The book is lyrical, masterfully crafted and boasts passages of romantic literary flourish. But through it all, Vinayak manages to logically situate the term ‘Hindu’. Where did it come from? What did it mean? To whom? And when?
To arouse the interest of the English-educated Indian, he begins the book with a reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the famous phrase ‘What’s in a name?’ The reference to the name (‘Hindu’ in this case) was to illustrate that unlike the Shakespearean logic, here, the name mattered a lot as he posited the first layer of Indian identity on it. It had different meanings for different people, no doubt, but throughout the text Vinayak deduced that the constant reiteration of this name through the history of the Indian people itself crystallized their first degree of identity. It also allowed him to lay out the first syllogism connecting the name (Hindu) with the country (Hindustan).
Janaki Bakhle mentions the strategies that Vinayak employed in the writing of the book:
. . . Four rhetorical strategies Savarkar employs: the politics of naming, the poetics of the list, the enchantment of territory, and the management and evocation of affect. Through these strategies he names into being a mythic Hindu community, identifies the magical territory it inhabits, and invokes through his enchantment of territory a militant affect of love. Savarkar uses a number of registers in Hindutva, from the theoretical and declamatory to the polemical, but the one he deploys most often is the poetic. 33
At the outset, Vinayak postulated that the essence of being a ‘Hindu’, defined by him as ‘Hindutva’ or Hindu-ness, was completely different from the popular religious connotation of ‘Hinduism’. Incidentally, it is believed that Chandranath Basu first coined the term ‘Hindutva’—a neologism with Sanskrit etymology—in his 1892 Bengali work, Hindutva—Hindur Prakrita Itihas (Hindutva—An Authentic History). 34 But it was undoubtedly Vinayak who popularized the term within a short span of time.
He postulated that ‘the ideas and ideals, the systems and societies, the thoughts and sentiments which have centred round this name [Hindutva] are so varied and rich, so powerful and so subtle, so elusive and yet so vivid’ that it has taken centuries to mould it. Hindutva was not a word for Vinayak but an entire history of the land and its people. The related term—‘Hinduism’—was ‘only a derivative, a fraction, a part of Hindutva’. Inability to understand this difference, he opined, had ‘given rise to much misunderstanding and mutual suspicion between some of those sister communities that have inherited this inestimable and common treasure of our Hindu civilization’. Hindutva was an all-embracing philosophy, to understand which he delved deeper into the word ‘Hindu’ itself and its captivating power over so many brave men for the longest period of human history. In his own words:
What is in a name? Ah! Call Ayodhya, Honolulu, or nickname her immortal Prince, a Pooh Bah, or ask the Americans to change Washington into a Chengiz Khan or persuade a Mohammedan to call himself a Jew, and you would soon find that the ‘open sesame’ was not the only word of its type. To this category of names which have been to mankind a subtle source of life and inspiration belongs the word ‘Hindutva,’ the essential nature of significance of which we have to investigate into . . . Hinduism is only a derivative, a fraction, a part of Hindutva. Unless it is made clear what is meant by the latter, the first remains unintelligible and vague. Failure to distinguish between these two terms has given rise to much misunderstanding and mutual suspicion between some of those sister communities that have inherited this inestimable and common treasure of our Hindu civilization . . . Hindutva is not identical with what is vaguely indicated by the term Hinduism. By any ‘ism’ it is generally meant a theory or a code more or less based on spiritual or religious dogma or system. But when we attempt to investigate the essential significance of Hindutva we do not primarily—and certainly not mainly—concern ourselves with any particular theocratic or religious dogma or creed . . . Hindutva embraces all the departments of thought and activity of the whole being of our Hindu race. 35
Several issues of contemporary discourse, such as the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), racial bloodlines and foreign rule, find place in his work. He located factors that contributed to the ideological phantasm of a Hindu identity, legitimized those assertions with logical deductions (and sometimes hyperbolic) from history, and finally used this to create a common rallying point.
Vinayak appealed to a hoary Hindu past—one that was imagined and defined by a monolithic Hindu identity, linked geo-culturally to a mythical and ageless Hindu nation. This nation continued to exist beyond the vicissitudes of history and political change. He begins his historical narrative at the very ‘beginning’, which according to him is when the first Aryans ‘settled down’ in different parts on the banks of the Indus river, or Sindhu.
