-7. 55 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 9-10. 56 The marketplace of ideas refers to both the freedom of expression long cherished in the west and the nature of language and how it influences desirability and choice. Essentially, it represents both free will and fatalism.

16 society. Nationalism employed symbols and myths in order to convey certain truths.

Hindu nationalist organizations, such as the RSS, not only attempted to control institutions of indoctrination, but also the enculturation and socialization of youths in order to manifest a society based on their conservative ideals.57 Additionally, the publications of their versions of history and identity reinforced the notion of a new Hindu

India, continuous with the great religious epics and mythical kings of the past and glorious, unified future to come.58

Power, the intermediary between tradition and knowledge, displayed two functions in this relationship: latent and manifest. Latent power incorporates the unconscious and subconscious aspects of the connection between knowledge and tradition. At the societal level, latent power regulates social norms and performance.59 In other words, it acts as the “common sense” within any given community. Manifest power reflects upon society’s agency over its collective members. Legal institutions and enforcement represent some of the largest sources of manifest power.60 This type of power drives social consciousness and governs over the public sphere. Both types of power originate from the core of tradition and emanate throughout knowledge space.

When accumulated in the zones of contestable knowledge, a shift in modernity takes

57 The works by M.S. Golwalkar later in the thesis provide a description of this indoctrination process. 58 Pralay Kanungo, “In Defence of Our Dreams: History of Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS)” (documentary lecture, Anhad, 2003). 59 The material on performance in the humanities and social sciences discipline is extensive and touches on the works of countless scholars. A general Internet search for brief descriptions of the various contributions to the concept of performative turn provides a solid start. For this study, however, performance is the psychosocial interaction of people within their imagined communities. In a sense, people both participate in the propagation of knowledge and power as well as transform it according to innovation and hybridization. 60 The discussion of latent and manifest “power” comes from a mixture of historical and sociological theorists. See Robert K. Merton’s 1968 work Social Theory and Social Structures and Peter L. Berger’s 1963 piece Invitation to Sociology to get a foundational understanding of these concepts. See also, Said, Orientalism, 206.

17 place.61 Internal factors, such as technological innovation and social incorporation, present opportunities for such a shift. Manifest power, when acting as an external factor, can inject agency into an alien community and encourage hybridization or globalization.

When overlapping imagined communities exchange knowledge and power with enough momentum and duration, responses to modernity appear.62 Due to Hindu nationalism representing hybridization between Western conservatism and Hindu ideology, this study considers both modernity and its response for the present status of Hindu nationalism.63

Transformations via external and/or internal processes suggest that society functions in constant flux. The flow of power within knowledge and tradition, as well as within the public sphere, is subject to mutations depending on shifts in knowledge- tradition paradigms and the redirection of latent and manifest power.64 When latent and manifest power undergoes transformations, the imagined community encounters systemic change. Such dramatic shifts mirror a new modernity and a restructuring of knowledge- tradition dynamics. However, when only manifest power undertakes a transformation, superficial changes reverberate throughout society. Minor shifts, not sufficient to herald in a new modernity, appear as corrections within the superstructure of society.65 For example, conscious adjustments made in any given society include large policy changes and social awareness organizations, focusing on alleviating systemic pressures.

Unconscious adjustments materialize as small legal victories and local economic developments. As alluded to earlier, external factors of change, including globalization,

61 See, Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) 175-77. 62 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 9-10. 63 Nayar, Globalization and Nationalism, 30-31, 48-49. 64 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 88-91. 65 In some cases, these micro adjustments appear as subcultural trends. See, Dick Hebdige, Subculture and the Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), 5-7.

18 migration, and internationalism, also affect societal transformations.66 Ultimately, such transformations would alter a societal matrix, making it more favorable in a new sociocultural context.

Public and Private Space

When pertaining to public and private space, the tradition within an imagined community demarcates the private and public spheres. Religious spaces may appear public, but only to those within the imagined community. In this instance, an imagined religious community designates a particular location as sacred in which outsiders cannot enter for fear of pollution or corruption of their purity.67 Fears of contamination carry significant weight in Hindu culture and stand reinforced by Hindu systems of knowledge and power. Religious tracts and social mores signify two examples of these systems.

When projected onto India, non-Hindus appear inherently impure and their presence disturbs the holiness of Indian land, a setting where shrines to the gods are built anywhere.68 Deepa Reddy’s Religious Identity and Political Destiny: Hindutva in the

Culture and Ethnicism touches on the topic of ethnic space, which complemented the notion of public and private domains. Reddy presents a cultural studies analysis of ethnicism, the process by which ethnic tradition enters discursive formations and creates an imagined community based on such an ideal as the highest form of identity. Those

66 The subject of globalization and internationalism complicate the study of modernity for at least two reasons. The first reason looks at the external force globalization plays against national identity. The interaction between conflicting identities is a complex discussion that would serve as a paper of its own. This interaction of ideas and civilizational markers weaken the boundaries of local and national imagined communities. The second reason comments on globalization and corporationism as a new imperialism with indirect control over economic systems throughout the world. In a sense, the ghost of colonialism haunts the colonized through economic structures still in place today that emerged decades ago. 67 Deepa S. Reddy, Religious Identity and Political Destiny: Hindutva in the Culture of Ethnicism (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), 149, 179. 68 M. G. Chitkara, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh: National Upsurge (New Delhi: A P H Publishing Corporation, 2004), 65-8.

19 who espouse ethnicism argue that the nation state should reflect one common identity and often one common language based on the traditions and history of a common people. A highly conservative philosophy, proponents of ethnicism sharply disagree with multiculturalism and racialize politics in order to elicit emotions normally associated with hyper nationalism, hardly benefitting “the secularity of this [Indian] national” community.69 Here, Reddy challenges Savarkar’s egregious promotion of religiosity by pointing out systemic religious and cultural beliefs that already exist at the unconscious and subconscious levels. In other words, nationalism can abduct religion quite easily when idealized to such a pedigree and expand cultural characteristics beyond proportions.

Resistance, Reform, and Hybridization

As in all political movements, Hindu nationalism stood on the shoulders of preceding giants. Hindu reformers of the nineteenth-century and the sociopolitical organizations determined to see India ruled by Indians comprise the two sources of inspiration for Hindu political conservatism. In the case of the former, individuals such as

Aurobindo Ghose and Swami Vivekananda represented the modernization of Hindu thought.70 Hinduism, according to such idealists, possessed immense wisdom and foresight into the complexities of the modern age.71 Despite Hinduism being an orthopraxic religious tradition, these Hindu reformers fixated on distancing themselves from archaic and barbaric local practices as well as caste divisions and propagandizing the Hindu belief that many philosophical positions stemmed from an ultimate source of

69 Reddy, Religious Identity and Political Destiny, 180. 70 Swami Vivekananda was generally viewed as an early icon of Hindu nationalism. M.S. Golwalkar referred to him in Bunch of Thoughts as, “the great harbinger of our national renaissance in modern times.” See, Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, 126-27. See also Jyotirmaya Sharma, Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (New Delhi: Viking, 2003), for a lengthy discussion on these individuals listed. 71 Andersen and Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron, 10-9.

