The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts
By Arun Shourie
India Viking, 560 pages, Rs 999.00

When Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was tried, along with Nathuram Godse, N.D. Apte and others, for Gandhiji’s assassination, he filed a detailed written statement, claiming innocence. Arun Shourie’s new book on the Hindutva ideologue has an epilogue-like, presenting a forensic analysis of a key passage from that statement.

Savarkar says he has been accused of “so wicked a crime as to abet the murder of Gandhiji and of an incitement against the life of Pandit Nehru too”. In his defence, he says mentions “the personal feelings I cherished regarding Gandhiji and Panditji too”. He refers to his meetings with Gandhiji in London in 1908, and also to a visit Gandhiji paid to him much later and “spent hours in happy talks about our old comradeship and current politics”. Though there were “fundamental differences in our ideologies on some points”, he fondly recalls how the two “lives together as friends and worked together as compatriots”.

Shourie methodically subjects every claim and every assumption to precise and clinical investigation over 58 pages, presenting documentary evidence and facts in each case (only one, not relevant correction, though: Gandhiji was in South Africa not from 1896, as stated on page 469, but from 1893). Like a lawyer armed with notes, the author presents evidence after evidence, interspersed with his trademark witty asides. The conclusion: From the passage, “Not a syllable survives scrutiny.”

In ‘The New Icon’, Shourie delves deep into Savarkar’s own writings to take the reader into the mind of the foundational thinker of the Hindu right.

Here is a sample of questions Shourie seeks to answer by quoting Savarkar’s own books, essays, speeches:

What did Savarkar think of Hinduism, about our beliefs and ‘holy cows’, about the texts Hindus hold to be sacred? Have our people been suffused with Hindutva as Savarkar maintained? What sort of a State did he envisage? Is he being resurrected today to erase the one great inconvenience—Gandhiji?

Also:

Did Savarkar battle a stormy sea when he attempted his legendary escape at Marseilles? Did he turn against Muslims because of the cruelty of jailers in the Andamans? What is one to make of his ‘mercy petitions’ to the British? Did he pledge to be ‘politically useful’ to the British and accept conditions for his release that even the British had not demanded? During the Quit India movement, did Savarkar promise ‘whole-hearted cooperation’ to the British? What did he seek from the British? Was Savarkar the one who showed Subhas Bose the path that Netaji then followed?

His advice in conclusion: “Read Savarkar, not his hagiographers, and remember that when you read Savarkar.”  

Shourie has a long list of books to his credit, going back to 1978. His critiques of the Left, leftist historians, Ambedkar and others in the 1990s sparked debates – once memorably in Parliament too. His detractors could only accuse cherry-picking his source material, but of fudging facts or misquoting he was never accused. Of late, there was a phase of apolitical books (‘Does He Know A Mothers Heart: How Suffering Refutes Religion’, ‘Two Saints: Speculations Around and About Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Ramana Maharishi’, ‘Preparing For Death’) or about non-ideological governance matters (‘Anita Gets Bail: What Are Our Courts Doing? What Should We Do About Them?’ and ‘The Commissioner Of Lost Causes’). With ‘The New Icon’, he returns to his old ground.  

[Image: Via Wikimedia Creative Commons, Courtesy https://madrascourier.com/opinion/the-origins-of-hindu-nationalism/attachment/hindu-nationalism-madras-courier-02/]