It must be mentioned that contentious debates are still under way on the subject of the AIT. According to this theory, nomadic tribes migrated from Central Asia around 1500 BC to the subcontinent, absorbing the advanced, dark-skinned Dravidian inhabitants and giving birth to an Indus or Vedic culture. Many scholars have refuted the theory, both through scientific and genetic studies, as well as scriptural studies of the earliest treatise of mankind, the Rig Veda, that was composed during this period.
However, Vinayak mildly settles for the AIT and seems to indicate that the Aryans came from Persia and thereabouts. He inferred that upon coming to this land they felt a deep sense of oneness and belonging to the river that sustained them. They began to call this land Sapta Sindhu or the land watered by seven rivers and presided over by the Sindhu, or Indus. The people who belonged to this land came to be known as the Sindhus, which gradually changed to ‘Hindu’ given the way Sanskrit terms were mispronounced. He quoted the Zend Avesta to corroborate this, wherein the people here were called Hapta Hindu —again a corruption of the syllable ‘S’ with ‘H’. This was what the contemporaneous ancient Persians called the people of this part of the world.
This brave race soon expanded the frontiers of their occupation—forests were felled, agriculture flourished, cities rose, kingdoms thrived. In time, several other names such as Bharata, Bharatavarsha, Bharatakhanda, Aryavarta, Brahmavarta, Dakshinapatha and so on became prevalent. So while the umbilical cord with the Sindhu (and hence ‘Hindu’) might have been forgotten, it was never cut off. The foreigners, be it the Avestic Persians, the Jews or the Greeks, continued to address the people of the land as Hindus. Even Xuan Zang (Hiuen-Tsang), the Chinese-Buddhist monk who travelled widely across India in the seventh century AD , persisted in calling the people here as ‘Shintus’ or ‘Hintus’. Thus ‘Hindustan’, for Vinayak, was a fulfilment of the wishes of the Vedic forefathers of the land who made the name their first choice.
He contested the popular narrative that the subcontinent was merely a disparate mass of warring kingdoms and nationalities and that it was the British who had welded them together to give us a sense of nationhood. Quoting from one of the eighteen Mahapuranas—a genre of ancient and medieval texts of Hinduism—the Vishnu Purana , he states: ‘We have met with no better attempt to define our position as a people than the terse little couplet in the Vishnu Purana , “The land which is to the north of the sea and to the south of the Himalaya mountains is named ‘Bharata ’, inhabited by the descendants of Bharata.”’ 36
Interestingly, the unitary nature of the nation state and its existence stretching back to pre-British and even pre-Islamic times was a common narrative for both Gandhi and Vinayak, ideological opponents though they were. In his Hind Swaraj , that he wrote in 1909 as a manifesto of his thoughts for India, Gandhi stated:
The English have taught us that we were not one nation before, and it will require centuries before we become one nation. This is without foundation. We were one nation before they came to India. One thought inspired us. Our mode of life was the same. It was because we were one nation that they were able to establish one kingdom. Subsequently they divided us . . . I do not wish to suggest that because we were
one nation we had no differences, but it is submitted that our leading men travelled throughout India . . . They learned one another’s languages . . . they saw that India was one undivided land so made by nature. They, therefore, argued that it must be one nation. Arguing thus, they established holy places in various parts of India, and fired the people with an idea of nationality in a manner unknown in other parts of the world. Any two Indians are one as no two Englishmen are. 37