20 truth.72 Hindu nationalists of the twentieth-century built upon these religious adaptations and applied a national vision for Hindu philosophy that resolved any issues in interpretation of original texts. This offered Indian modernists the opportunity to: unify the variety of castes and religions under one banner, modernize old religious practices, and position Hinduism as India’s official religion, and bolster it against Christian missionaries and Muslim competitors.

Whereas Hindu revivalists challenged traditional beliefs and external pressures,

Indian nationalists of the nineteenth-century set up the organizational groundwork for later political parties.73 From this broad description, two branches emerged: the constructivists and the deconstructivists. Constructivists started with deep connections to

British power, such as the Zamindari Association, British Indian Association, Indian

National Association, and Indian National Congress.74 These organizations reformed society at the political level and altered the relationship between India and Britain in an attempt to give some autonomy to the former. By doing so, these groups laid the foundation for twentieth-century political movements and tested a number of discourses against the new Indian cultural structure. In other words, these fledgling groups acted in response to underlying economic and political narratives within British India, initiating the transformation from colonial to neocolonial.

The other response to British hegemony came from the deconstructivists who called for a violent stand against their imperial overlords.75 Some of these

72 Chitkara, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 123-5. 73 Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 8-14. 74 B. Bala Parameswari, “Abolition of Zamindari System and Its Impact on Agriculture,” Imperial Journal of Interdisciplinary Research 2, issue 4, (2016): 9-11. 75 Ian McDonald, “’Physiological Patriots’?: The Politics of Physical Culture and Hindu Nationalism in India,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 34, no. 4 (1999): 344.

21 deconstructivists, such as Dadabhai Naoroji, called for economic deconstruction in the form of the Swadeshi movement. This movement encouraged economic self-sufficiency and self-determination from Indian communities, limiting the power of the British Raj throughout the country.76 By the twentieth-century, Gandhi promoted this ideology by boycotting particular British-run resources and returning India to a self-sustaining economy. Other deconstructivists looked to dismantle British rule through outright rebellion. In some cases, peasants revolted and declared their own micro governments that forced the British to deploy troops and subdue pockets of resistance.77 In other cases, larger communities challenged the British for regional autonomy. Conflicts, such as the

Vellore Mutiny (1806), Anglo-Maratha Wars (concluded 1818), Sikh Wars (concluded

1849), Santhal Rebellion (1855), Sepoy Mutiny (1857), and Central Indian Campaign

(1858), represented both a shift towards direct British rule in India as well as the foundation of Hindu nationalism.

These failed rebellions sent the message to Indian nationalists that society must modernize according to western practices of capitalism and nationalism, utilizing Hindu

“reformation” discourse as the language of Indian modernity and Swadeshi socialism as the economic base of the transformation.78 Indians during the turn of the twentieth- century participated in both an internal mechanism of structural modernization and national economic development and an external mechanism of globalization. Internally,

India underwent drastic shifts from regional to national, connected by railroads and telecommunication. The Indian community attained a level of self-awareness that

76 Manu Goswami, “From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870-1907,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no 4, (Oct. 1998): 615. 77 Vinayak Chaturvedi, “The Making of a Peasant King in Colonial Western India: The Case of Ranchod Vira,” Past and Present no. 192, (Aug. 2006): 155-6. 78 Goswami, “From Swadeshi to Swaraj,” 621-24.

22 produced nationalist thinkers of which Hindu nationalists represented a conservative branch. With the rise in popularity of Hindu nationalism, a more solidified capitalist and neocolonialist agenda shifted Indian discourse from a strong, inward socialism to a strong, outward imperialism, particularly after the formation of Pakistan and the perception of the “eternal” duality between Hindu and Muslim. Such internal developments also hinted at a greater globalization of economies and nationalisms responding to the shift from colonial to postcolonial imperatives.

Following WWI, two developments complicated Indian nationalism: representation in government and realistically procuring independence. The first question addressed an ideological dilemma prominent statesmen such as Gandhi and Jinnah quarreled over during the 1920s-1940s. The geographical borders of India, the possible formation of a Muslim state, and the definition of Indian citizenry all muddled nationalist aspirations.79 For a few royal leaders, such as the Nizam of Hyderabad, opposition to the formation of India led to outright military suppression.80 The second question pondered the course of action to take against the British overlords. On one hand, pacifists such as

Gandhi believed non-cooperation on an economic and societal level guaranteed a safe and direct transition from colony to independence. On the other hand, proponents of aggressive nationalism, such as Netaji Bose, demanded immediate, decisive, and violent action.81 These individuals envisaged a united India born out of blood and fire rather than peace and negotiation. By going to war with the British, Indians would earn their right to self-determination, not from generous imperialists granting them freedom but by

79 Wolpert, A New History of India, 323-4. 80 Sukumar Muralidharan, “Alternate Histories: Hyderabad 1948 Compels a Fresh Evaluation of the Theology of India’s Independence and Partition,” History and Sociology of South Asia 8, no. 2 (2014): 121-2. 81 Wolpert, A New History of India, 318-9.

23 restoring Indian honor and defeating the Europeans once and for all.82 As the years went on and peaceful non-cooperation seemed to wear thin the patience of some prominent figures, Hindu nationalism emerged to fill in the gaps created by a cracking coalition.

Indian hybridization in part due to these active revolutionaries, politicians, and thinkers attempting to control their relationship with the British and their colonial system.

However, hybridization also contained a more complacent aspect with Christian proselytization and participation within the British superstructure. India’s coastal areas experienced centuries of Christian missionary work, which contributed to its more diverse demographics and cosmopolitan sensibilities. Beyond the coast, however, Indian

Christianity often stood as a marker for Indian hybridization and the illusion of Anglo-

Indian identity.83 This unique demographic held London as a cultural center of power and participated in the British superstructure through educating children in Christian schools, dressing in western clothes, recognizing the Queen/Empress as a spiritual leader

(Anglican rite), and altering social performance to match western expectations of modernity.84 Hindu nationalism, in staunch opposition to these “traitors,” rejected the message of British modernity, but still participated in western modalities of intellectualism and cultural hegemony. For the twentieth-century ultranationalist Netaji

Subhas Chandra Bose, admiration of Germany’s fascism represented this notion of cultural hegemony.85

82 A.A. Parvathy, Secularism and Hindutva, a Discursive Study (Mangalore, India: University College, 1994), 78-80. 83 See Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Little, Brown, 2004), 168-73. See also Bose, An Indian Pilgrim, 85. 84 Andrew Porter, “Religion and Empire: British Expansion in the Long Nineteenth-century, 1780- 1914,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 20, issue 3, (1992): 370-80. 85 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Modernity and Ethnicity in India,” South Asia 17, (1994): 143-4.

