CHENNAI: Historian and political analyst Vikram Sampath released the second part of his two-volume series on the controversial Indian politician, activist and freedom fighter Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. The book, Savarkar (Part 2): A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966, published by Penguin Random House India is a sequel to his 2019 bestseller Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883-1924. Vikram discusses the milestones in Savarkar’s life after his release from prison in 1920, his confinement in Ratnagiri till 1937, becoming the president of Hindu Mahasabha, MK Gandhi’s assassination, and his death in 1966.
Why a Savarkar biography now?
The last biography written on Savarkar was in 1960. Sixty years after his death, there has been no effort to reanalyse him because all characters from the past need constant revaluation. We do with other leaders all the time, but somehow Savarkar escaped that re-evaluation so that was one of the reasons to write a biography on him. Secondly, Savarkar’s name gets thrown around by those who are both, for and against him, during election rallies, election manifestos and defamation cases. So when someone wants to read up on him, there’s not much, which says a lot about the scholarship in India that probably does not want to look at Savarkar from a modern perspective.
In his book, Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, Savarkar is accused of legitimising rape as a political tool.
That book is in Marathi and maybe the meaning got lost in translation. The way Savarkar wrote, it is not an advocacy to use rape as a political tool. He was an amateur historian, he was a poet. Therefore, he writes with flourishes and his work is not seen as works of history because a historian needs a cold detachment from his subject. In this case, Savarkar was making a commentary on the past where Indian soldiers and kings followed certain ethics during warfare such as, not attacking someone who is unarmed, not fighting after sunset and not stabbing someone in the back, among others. But the Arab, Turk and Mongol invaders did not subscribe to these ethics. They saw the Indian warfare ethics as cowardice. Savarkar wrote that had we followed the same kind of treatment, which the invaders meted out, to our women, children and places of worship, then maybe we could have instilled fear in them.
The Hindu Mahasabha never did anything to end caste discrimination. How can we say that Savarkar did anything to end it?
The Hindu Mahasabha was a political organisation and the question of ending caste discrimination is done by social reform movements. He (Savarkar) did a lot to end caste discrimination in his own capacity during his captivity in Ratnagiri, but when he joined the Mahasabha, it was more concerned with how to get rid of the British Raj, and who will get the mantle of power once they leave.
What about his apology letter to the British government when he was in prison?
It is not a mercy petition; the nomenclature is different. I have attached all the petitions in my previous book. These petitions were a normal agency that was made available to all political prisoners. And the government would time and again open their doors to amnesty. Savarkar is said to be even nonchalant about his role, that he is not at all apologetic or repentant.