In an obvious rebuttal of the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence, Vinayak stated that Buddhism did not collapse merely because of its philosophical differences with Vedic Hinduism or its internal bickering. Instead, Vinayak explained, the problem was at the political level. Buddhist expansion was disastrous to both national virility and the existence of India. It was not an eventual decline; in its very inception, at its core, Buddhism was incompatible with nationhood because of its philosophy of non-violence. This preponderance with non-violence meant that the Indian nation fell easy victim to warlike outsiders such as the Huns. Buddhism, he stated, had nothing to offer against violence and thus the Indians had to go back to the Vedic ‘fire’ to make steel to fight. 38 Non-violence, he opined, was answerless when pitted against ‘people inferior to Indians, in language, religion, philosophy, mercy, and all the soft human attributes . . . but superior to them in strength alone—in fire and sword’. 39
India’s history for Vinayak was her political history comprising violent and decisive battles, rejuvenating the Indian nation. Racing down centuries of history in a massive sweep, Vinayak asserts that despite the triumphs and turbulences of various centuries, invasions, the spread of Buddhism to other lands, the intermingling of races and communities and the creation of a cosmopolitan unit, the word ‘Hindu’ somehow stuck. Hindutva was thus a shared political history, the result of countless actions, conflicts, comingling and cooperation. It was not about religious, spiritual or theocratic codes of law. Despite the criticism that is often mounted against him for perpetuating myths of ‘racial purity’ (and thereby superiority) for the Hindus, just as it was in the case of European nationalism, a closer reading of his work illustrates a more pragmatic view of race as being relatively and subjectively constructed:
After all there is throughout the world, so far as man is concerned, but a single race—the human race kept alive by one common blood, the human blood. All other talk is at best provisional, a makeshift and only relatively true . . . To try to prevent the commingling of blood is to build on sand. Sexual attraction has proved more powerful than all the command of all the prophets put together. Even as it is, not even the aborigines of the Andamans are without some sprinkling of the so-called Aryan blood in their veins and vice versa. 40
In a section, ‘Hindutva at Work’, he proclaims that both friends and foes contributed equally to enable these words ‘Hindu’ and/or ‘Hindustan’ to supersede all other definitions and designations of this land and its people. ‘The enemies,’ he claimed, ‘hated us as Hindus and the whole family of peoples and races, of sects and creeds that flourished from Attock to Cuttack was suddenly individualized into a single being.’ 41 It was this Hindutva that ran like a vital spinal cord through the ‘body-politic’ and made ‘the Nayars of Malabar weep over the sufferings of the Brahmins of Kashmir’. He further states: ‘Our bards bewailed the fall of Hindus, our seers roused the feelings of Hindus, our heroes fought the battles of Hindus, our saints blessed the efforts of Hindus, our statesmen moulded the fate of Hindus, our mothers wept over the wounds and glorified over the triumphs of Hindus.’ 42
To substantiate this unitary nature of identity he quotes the works of several poets and teachers across centuries. From Chand Bardai—who wrote Prithviraj Raso about the valorous twelfth-century king Prithviraj Chauhan in Rajasthan; to Bhushana—the poet who eulogized Chhatrasal, the seventeenth-century Bundela king; to Shivaji Maharaj’s initiation by his mentor Dadaji Kondke; and to the Sikh gurus, Tegh Bahadur and Guru Gobind Singh. Their common terms of usage were ‘Hindu’, ‘Hindawan’ or ‘Hind’ and fighting for its cause. Divided though they were by time and space, their cause and commitment were, according to Vinayak, a fight for the ‘Hindu’ cause—evidently not a religious one, but a national identity. This spirit remained with the Marathas, who had unified the country regarding a pan-national outlook in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before falling to the might of the East India Company.