24

V.D. Savarkar and the Language of Hindutva

In the nineteenth-century and first decade of the twentieth-century, self- determination seemed far beyond the horizon and into a distant future when the British

Raj incrementally handed over power to the fledgling Indian government. Before WWI,

Indian independence politics functioned as a united front of Muslim organizations, quasi- religious Hindu factions, and secular or interreligious movements.86 The Hindu nationalists of the early twentieth-century represented a political shift marked primarily by an obsession with organization and language. Each of the nationalists under review held different affiliations, ranging from Bose's militaristic communalism to Golwalkar's

RSS. V.D. Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha argued for a strong Hindu community defined by historical identity and language. Their ideology adhered to their philosopher's teachings, laid out in a number of texts and speeches composed over the course of fifty years.

Although Savarkar's 1923 Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? introduced his main ideas to an international audience, his earlier The Indian War of Independence, 1857, challenged the status quo some fourteen years prior to his magnum opus and earned its place on the British ban list for years.87 In his early work, Savarkar testified passionately for the Hindu cause and condemned the British, both for their efforts to subdue India's right to self-determination and conceal the historical truth with a convenient account of facts and realities. Almost immediately, he challenged the official cause for the 1857 revolt—Indian outrage over the use of gun cartridges lined with animal fat—by pointing

86 Wolpert, A New History of India, 287-8. 87 Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? was originally titled Essentials of Hindutva before it received its current title in the 1928 reprint. Savarkar composed the first edition while imprisoned by the British on Andaman Island.

25 to prominent supporters for the movement as an indicator of proto-nationalism and revived masculinity.88 A page later, he also called into question the annexation-of-Oudh hypothesis for the revolt, downplaying local factors for rebellion and amplifying sentiments of nationalist uprising as a more desirable counter.89 In a sense, his connection between homeland and faith illuminated his long affinity with religious symbolism and nationalism.90 In later works, Savarkar demonstrated how Vedic identity designated

Indian citizenship. So long as Indians supported a Vedic based religion, such as Jainism,

Buddhism, or Hinduism, their allegiance to the country went without question. As illustrated by most critics of Savarkar, his attempt to racialize the Hindu identity in order to present a stronger, more nationalist front led to intense hatred and ostracism of Muslim

Indians.91 This political rationale challenged Muslim rights to India, since they presumably lacked any connection or loyalty to the motherland and instead “yearned” for

Mecca and the caliph (Khilafat Movement).92 Such logic promoted animosity between the two groups and ultimately justified the formation of Pakistan as a home for Indian

Muslims.

Despite the seeds of irreconcilability in The Indian War of Independence, 1857,

Savarkar recognized the power of working together to rid India of the greatest Other—

Britain. When dwelling on the roots of the 1857 revolt, he chided the English for believing, "that Hindusthanis would be ashamed of their religion when they saw the light

88 V.D. Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence, 1857 (India: Phoenix Publications, 1947), 4-5. 89 The annexation of Oudh in 1856 by the British East India Company saw a number of local nobility lose their landed power and prestige, causing great anger with the British and concern over the possible increase in land taxes. The hypothesis suggested that disgruntled Oudh nobility were one of the primary catalysts for rebellion the following year. 90 Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence, 1857, 6. 91 Parvathy, Secularism and Hindutva, 95-99. 92 Chitkara, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 18-21.

26 of western [civilization] and give it up."93 Furthermore, he documented the adverse effects of Christianization and loss of indigenous culture in other areas of the British

Empire and identified the connection between identity and nationhood.94 Despite belonging to one of his earliest works, this ideology proved vital to later Hindu nationalist movements and defined his personal conviction for decades. For Savarkar, western civilization symbolized a discourse of indulgence, which weakened the spiritual continuity of communities and pushed them into a global system dominated by the

British.95 Throughout the monograph, he utilized the militaristic language of revolution in order to convey both historical events and nationalist rhetoric. As with many nationalist histories, authors attempt to humanize and sympathize with their political ancestors as well as construct events as eternal and relatable. Savarkar wrote his history of 1857 not only as if it just happened recently but also as if it will happen again. The words from the proclamations of Oudh and Delhi proved just as relevant in 1857 as they did in his own time. Language such as: "free and liberated," "consciousness of a divine duty,"

"Dharma," "determination and will," "our ancient faith," "martyrdom," and "zeal for religious duty...[without] any worldly aspiration," originated from nineteenth-century

Indian princes and activated discursive formations within Hinduism that functioned with a sense of timelessness and irrevocability.96 These words carried religious gravitas

93 Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence, 1857, 54. Hindusthan and Hindusthani can also be written as Hindustan and Hindustani. 94 Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence, 1857, 55. 95 Nooran, Savarkar and Hindutva, 38-41. Although critical of western civilizational discourse, historians and theorists could conceive of Savarkar’s language as a hybrid discourse of cultural nativism, as documented above, and sympathy towards processes connected to modernity. Nonwestern nationalists divide modernity between agents (the west) and their processes (the structure of modernity), hybridizing their nativist rhetoric with the latter. When analyzing Hindu nationalism, scholars should consider rhetoric as both a means to categorize nativistic discourse as well as document the currents of modernity beneath the political hyperbole. 96 Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence, 1857, 285-86.

27 reminiscent of Krishna's sermon on the nature of Dharma in the Bhagavad Gita. By constructing both revolution and nation around imagery all of India easily recognized as their narrative heritage, Savarkar called to Hindus of all principalities and states to overthrow their foreign masters and purify their land through blood and fire. The inflammatory rhetoric used in this early work earned its place on a British ban list and most likely contributed to his detainment from 1911 to 1925.97 By the time of his next major work, Hindutva, Savarkar enhanced the language of revolution and built upon the religious connection between nationalism and Dharma.

In 1923 V.D. Savarkar’s Hindutva provided the language that later defined the conservative movement in India. According to him, Hindutva "is not a word but...a history in full."98 He drew distinctions between Hinduism and Hindutva in order to separate religious affiliation from political identity. National sentiment for Savarkar originated in India's ancient past and in the linguistic history of the term Hindu and

Hindusthan. His premise contended that neighboring civilizations identified India and its people by the Sindhu/Hindu/Indus River.99 Despite centuries of human migration from

Central and Southwest Asia into the lands of the Hindus, a will to tradition emerged that insulated prominent cultural features recognizable today as Indian. When pertaining to language, terminology created in a response to the Other legitimizes the nationalist cause.

