Vinayak Damodar Savarkar

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (born May 28, 1883, Bhagur, India—died February 26, 1966, Bombay [now Mumbai]) was a Hindu and Indian nationalist and leading figure in the Hindu Mahasabha (“Great Society of Hindus”), a Hindu nationalist organization and political party. His definition of Hindutva launched the modern Hindu nationalist movement.

While a student of law in London (1906–10), Savarkar helped to instruct a group of Indian revolutionaries in methods of sabotage and assassination that associates of his had apparently learned from expatriate Russian revolutionaries in Paris. During this period he wrote The Indian War of Independence, 1857 (1909), in which he took the view that the Indian Mutiny of 1857 was the first expression of Indian mass rebellion against British colonial rule.

In March 1910 Savarkar was arrested on various charges relating to subversion and incitement to war and was sent to India for trial and was convicted. In a second trial he was convicted of complicity in the assassination of a British district magistrate in India, and, after sentencing, he was transported to the Andaman Islands for detention “for life.” He was brought back to India in 1921 and released in 1924.

While imprisoned, he wrote Essentials of Hindutva (1923), coining the term Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”), which sought to define Indian culture as a manifestation of Hindu values rooted in the Indian subcontinent. The epigraph of his book defines the concept: “A HINDU means a person who regards this land of BHARATVARSHA, from the Indus to the Seas as his Father-Land as well as his Holy-Land that is the cradle land of his religion.” (Bharata is the Sanskrit name—Bharat in Hindi—for the Indian subcontinent, and varsha means “country” in Sanskrit.) This concept grew to become a main tenet of Hindu nationalist ideology and the groups that were developed to promulgate that ideology, such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary organization that was founded in 1925 based on Savarkar’s ideas.

Savarkar resided in Ratnagiri, India, until 1937, when he joined the Hindu Mahasabha, which militantly defended the Hindus’ claims of religious and cultural supremacy over Indian Muslims. He served as president of the Mahasabha for seven years. In 1943 he retired to Bombay (now Mumbai). When Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist who was a member of the Mahasabha, Savarkar was implicated but was acquitted in his subsequent trial because of insufficient evidence.