BENGALURU : Writing a biography is a love affair, says Vikram Sampath. And he is currently “in love” with Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. It’s easy to see why. The city-based writer-historian has come out with an almost 600-page saga of the life and times of one of the most contentious freedom fighters – at a time when Savarkar’s name often crops up during polarised conversations.
Sampath thinks it’s high time the debate got more informed. “If not now, when?,” he says about the timing of the book, Savarkar – Echoes from a Forgotten Past (Penguin). “Savarkar died in 1966. But he is regularly discussed in political discourse,” he says, pointing out the recent issue in Delhi University over installation of Savarkar’s bust. “But what do people know about him to talk so much either for or against him?,” he asks.
Sampath also thinks the timing is important since while other leaders like Subhash Chandra Bose, S P Mukherjee and Bhagat Singh are being relooked at, Savarkar has escaped reevaluation by historians. “An independent view needed to be taken about what is it about his life that we need to know that raises the hackles,” he says.
The book comes after a three-year research that took Sampath to the United Kingdom and Germany, and closer home to places like Nasik, Pune and Port Blair. “Never during my schooling do I remember having read his name in textbooks. Or about the 200 prisoners holed up in Cellular Jail,” he says. “I learnt his significance in 2003 when the Vajpayee government put up his photograph in Central Hall of Parliament, and the ugly episode when the UPA government removed it,” he recalls about his acquaintance with Savarkar as a man polarising opinion.
Sampath blames Savarkar’s projection, or lack of it, to the way Indian history has been presented. “It is important to see the trajectory of history writing,” he says, adding that from the 1970s, there has been a “one-sided Marxist-dominated historiography that has stifled every alternative viewpoint” in academics, media, and art. “We have been fed a simplistic narrative about a non-violent freedom movement. But when you look at the armed conflicts from 1857 to 1946, you wonder, what were we indoctrinated with?,” he says.
The book is the first of a two-part series that ends in 1924, tracing Savarkar’s time in London, his rise as a revolutionary, and the much-maligned clemency that he sought from the British government. “He was put in Cellular Jail for 50 years. The clemency option was available to every prisoner, and as a lawyer he wanted to use the law in every way. He told other revolutionaries too to get out and fulfill their duty, instead of rotting inside,” Sampath says, adding that even Gandhi sent a petition to the British on behalf of the Savarkar brothers to let them participate in nation-building. “It’s unfortunate that so much is made out of that, in a distorted way,” says Sampath, who hopes to finish the book’s second part by next year.
He is also looking forward to the making of his book, My Name is Gauhar Jaan!, on the first Indian voice to be recorded in 1902, into a film by Ashutosh Gowariker. “She too was a misunderstood character, like the Wodeyars and musician S Balachander,” he says, mentioning his earlier books. “None of them fits into a monochromatic box,” he adds, talking about his love for writing biographies. “Maybe that’s because I am voyeur,” he laughs. “The vagaries of human nature are so interesting.”