Savarkar recognized the sacredness of Sanskrit and its relationship to Prakrit, and ultimately Hindi, as an asset to the unification of India under the Hindu banner. After all, the Vedas originated as an oral tradition with a high emphasis on proper pronunciation and transmission. Prakrit, "one of the eldest daughters of Sanskrit," connected the sacred

97 Nooran, Savarkar and Hindutva, 48, 59. 98 V.D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan, 2003), 3. 99 Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, 3-39.

28 past to the nationalistic future.100 This language, according to Savarkar, carried the potential to unite the country and bring the various peoples of the subcontinent together culturally and linguistically—despite India's linguistic diversity recognized today.

Two years after Hindutva, Savarkar wrote Hindu Pad Padashahi, which reviewed the Maratha Empire and considered the significance of a forerunner to the model Hindu state. Whereas The Indian War of Independence championed the leaders of the 1857

Mutiny, Hindu Pad Padashahi focused on the Marathas and their defiance to the Mughal court. In his forward to the monograph, he addressed a religiously divided readership by assuaging Muslim opinions and contextualizing his work within a greater struggle for

Indian independence. He openly admitted that Muslim overlords played the antagonists in his book dedicated to the Hindu empire. However, according to Savarkar's racial definition of Hindu, religious affiliation related only to cultural practices and not biological certainties. In his mind, Indian Muslims were Hindus following Arab teachings.101 His first chapter highlighted the political shift between Muslims and Hindus following the rise of Shivaji during the latter half of the seventeenth century. His fond reminiscence of this seemingly messianic figure flowed with nationalist sentiment, questioning the possibility that Shivaji was "the chosen champion of his people, the chosen instrument of God."102 Throughout the text, words such as Race, Nation, Empire,

Revival, and Dharma littered most pages and inspired any nationalist to conceive of a

Hindu India before state independence. Just as in The Indian War of Independence, the

100 Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, 40-41. 101 V.D. Savarkar, Hindu Pad Padashahi; or, A Review of the Hindu Empire of Maharashtra (New Delhi: Bharti Sahitya Sadan, 1971), 18-20. 102 Savarkar, Hindu Pad Padashahi, 28-29. On page 29 Savarkar specifically references Krishna and Rama when describing the ethnocentric upbringing of Shivaji by his mother. The language utilized here drew parallels with a mother nation nurturing her favorite children to power and prestige.

29 subject fit within both a historical and modern context. In order to perform as a nation, the Indian community needed a common past to identify with. The rise of the Maratha

Empire stood as a bastion of Hindu masculinity against the Mughals and British and symbolized hopes for "their oppressed Hindu brethren outside of Maharashtra."103 By the end of his historical account, Savarkar argued for the long history of Indian self-rule— swarajya—and challenged his audience to revive Hindustan to its former glory.104

Furthermore, he called for a pan-Hindu society that represented the interests of the major population, hinting at both his Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha (1921) and the

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (1925).105

The prolific works of Savarkar placed him as a major philosopher of the Hindu nationalist movement. The sources reviewed for this project only broadly trace the impact of his teachings and influence. The 1940s marked a rise in nationalist literature brought on by the impending departure of British rule.106 Savarkar, Bose, and Golwalkar all produced some type of nationalist material during this decade, either in the form of speeches delivered to their respective organizations or general outlines of their personal beliefs. In any case, they each weighed in as the question of Indian independence flared.

Savarkar, working with the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, sought to bring all of

India under a Hindu government that monitored every religious and ethnic group in the

103 Savarkar, Hindu Pad Padashahi, 49. 104 Savarkar, Hindu Pad Padashahi, 194-95. 105 Prabhu Bapu, Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915-1930 (London: Routledge, 2013), 11-25. The Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha is a Hindu nationalist political organization in India that closely follows Savarkar’s teachings. Founded early in the twentieth century, their definitions of Hindu nation and identity contributed to Hindu nationalism today. 106 Sharma, Hindutva, 141.

30 subcontinent.107 Control of identity at a national level meant supporting local politicians and building coalitions across the country:

If but the Hindu electorate thus enables the Hindu Mahasabha to capture all political power in the legislatures and municipal boards, the Government will be compelled to recognize the Hindu Mahasabha as the only elected representative of the Hindu people and in that case alone the Congress or any other pseudo- nationalistic body would be totally disarmed and forced to cease to play ducks and drakes with Hindu interests and betray Hindu honor any longer. The Hindu Mahasabha alone can checkmate and foil the anti-Hindu designs of the Muslim League.108

Savarkar manipulated the definition of Indian and Hindu in order to curtail all political and religious opposition as well as create power for right-wing organizations. Naturally, the moderate Congress Party, which dominated Indian politics during the earliest post- independence years, stood as the main target for cultural conservatives such as Savarkar and Golwalkar.109 Interestingly, by referring to Congress—and all other organizations— as pseudo-nationalistic, Savarkar publically jeered at their political platforms, challenged the legitimacy of all parties in India, and condemned their half-hearted concerns about

Hindu honor and tacit approval of the Muslim League. For the Hindutva scholar, pseudo- nationalist tainted any organization representing only a section of the full Hindu identity.110 Savarkar politicized the Hindutva movement and considered any opposition to the hegemony of the Hindu Rashtra in India as misguided by “delusional” and

“dangerous” demagogues. Any concessions to other political positions functioned against the best interests of the nation and nation building. In other words, Savarkar and

107 Sharma, Hindutva, 155. 108 V.D. Savarkar, Historic Statements, S.S. Savarkar and G.M. Joshi, eds. (Bombay: G.P. Parchure, 1967), 21. 109 Roy, Beyond Belief, 19-20. 110 In this instance, pseudo-nationalist refers to any organization that made political concessions to “non-Hindu” social interests, regardless of their pluralistic justifications. In other words, India and the Hindu Rashtra, according to Savarkar, were one in the same. Therefore, the nationalism of Hindustan must reflect the name it represents: Hindu.

31

Golwalkar espoused conservative Hindu rhetoric in order to silence Indian plurality and construct a homogenized illusion of Hindustan.111 Despite representing a different perspective to Hindu nationalism, Netaji Bose also wielded the power of language in order to garner a strong, militaristic following.

Netaji Bose and the Battle Against Colonialism

A man of fearless action and steadfast beliefs, Bose represented himself in two main autobiographies and a number of speeches. Whereas his economic agenda placed him closer to the political left, his persona embodied the consummate soldier, similar to the goals of Golwalkar's RSS. Early in his first autobiography, An Indian Pilgrim, he contextualized his homeland with the "Hindu Kings of Kalinga."112 From there, he outlined his personal and family history stretching back some hundreds of years. Despite arguing for a middle-class upbringing, his lineage suggested he bore the potential for greatness. By the nineteenth-century, his family took interest in the Brahmo Samaj, a

Bengali reformist movement seen as the predecessor to a moderate number of prominent nationalist organizations later in that century. Bose documented this fact with a sense of pride, positioning him as a child of revolution and reform.113 His father, educated in western institutions and gifted as a lawyer, provided the reader with another clue into the mind of Bose. Whereas Savarkar and Golwalkar related to the Hindu premise of this thesis, Bose best illustrated the postcolonial argument. Throughout his political career,

Bose admired European fascism and Japanese imperialism for their abilities to galvanize their ethno-national communities around a strong sense of pride and modernity. He

111 McDonald, “’Physiological Patriots’?, 348-49. 112 Subhas Chandra Bose, An Indian Pilgrim: An Unfinished Autobiography and Collected Letters, 1897-1921 (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1965), 2. 113 Bose, An Indian Pilgrim, 5-9.