With this historical sweep, Vinayak propounded:
The geographical sense being the primary one has, now contracting, now expanding, but always persistently been associated with the words Hindu and Hindusthan till after the lapse of nearly 5000 years if not more. Hindusthan has come to mean the whole continental country from the Sindhu to Sindhu—from the Indus to the Seas. The most important factor that contributes to the cohesion, strength and the sense of unity of a people is that they should possess an internally well-connected and externally well-demarcated ‘local habitation,’ and a ‘name’ that could, by its very mention, rouse the cherished image of their motherland as well as the loved memories of their past. We are happily blessed with both these important requisites for a strong and united nation. Our land is so vast and yet so well-knit, so well demarcated from others and yet so strongly entrenched that no country in the world is more closely marked out by the fingers of nature as a geographical unit beyond cavil or criticism, as also is the name Hindusthan or Hindu that it has come to bear. The first image that it rouses in the mind is unmistakably of our motherland and by an express appeal to its geographical and physical features it vivifies it into a living being . . . In America as well as in France, the word ‘Hindu’ is generally understood thus exactly in the sense of an Indian without any religious or cultural implication. And had the word Hindu been left to convey this primary significance only, which it had in common with all the words derived from Sindhu then it would really have meant an Indian, a citizen of Hindusthan as the word Hindi does. 43
The first essential prerequisite of Hindutva was a geographical one, and the way in which its people identified themselves, as did the rest of the world. This was the ‘land of Hindus’ or Hindustan. Here a ‘Hindu’ did not mean someone who merely followed the religion; he was primarily a citizen—either in himself or through his forefathers who had revered this land as his motherland. According to Vinayak, the factors that bonded this group despite their geographical separation in this vast tract of land were those of common blood, common culture, common epics, common laws and rites, the Sanskrit language, common feasts and festivals, and the shared works of art and literature. Thus, a nationalism led by cultural integration was another essential component of this ‘Hindu-ness’ that had run unbroken over millennia.
Vinayak postulated that the Hindus are not merely citizens of the Indian state because of the love they share for their motherland; it is because of the bonds of common blood. They are not only a rashtra, or nation, but also a jati (race). He finds absolutely nothing amiss therefore among intermarriages between people of various castes—a stand much ahead of its times. He finds sanction for such inter-caste marriages even in the holy epics and scriptures of the land. From the characters of Karna, Babhruvahana, Ghatotkacha, Vidura and others to historical figures such as Chandragupta Maurya who married a Brahmin to beget Bindusara, Ashoka who married a Vaishya and Harshavardhana who gave his daughter to a Kshatriya despite being a Vaishya are examples he uses to illustrate the fluidity with which the caste system operated.
Quoting the scriptures, Vinayak makes a case that an individual could lose his or her caste and be relegated to another by sheer virtue of actions and not necessarily birth alone. A Shudra could thus become a Brahmin and vice versa by the kind of actions they performed rather than the families they were born into. He quotes a Sanskrit verse that emphasizes this fluidity: ‘The family is not really called family; it is the practices and customs that are called family. One that does his duties is praised on earth and in heaven.’ He speaks about several warrior-c
aste Kshatriyas who lost their respect by taking to agriculture or other professions not mandated for them, and similarly several tribes, considered as outcastes, elevating themselves to the position of a Kshatriya or a Brahmin by virtue of their deeds. The authors of both the great epics—the Ramayana and the Mahabharata—were Valmiki and Vyasa respectively who were born in communities termed low caste, but they were venerated to the status of sages and immortalized as authors by the power of their actions.
Such fluidity, Vinayak suggests, existed even in non-Vedic communities. Hence, it was perfectly normal to witness a family that had a Buddhist father, a Vedic mother and a Jain son. Intermarriage permitted between Jains and Vaishnavs in Gujarat, Sikhs and Sanatanis in Punjab and Sindh offer similar illustrations. Thus, for Vinayak, the word ‘Hindu’, in fact, encapsulates a racial unity of all Indians. Replete with rhyme and alliteration, he propounds, as an ace poet, the following theory:
Some of us were Aryans and some Anaryans; but Ayars and Nayars—we were all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us are Brahmans and some Namashudras or Panchamas; but Brahmans or Chandalas—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us are Daxinatyas and some Gauds; but Gauds or Saraswatas—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us were Rakshasas and some Yakshas; but Rakshasas or Yakshas—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us were Vanaras and some Kinnaras; but Vanaras or Naras—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us are Jains and some Jangamas; but Jains or Jangamas—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. Some of us are monists, some, pantheists; some theists and some atheists. But monotheists or atheists—we are all Hindus and own a common blood. We are not only a nation, but a Jati , a born brotherhood. Nothing else counts, it is after all a question of heart. We feel that the same ancient blood that coursed through the veins of Ram and Krishna, Buddha and Mahavir, Nanak and Chaitanya, Basava and Madhava, of Rohidas and Tiruvelluvar courses throughout Hindudom from vein to vein, pulsates from heart to heart. We feel we are a JATI, a race bound together by the dearest ties of blood and therefore it must be so. 44
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