Arun Shourie’s new book is as much about Savarkar’s contradictions as his own – Firstpost
Arun Shourie is today seen by many as a Hindutva ideologue gone rogue. Shourie, to his credit, always wore the badge of anti-establishment with a sense of pride, but post-2014, he has taken this to an altogether different level. In the process, he is often seen to be dismantling the very edifice, intellectual as well as ideological, that he had built so arduously over the decades since the 1980s. As his new book on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar hits the bookstores, the limelight is as much on Savarkar as on Shourie.
Reading The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts, it’s obvious that the author isn’t quite charitable towards the Hindutva icon. First, Shourie brings out the contradictions between the fundamental Hindutva belief system and Savarkar’s worldview. So, Savarkar would want “gau palan” and not “gau pujan”, going to the extent of saying that “venerating the cow has become the cause of ‘rashtra ki buddhi-hatya kaa paap’ (the sin of killing the intelligence of the rashtra)”. He believed that eating beef or pork was “a matter not of religion but of your stomach”. He said, “The cow and bullock of our country, being useful to us, should ordinarily not be eaten, but there is no harm in eating their meat like the meat of any other animal in England or America.”
Howsoever inconvenient these statements may sound to those on the right side of the ideological divide, the fact is they indeed were Savarkar’s utterances. So was the following statement, which Shourie writes in his own provocatively engaging style:
“And look at the harm such beliefs inflict, Savarkar reminded readers. Confronted with a Hindu army, the Mussalmaan invaders would put a ring of cows in front. The Hindu soldiers and army would refuse to fight lest a cow be killed, he said. No one taught them that to stop the ingress of enemies of the nation and dharma was a great punya. They let the rashtra die so that the cow-mother may live… And once the Mussalmaan had conquered all, the cows too were butchered… If you resist, we will break the Surya temple in Multan, the Mussalmaans warned… and the Hindu forces withdrew… If you take a step towards taking Kashi back, we will reduce the temple there to rubble, the Mussalmaans proclaimed. The nawab had but to threaten them in this way that the Hindus sat down in dharna to keep the Peshwa from attacking Kashi. The entire kingdom of devtas was sunk to save one temple… As if in the reign of Aurangzeb and Allauddin Khilji cows were not being butchered, as if temples were not being destroyed. They took gau-rakshand (cow protection) to be dharma and made gau-bhakshand (devouring cows) widespread. Intelligence goes first, and then…”
Shourie acknowledges Savarkar’s constructive role, especially in his hometown Ratnagiri, in fighting the malaise of the caste system, calling it “jaatibhed kaa raakshas, the demon of caste differentiation”. His admiration for Savarkar, however, ends there. The book, thereafter, becomes a litany of lies, hyperboles, and hypocrisies that Shourie believed Savarkar had allegedly indulged in throughout his life.
On his attempted escape from the SS Morea, for instance, Shourie elaborates on how Savarkar, through his own book, Life of Barrister Savarkar, written under the pen name of Chitragupta, distorted the incident by turning the two Englishmen and two Indian sepoys who had been deputed to keep guard over him into “ten picked and armed officers and men and hundreds of European passengers” guarding him. He also wrote how he had to swim “for his life, now diving, now riding the waves”, followed by a chase on the land “not less than a mile” long. The fact is, as Vikram Sampath, too, writes in his Savarkar biography, Echoes from a Forgotten Past, he “swam for about ten to twelve feet to get to the quay”, followed by a “run for about 200 yards”.
The author questions Savarkar on the clemency issue and also picks holes in his claims that he had advised Subhas Chandra Bose to go abroad to seek military support for India’s independence. He also believes Savarkar had a hand in Gandhi’s assassination.
Except for Shourie’s claims on Subhas Bose, his other assessments seem to be more the case of his preconceived bias rather than the reality. On the clemency issue, for instance, there is no denying that this was being used as a tool by revolutionaries of the era, including by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Schindra Nath Sanyal. There is no reason to disbelieve Savarkar when he says that “sacrifice was adorable only when it was, directly or remotely, but reasonably, felt to be indispensable for success”. Also, British records suggest that the colonial government continued to keep a close watch on Savarkar even a decade after his release from the jail.
Similarly, the attempts to link him with Gandhi’s assassination seemed far-fetched and overtly political in nature, with the then Law Minister, BR Ambedkar, conceding that there were powerful forces in the Nehru government that desperately wanted Savarkar framed.
Shourie’s obsessive bias gets even more pronounced when he wears the hat of a historian. His assessment of the Marathas, especially Shivaji, is shallow; he quotes selectively, highlighting only the negatives. It appears that the author’s political standing in the last 10 years has blurred his historical vision. His call to “save Hinduism from Hindutva”, seems straight out of the toolkit of the ‘eminent’ historians and intellectuals whom he had so gallantly fought in the past. Shourie, in that way, seems to be dismantling his own legacy as a writer and an intellectual.
Savarkar, no doubt, was a man of contradictions. He might not have always been consistent with the truth, but then who is ever consistent? And who is free from contradictions? Shourie’s hero, Mahatma Gandhi, was often the epitome of inconsistency, if not contradictions. His inspiration to become a ‘Mahatma’ largely came from non-Indic sources. It was this tendency to pick up things from ‘foreign’ sources that made Sri Aurobindo call Gandhi “a European… in an Indian body”. He would recite the Bhagavad Gita and yet dogmatically pursue the cause of ahimsa even at the sight of grave injustice. He would invoke Rama in his daily discourse, but the latter remained a mythical figure for him!
Vivekananda, another Hindutva icon, if his biographer Sankar is to be believed, “captured the hearts of men and women all over the world”, but “his own people” in Bengal “took time to accept him”. Sankar, in his book The Monk As Man: The Unknown Life of Swami Vivekananda, writes how two high court judges were asked to preside over the condolence meeting after Swami’s death. “They not only refused but treated the offer with withering scorn. One of them went so far as to say that if Bengal had a Hindu king, Swami Vivekananda would have been hanged before then,” Sankar writes. Sankar also asks why it was so difficult for the math to raise funds to erect a small temple over the site where Swami Vivekananda was cremated. “The work was not begun until January 1907 and was completed many years later, on 2 January 1924.”
Shourie, too, has often displayed contradictions. Even at a time when he was a Hindutva mascot, he idolised Gandhi. Even when he exposed the notion of Muslim separatism, especially highlighting the Congress’ Khilafat self-goal, Gandhi would retain a position of absolute veneration in Shourie’s scheme of things. He would reconcile the thoughts of Sita Ram Goel, where Gandhism would be unsparingly criticised, with those of the Mahatma.
This is the beauty of civilisational India: It often assimilates what may appear as contradictions. Where Vedic philosophy thrived alongside the Charvaka or even Buddhist worldviews. Where Adi Shankara propounded Advaita while writing in praise of the Shakti. This explains why Vivekananda, Gandhi, and even Savarkar came to be accepted as Hindutva icons, even when they weren’t on the same page on several important issues and held many contrasting, contradictory views. What mattered—and that is the heart of the issue—was that even in their criticism, all they wanted was the well-being of the Indic civilisation. Their intent was invariably focused on furthering the interest of Hinduism.
Shourie, who in the past retained his Hindutva identity despite holding several contrarian views, is now well and truly into the Left-‘liberal’ camp that he once fought so vigorously. The New Icon is immensely readable, and it will further bolster interest in Savarkar. Where Shourie—unlike Savarkar, Gandhi, Vivekananda, and others—gets it all wrong is his intent. And that’s the real tragedy of his otherwise glorious life journey.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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