32 recognized the futility of negotiating independence with British imperialists and believed that only a strong display of military power could garner their freedom. When considering the historical role of Hindus under Muslim and British rule, he noted how

Hindu bureaucracy determined the strength and success of foreign governance.114 With the success of the Brahmo Samaj and Hindu reformers in the nineteenth-century,

"spirituality was wedded to politics," and twentieth-century nationalists no longer needed the British civilization to modernize India.115 This perspective on history drew a distinction between Savarkar and Bose.

Hindutva nationalists answered India's problems by referring to the glorious past and Hindu symbols of power in order to curtail British influence over institutional reform. For them, Hindu revivals and reforms demonstrated the versatility and indestructibility of their timeless culture. They celebrated their nineteenth-century counterparts who withstood the efforts of Christian missionaries and brought Hinduism into the modern age without sacrificing the essence of its teachings.116 Bose nationalists, on the other hand, recognized the role the British played in modernizing India. When referring to Christian missionary "onslaughts" against the Hindus, Bose commented, "in this there was common ground between the Brahmos and the orthodox Pundits, though in other matters there was no love lost between them."117 These other matters referred to by

Bose represented the role modernity would play in an independent India. Modernity—in the form of institutions of knowledge and power—originated in the interactions between

British imperialists and Indian subjects. Bose, educated at Presidency College in Calcutta

114 Bose, An Indian Pilgrim, 12-13. 115 Bose, An Indian Pilgrim, 15. 116 Guha, The Mahatma and the Netaji, 28-31. 117 Bose, An Indian Pilgrim, 14-15. See also pages 33-34 for a description on how Swami Vivekananda influenced his life and philosophy since a young age.

33 and Cambridge University in England, knew well the processes of western civilization and their effects on the minds of impressionable Indian youth. After all, the audacity of

British-Indian equality emerged out of receiving a good English education and loyally serving the empire in a civil servant position. Indeed, by promoting a liberal education program and relying on a productive Indian bureaucracy, the British gave birth to their own destruction.118 By Bose's generation, the British in India became nothing more than a security force on the verge of becoming obsolete. International politics and world wars influenced the minds of radicals such as Bose and called into question the rationale for empire.

While traveling to Cambridge, Bose commented on the social rules between

British and Indian passengers. He noticed how since "association with them [the British] was hardly possible...Indians kept mostly to [them]selves." Furthermore, "Anglo-Indians develop[ed] a love for India," because "in England Anglo-Indians cannot pass themselves off as Englishmen. They have, moreover, no home there, no associations, no contacts."119

Bose's analysis of the journey to Cambridge provided insight into the nature of colonialism in the twentieth-century. Since the transfer of power to the Crown following the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, colonialism in India witnessed a shift in positionality from economic exploitation to socioeconomic development. As European colonialism in the nineteenth-century transformed economic systems from regional to global, human systems transitioned to accommodate the new relationships between nations. The hybridization of people, such as the Anglo-Indians, alluded to the viability of

118 See Sayed Nurullah and Jay Naik, A History of Education in India During the British Period (London: Macmillan, 1951) for a detailed breakdown of education policies in India and their ramifications. 119 Bose, An Indian Pilgrim, 85.

34 transnationalism and transmigration.120 However, Bose aptly noted that traditional cultural structures lagged behind the global economic imperative. Anglo-Indians appeared as traitors to Hindutva nationalists and second-class citizens to the British.

Therefore, colonialism shifted into neocolonialism, where discussions of Dominion status in the 1920s and independence in the 1940s would not necessarily change the position

India and Britain maintained on the global stage. By the 1930s, Bose indicated in speeches that Gandhi's passive and gradual self-rule lacked the momentum to overthrow the processes of colonialism and suggested only a European style nationalism, one orientated around a common identity—Hindu—and a hyper-masculine presence, could earn lasting independence.121 When discussing the Calcutta Congress of 1928, the Delhi

Manifesto of 1929, and the Round Table Conference in London (1930-32), Bose commented that the conference was "a misnomer because it was not a Conference of plenipotentiaries representing the belligerent parties," but an opportunity for British elected Indians to "do the bidding of the wily British politicians."122 Bose understood that in order to take power away from the British, physical displays of nationalism and international cooperation provided the best chances for real success.

120 Winder, Bloody Foreigners, 172-73. The term Anglo-Indian has at least three different meanings: English born/living in India, racially intermixed Anglo-Indian individuals, and Indians born/living in England. When pertaining to this instance of Anglo-Indian, a fourth definition may prove necessary. Here, Anglo-Indian refers to those Indians who represented or upheld English hegemony in India. In this particular instance, Bose commented on the predicament racially intermixed Anglo-Indians faced in India and England. However, he offered no sympathy towards those individuals who desired to be English, regardless of their racial background. For Bose, they were traitors to their race. 121 Guha, The Mahatma and the Netaji, 62-63. 122 Subhas Chandra Bose, Fundamental Questions of Indian Revolution (Calcutta: Netaji Research Bureau, 1970), 5-6. Each of these listed events describes attempts to work with the British in order to secure partial independence for India. Bose criticized moderate organizations for their “foolish” attempts to secure independence from the imperial government and displayed his aggressive form of nationalism as an alternative.

35

In his second autobiography, The Indian Struggle 1920-1942, Bose narrated the various attempts Indian politicians took to achieve independence.123 Within the first few lines of his introduction, he made a statement similar to the rhetoric used by Hindutva nationalists: "Firstly, the history of India has to be reckoned not in decades or in centuries, but in thousands of years. Secondly, it is only under British rule that India for the first time in her history has begun to feel that she has been conquered."124 In the first statement, he appealed to the ancient ethno-cultural civilization Savarkar defined as

Hindutva. By doing so, he disavowed the reality of a globalized modernity in which India came to exist. For his position to hold, Britain acted as the eternal Other, destined to function as the antagonist of a free India until they secured independence. Upon acquiring independence, Hindutva ideologists and practitioners intervened in free India's socialist birth—in which the perceived Other would have been neocolonialism and capitalism— and placed their Muslim population as the enemy, setting the stage for conservative political organizations such as the RSS.125 In the second statement, he utilized conquest rhetoric in order to rally supporters around a strong, military India. By phrasing Britain's presence in India as a complete conquest, Bose expected Indians to rise to arms and violently overthrow their oppressors, similar to the calls for nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth-century. After the disappointing results of negotiations between the Indian and British governments in the 1920s, Bose appealed to alternative means to

123 The organization connected to this book utilized Bose's second autobiography composed in Europe and his other works and speeches in order to compile a text on his life during these years. Although not entirely autobiographical, the value of the material suggested its position alongside primary sources. 124 Subhas Chandra Bose, The Indian Struggle 1920-1942 (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1964), 3. 125 Partha Banerjee, In the Belly of the Beast: The Hindu Supremacist RSS and BJP of India, An Insider’s Story (Delhi: AP, 1998), 101-08.

36 independence, such as working with the German Nazis and Japanese imperialists during the 1930s and 1940s.126

Towards the end of his text, he addressed whether he supported fascism or communism. He began by quoting the most prominent Indian politician, Gandhi, who argued that fascism and communism were contradictory. True to his idealist perspective,

Gandhi selected communism as a way to counter the effects of capitalism. However, the practical Bose found Gandhi "fundamentally wrong."127 Instead he hypothesized a

Hegelian approach to the binary and proposed "the basis of the new synthesis...called by the writer [Bose] 'Samyavada'--an Indian word, which means literally 'the doctrine of synthesis or equality.' It will be India's task to work out this synthesis."128 The creation of a new term, Samyavada, internalized the processes of modernity while silencing the western agents who commoditized the discourse, similar to Savarkar’s rhetoric explored earlier. The conceptualization of Samyavada originated out of the same intellectual space as Savarkar’s Hindutva philosophy and Golwalkar’s doctrines for the RSS and attempted to transform globalized nationalism and modernity into a nativist uprising for independence. Additionally, by attributing the task of intellectual innovation to Indians,

Bose initiated a move to create real Indian agency and displayed nationalist bravado in implying that Indians could solve the greatest discursive quandary in the western world.

His Samyavada challenged Gandhi's response to the issue of socioeconomic ideology for a few reasons. First, like other supporters of a non-aligned philosophy, Bose

126 Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 441-462. 127 Bose, The Indian Struggle 1920-1942, 313. 128 Bose, The Indian Struggle 1920-1942, 314. Further down the page, he listed a number of reasons as to why India would not adopt communism as its political and economic social system. Among other reasons, communism's anti-nationalist rhetoric proved irreconcilable with India's strong nationalist current and threatened to disrupt caste and local economic structures within society.

37 recognized both sides of the philosophical coin resulted in neocolonialism. Western nations manipulated global economies and foreign aid in order to force nonwestern polities to remain peripheral.129 Soviet Russia suspended calls for nationalism within its sphere of influence and suppressed satellite republics for decades. Had Bose lived long enough to participate within the non-aligned movement, he would have been one of its most ardent supporters. Additionally, nonwestern nations applied this political standpoint by creating hybrid economies, which nationalized natural resources, sponsored socialized welfare, and encouraged capitalist ventures through military expansion and modernized infrastructure.130 Second, Bose understood the origins of both economic policies and recognized every country's need to form its own economic viewpoints through cultural preferences and social structures. It served India and the rest of the nonwestern world to look at both strategies on a gradient scale rather than a binary.131 Lastly, Bose took the opportunity to advance nationalist language and reinvent a word, Samyavada, in order to label an ideal Indian economy. By taking an older Indian concept and applying it to a modern situation, historical continuity remained intact, and every participant within the economy attached cultural meaning and significance to daily activities.132 Savarkar and

Golwalkar supported his rationale on this matter, since it orientated the discussion around

Hindu India and presented ideas on how to build a strong, nationalist state.

129 Gitika Commuri, Indian Identity Narratives and the Politics of Security (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, 2010), 45-57. 130 Anshuman A. Mondal, Nationalism and Post-colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 237-40. 131 Rami Ginat, “Indian and the Palestinian Question: The Emergence of the Asio-Arab Bloc and India’s Quest for Hegemony in the Post-colonial World,” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 6 (Nov. 2004): 212-14. 132 Barthes’s Mythologies would apply here again.

38

M.S. Golwalkar and the Hindu Extreme

Historian Pralay Kanungo describes RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar’s indoctrination tactics in the 1920s as focusing on the physical strength of the population and the intellectual development of Hindu youth.133 Hedgewar wanted boys to grow up believing that, above all, Muslims are traitors, Christians control the world, and young males must revive the glorious history of Hindu India. Of course, since the origins of the

RSS started in Maharashtrian Brahmin society, Hedgewar intended to appease the Dalit

(untouchable) caste with a message of unity while defending some of the racial aspects of

Hindu society. As in most cases of cultural resistance, the greater enemy of Muslims,

Christians, and Marxists called for cooperation with the lower castes so that Hindu numbers overwhelmed any political opposition.134 Savarkar's lack of religious conviction compromised his role in later Hindu rightist organizations. Due to his atheist leanings, his ability to potentially head the RSS after Hedgewar faced serious doubt.135 In fact,

Hedgewar looked for a more conservative and charismatic successor who could guide the

Hindu right into the latter half of the twentieth-century.

Madhav Golwalkar’s selection proved successful in this matter, since his expansionist policies and determination to survive government bans set the stage for future victories. During his over thirty year reign as supreme commander, he crafted the image of the RSS and its affiliate organizations as strong Hindu communities coming together as a nation against the perpetual Muslim threat and western imperialism.136

133 K.B. Hedgewar (1889-1940) was the founder and first Sarsanghchalak of the RSS and promoted Hindu nationalism in the 1920s. His organization expanded following the recruitment of his successor M.S. Golwalkar. 134 Kanungo, “In Defence of Our Dreams,” 5:00-8:00 minute mark. 135 Kanungo, “In Defence of Our Dreams,” 8:00-9:05 minute mark. 136 Andersen and Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron, 41-5.

39

Whereas he celebrated India's rich linguistic background as a source of unity, he questioned the stability of religious plurality. He rejected non-Hindus in his definition of what he envisioned as true India and described Muslims as the embodiment of “anti-

Indianness.”137 In fact, he criticized their presence in the country by postulating that “they are born in this land, no doubt. But are they true to its salt?”138 This statement identified the enemy of Hindu nationalism and contested the claim made by Muslims and Christians as being Indian. This distinction contained deep roots within Indian tradition, because it identified Hindu-Muslim animosity that governed India since the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth-century and utilized western discourse to justify this hostility.139

Hostile language and Hindu glorifications permeated the major works of

Golwalkar. One of his earlier works, We, or Our Nationhood Defined, focused on his conception of the Hindu nation.140 Within the first several pages of this small treatise,

Golwalkar distinguished between nation and state. For him, the Hindu people must ask themselves, “do we strive to make our ‘nation’ independent and glorious, or merely to create a ‘state’ with certain political and economic powers centralized in other hands than those of our present rulers?”141 Within this statement, he appealed to Hindu communities by referencing their pride in a common ethno-cultural identity and their fears of a powerful state government misrepresenting their best interests. Throughout the text, his

137 Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambuddha Sen, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right (New Delhi: Orient Longman Limited, 1993), 25-6. 138 M.S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts (India: Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana, 1966), 127. 139 Wolpert, A New History of India, 113. 140 Although recognized as one of Golwalkar’s most powerful texts and the foundation of RSS doctrine, V.D. Savarkar’s brother Ganesh Savarkar was likely the original author. Golwalkar was tasked with translating Ganesh Savarkar’s text Rashtra Mimansa and in the process produced We, or Our Nationhood Defined. Interestingly, in 2006 the RSS abandoned this text as a central pillar of its organization. See Akshaya Mukul, “RSS Officially Disowns Golwalkar’s Book,” The Times of India (New Delhi), March 9, 2006, accessed May 26, 2016, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/RSS-officially- disowns-Golwalkars-book/articleshow/1443606.cms. 141 M.S. Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur, India: Bharat Prakashan, 1947), 6- 7.

40 sharp attacks on the world underscored his beliefs in a powerful Hindu nation-state and complete separation of the races. When pertaining to the definition of a nation, he cited five criteria to qualify: country, race, religion, culture, and language.142 Both Savarkar and Golwalkar agreed that geography, ethno-nationalism, and language determined cultural hegemony for any group of people. Particularly the relationship between a national language and religious symbolism demonstrated the conservative force of Hindu nationalists. Golwalkar declared boldly language as “an expression of the Race spirit, a manifestation of the National web of life.”143 When combined with his staunch views on religion, Golwalkar condemned both the socialist appeal to nonwestern nationalisms and the secularism associated with Congress plurality. If language and religion emanated culture, no true Hindu could support any other form of government. With seemingly fascist rhetoric, Golwalkar insulated India with religious nationalism and recommended a government strong enough to secure Hindu domination of the subcontinent and the complete marginalization of the Muslim population.144

In one of his longest works, Bunch of Thoughts, Golwalkar outlined his entire philosophy and highlighted his expectations for RSS members. This monograph detailed hundreds of pages broken into four major parts: the mission of the RSS, the status of the nation, the glorification of God and war, and the reinvigoration of the Hindu man.145 In the first section, he charged Hindu men with the responsibility of representing Hindu nationalism throughout the world. He generally condemned communism and democracy

142 Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined, 47. 143 Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined, 32. 144 M.S. Golwalkar, Nation at War (Bangalore, India: Rashtrotthana Sahitya, 1966), 21-22. See also Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined for his sympathy towards the Nazis and their genocidal policies. 145 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, Table of Contents.

41 as self-indulging western philosophies focused on the individual. In contrast, the Hindu nation appeared united around ethno-religious principles that guided and permeated entire lives.146 In the second section, he reinforced his definition of the nation and continued to espouse his belief that only Hindus could claim legitimacy to India. Christians, Muslims, and communists simply lacked the right to agency in the “Motherland.”147 For the most part, other Indians faced suspicion throughout the spectrum of Indian nationalism, leading to the India-Pakistan Partition post-independence, the expulsion of Anglo-Indians and Christians from hostile regions, and the ongoing war with communists throughout the eastern part of the country. In the third and fourth sections of the text, Golwalkar considered what the national and local Sangh must do in order to promote a strong nationalist nation. At the national level, he encouraged the Indian government to maintain hostile relations with Muslim neighbors outside India’s borders and invest in atomic weaponry. At the local level, he instructed men on how to maintain mental, spiritual, and physical prowess and avoid the temptations of western indulgences such as individualism and secularism.148 Golwalkar, representing the extreme right within Hindu nationalism, left a deep impression on RSS members and influenced conservative politics in India for decades after independence.

Language, the Body, and Fascism in Hindu Nationalism

Govind Sahai’s 1956 critique of the RSS condemned the organization as “an antithesis of Hindu culture” that failed to appreciate India’s “unity in diversity.”149 The authors of the book, RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi,

146 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, 16. 147 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, 166-67, 171, 180-81, 188-89. 148 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, 314, 320, 336-37. 149 Govind Sahai, A Critical Analysis of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Delhi: Naya Hindustan Press, 1956), 52-3.

42 demonstrated through primary analysis of RSS school textbooks how Muslims in India were labeled as foreign enemies of Hindu sovereignty that conspired to encroach their

Islamic empire into Hindu space.150 Whereas some of India’s greatest legacies celebrated

Hindu-Muslim cooperation, the politicizing of cultural history in favor of a constructed ideology bestowed a tremendous source of power over the next generations of Hindu nationalists. Arvind Sharma investigated the linguistic constructions of the words Hindu,

Hinduism, and Hindustan, and contextualized it within the Hindutva movement.151 By fashioning language around the geographical boundary, the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha further instilled the belief that India belonged to the gods, princes, and ancestors. The

Hindu language idealized Sanskrit and Hindi as containing the worldview of the Indians and wielding a superior spiritual essence to it.152 In a Savarkar viewpoint, since these languages belonged to the Indo-European family, Hindu nationalists could see themselves on par with their imperial masters and above the Muslim outsiders. Sharma responded to Savarkar’s distinctions between Hindu and Muslim with the statement, “In the pre-1900 period, lateral accommodation of non-Hindu elements in general and

Muslims in particular was possible at the social and political levels.”153 In other words, similar to scholar Christophe Jaffrelot, the invention of Hindu-Muslim distinction appeared as a rather new phenomenon, instigated by the British to divide and control

India. This quote also accounted for the racist laws that developed in the nineteenth- century and set India’s unified society into a partitioned mess. This anthropological

150 Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula Mukherjee, and Sucheta Mahajan, RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008), 18-23. 151 Sharma, “On Hindu, Hindustan, Hinduism and Hindutva,” 17. 152 Sharma, “On Hindu, Hindustan, Hinduism and Hindutva,” 2. 153 Sharma, “On Hindu, Hindustan, Hinduism and Hindutva,” 11.

43 linguistic strategy endeavored to grasp the mindset of nationalists and how they construct separatist worldviews.

The discourse for radical/militant nationalists highlighted the physicality and spirituality of the person.154 In Savarkar’s experiences in London during a 1906 study abroad, he acquired the abilities to manipulate history.155 For example, “He claimed that

‘Hindu’ even made its way into the vocabulary of the ancient Jews, for whom it meant strength and vigor.”156 The militant physicality of the youth in the Hindu Mahasabha, as described by scholar Bhuwan Kumar Jha, represented the re-masculinization of the Hindu population.157 Jha’s appropriation of Foucault’s discourse opened the door for another powerful theoretical tool, that of community analysis. As Jha illustrates, some of the problems presented at the first Punjab Hindu Conference in 1909 were: “Too much devotion to sedentary pursuits and a false idea as to the indignity of physical labor; early marriages; general abstinence from nutritious food due to habits of excessive thrift; in some instances inter-marriages within very limited circles.”158 Each of these concerns addressed a rising obsession of controlling youths to participate in the nationalist movement and see their bodies as propaganda for the cause. Hedgewar and Golwalkar both recognized the importance of developing both the minds and bodies of future nationalists. By focusing on reinvigorating Hindu men physically, they strengthened community bonds, created a political militia ready to fight for their viewpoints, and

154 Peter Heehs, “Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian Historiography,” History and Theory 42, no. 2 (May 2003): 180. 155 Lise McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 77. 156 McKean, Divine Enterprise, 81. 157 Bhuwan Kumar Jha, “Militarizing the Community: Hindu Mahasabha’s Initiative (1915- 1940),” Studies in History 29, no.1 (2013): 126. 158 Jha, “Militarizing the Community,” 128.

44 fashioned idealized male bodies as a form of advertisement for their movement.159 In his initial move to garner new recruits and attention to his organization, Hedgewar sent some of his best examples of Hindu nationalist youths throughout the country in order to generate excitement for the RSS. Similar to the propagandistic potential of Nazi youth in

Hitler’s Germany, these young men visited colleges and temples and won many admirers and supporters for the RSS.

In the case of Hindu nationalism, Jaffrelot’s, Hindu Nationalism: A Reader, spends a good portion of the monograph presenting primary accounts from leading nationalists and their lofty dreams for the country. When describing V.D. Savarkar,

Jaffrelot reminds historians of a few points. One “like most ethno-religious nationalists,

Savarkar was not himself a believer.”160 According to Kanungo, Savarkar defined Hindu as “one who considers this land from the Indus to the sea as his fatherland and holy land.”161 The two words italicized originated not from the Indian community, which saw the land as a mother, but from Nazi-influenced Germany where cultural nationalism and fascism dominated. Golwalkar participated actively in this type of language as well, going as far as justifying Nazi atrocities in the name of protecting the nation.162 Although

Savarkar acknowledged India as a holy land, the religious reference pertained only to nationalist discourse and a rallying point for the community. For Savarkar and Bose, religious symbolism carried tremendous power in any Indian community, regardless of personal religious convictions. Although they belonged to the Hindu fold, their admiration for Hindu reformers and cultural history proved stronger than their religious

159 Chitkara, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 55-7. 160 Christophe Jaffrelot, Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 86. 161 Kanungo, “In Defence of Our Dreams,” 10:45-11:00 minute mark. 162 Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined, 43.

45 practices.163 Golwalkar, the staunch Hindu guru, differed with them on this matter and based his nation almost solely on faith and language.

RSS Post-independence

With Indian independence in 1947, the RSS devoted all its efforts to marginalizing Indian Muslim and Christian populations and developing its network of political and social organizations throughout the country. Golwalkar, the supreme commander of the RSS from 1940-1973 faced challenges almost immediately. For one, the assassination of Gandhi the following year connected back to the RSS, leading to a temporary fall from grace. However, with the acquittal of their organization and the completion of the RSS constitution, Golwalkar and the Hindu right returned by 1949 ready to enter the political scene.164 Recognizing their advantage as war hawks on the

Indian political stage, the RSS and their affiliates targeted the remaining Portuguese imperialists and positioned their men to end foreigner rule in Goa. Subsequent wars against the Chinese, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis all benefited the Hindu nationalist cry because defending the geographical boundary justified their ideology. In a sense, their response to modernity demanded of them to target non-Hindu citizens and stay relevant within national discussions. Since Indian tradition promoted inclusivity and decentralization, Hindu nationalism emerged as a contrast to moderate Indian ideology, best illustrated by the relationship between conservative and liberal parties in India today.165

Just as Golwalkar and the RSS leadership looked throughout India to expand their power, they also looked at their own organization for growth and development. Within

163 Sharma, Hindutva, 171-72. 164 Kanungo, “In Defence of Our Dreams,” 13:30-15:30 minute mark. 165 Annavarapu, “Religious Nationalism in a Global Age,” 134-36.

46 the RSS, each chapter acted like a hierarchical family. Cadres followed the proper chain of command and obeyed their superiors unquestioningly.166 At the top of the RSS,

Golwalkar wielded a tremendous amount of authority and influenced social, economic, and political developments throughout the country. He manifested his power through the creation of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in 1964, an umbrella organization of all RSS affiliate groups throughout the nation.167 This political move allowed him to oversee the national development of Hindu right-wing conservatism in India. During this period, the

RSS played a supporting role due to the dominance of the Indian National Congress Party in the political scene. However, with the crisis in the mid-1970s, Hindu right-wing conservatism finally received its opportunity to assert its power.168 Under the new leadership of Madhukar Deoras, following the death of Golwalkar, the RSS saw the first conservative prime minister appointed in India. With an ally in power, the RSS shifted focus from developing its own structure to promoting its image to the world.169 The image of strong Hindu nationalism permeated through both external affairs and broadcasting and, along with adult education funds reallocated to the RSS, prepared the conservative current of Indian politics for the current generation of Indian citizens.170

Conclusion

The objectives of this thesis reviewed the rhetoric of Hindu nationalism in order to examine the influences played on the development of this conservative ideology. The globalization of western modernity played a significant role in the formation of modern

Indian politics. The language used by Hindu nationalists such as Savarkar, Bose, and

166 Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, 403-09. 167 Kanungo, “In Defence of Our Dreams,” 15:00-16:00 minute mark. 168 Wolpert, A New History of India, 424-25. 169 Kanungo, “In Defence of Our Dreams,” 16:00-17:30 minute mark. 170 Kanungo, “In Defence of Our Dreams,” 18:00-19:00 minute mark.

47

Golwalkar illustrates how ideas can transform knowledge and power structures within a society such as India. Despite differences among these three individuals, the processes of language creation and implementation remained in motion. The detailed minutia of modernity and identity make this particular field of study immensely challenging, largely due to scholarly perspective and a myriad of subjects worthy of review. Terms such as globalization, neocolonialism, and modernity represent daunting challenges for present- day and future historians of theory. However, when utilized correctly, historians uncover the complexities of human nature and identity and produce insightful works for both scholars and the public. In a pluralistic society such as India—with its currents of modernity and postmodernity competing for dominance and millennia old systems of knowledge, power, and tradition interacting with external forces from beyond the border—multiple perspectives on history give a voice to a country of over one billion people. Ultimately, the themes of Indian history remain enigmatic in the land too vast and diverse to homogenize. One strong ideology could take the nation by storm one day and blend into the tapestry by the next.

48

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