EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF THE RSS
The roots of the RSS are imbedded in the soil of Maharashtra. Its membership and symbols were almost exclusively Maharashtrian. Its discipline and ideological framework were shaped almost entirely by Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a medical doctor who had abandoned a potentially lucrative practice to participate in the struggle against colonialism. Hedgewar was born on 1 April 1889 at Nagpur, the capital of the ethnically diverse Central Provinces. According to his most reliable biographer, the Hedgewar family migrated from Hyderabad, a Muslim princely state in south India, and settled in Nagpur around the turn of the nineteenth century.21
Hedgewar’s father was aware of the advantage that could result from an English education, and he selected his brightest son, Keshav, to attend a modern school.22 The father’s decision not to prepare his son for the traditional role of priest may also have been influenced by Keshav’s disinterest in orthodox ritual. In fact, accounts of his youth suggest that he felt much of it was rather silly.23 The young scholar was keenly interested in history and politics, particularly the life history of Shivaji. Hedgewar’s biographer notes that young Keshav dreamed of emulating the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior-king. For example, on the occasion in 1896 of Queen Victoria’s sixtieth coronation ceremony at Nagpur, he and a group of young comrades unsuccessfully attempted to replace the Union Jack flying over the British fort with Shivaji’s standard.24
The young man, who avidly read Tilak’s Kesari (a nationalist weekly published in Pune) drifted into the nationalist circle of youth which formed around Dr Balkrishna Shivram Munje, a young doctor who had returned to Nagpur from the Boer War.25 Dr Munje, with whom Hedgewar lived during much of his adolescence, was a major influence in his life. Hedgewar enthusiastically accepted Munje’s militant nationalism and was expelled from several schools because of his participation in anti-British activities. According to one source close to both men, Munje sent Keshav to Calcutta in 1910 to study medicine at the National Medical College because he wanted Hedgewar to establish contacts with the revolutionaries in Bengal.26
During his six years in Calcutta, Hedgewar joined the Anushilan Samiti, a revolutionary society based in Bengal, and rose to its highest membership category.27 On his return to Nagpur in 1916, he decided, much to the dismay of his family, neither to marry nor to practise medicine. He resolved to remain in the revolutionary struggle. Very little is known of his revolutionary activities during the war years. The Nagpur District Gazeteer reports that he was ‘the brain behind the revolutionary movement in Nagpur’.28 The Gazeteer also reports that he developed contacts with revolutionary groups in other parts of India, and, indirectly, established contact with England’s enemies.29
With Germany’s defeat in World War I, revolutionary ardour diminished. Public apathy and the lack of commitment on the part of many fellow revolutionaries embittered Hedgewar.30 It is likely that his political mentor, Dr Munje, persuaded him to join the Indian National Congress. The Rashtriya Mandal (the Congress affiliate in the Central Provinces) was controlled by the followers of Tilak, and Hedgewar was accepted into its inner circles. In 1919, he was asked to organize the distribution of Sarikalpa, the Mandal’s newly founded newspaper. While working for the newspaper, he established important contacts that were to assist him later in spreading the work of the RSS.31
During the early 1920s, Hedgewar became even more deeply engaged in Congress party activities. At the 1920 annual Congress session in Nagpur, he organized a volunteer unit of some 1200 young men to keep order at the meeting.32 At that session, Gandhi promised freedom within the year through peaceful non-cooperation. Tilak had died the previous August and his supporters were unable to counter Gandhi’s programme.33 Many of Tilak’s supporters, including Hedgewar, decided to give the experiment in non-violent disobedience a chance to prove its efficacy. Following a special Congress session at Calcutta in September 1920, which endorsed Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, the Central Provinces Non-cooperation Council asked Hedgewar to mobilize public support for the proposed boycotts.34 On 14 August 1921 Hedgewar was sentenced to a one-year prison term for defying the ban on political meetings.35 He was released from prison on 12 July 1922 at a time when the tactics of the Congress appeared incapable either of uniting Indians or loosening the colonial grip on the country. The year 1921 ended without the promised swaraj (freedom). Gandhi called off a much-heralded non-cooperation campaign in early 1922, because a mob had killed a number of policemen in the United Provinces. Gandhi wrote to Motilal Nehru, a leading Congress politician in the United Provinces, that ‘our people were becoming aggressive, defiant and threatening . . . They were getting out of hand and were not nonviolent in demeanor’.36 Hedgewar (and others) believed Gandhi had made a serious tactical mistake. Though Hedgewar remained within the Congress and continued to take an active interest in Congress affairs until 1928,37 he became increasingly disenchanted with Gandhi and with politics.
The outbreak of communal rioting in 1923 caused Hedgewar to question the previously attempted methods used to rid India of colonial rule. The riots, in his view, were the signs of a deeper social problem—disunity among Hindus—that would have to be addressed if India were to be independent. He observed the problem at close quarters since Nagpur was one of the major centres of the rioting. Because of communal tensions, the district collector in September 1923 banned processions during the annual festival honouring the Hindu deity Ganesh, and the Hindu community complied with the order.38 On 30 October 1923 the collector banned Dindi processions (a musical procession in honour of a Hindu deity),39 but this time influential Hindu leaders decided to disobey the ban. One newspaper reported that up to 20,000 Hindus marched in defiance of the government order.40 Hindu leaders were surprised not only by the popular response, but also by the involvement of most segments of the Hindu community. A way had been found to unite the Hindus in a movement ‘that identified both the British and the Muslims as “oppressors’’.’ Out of this defiance emerged the Nagpur Hindu Sabha. Dr Munje was chosen the vice-president of the local sabha and Hedgewar became its secretary.41 The sabha organized more protest marches, and it negotiated a compromise with the government and with leaders of the Muslim community which permitted Hindus to march in religious processions at times and in places that would not interfere with Muslim religious observances.
Hindus in Nagpur were not slow to appreciate the influence they could exert if they organized. The experience established a precedent for their response to communal riots the next year. Hindus reacted by declaring a boycott against Muslim-owned businesses.42 This was a serious blow to the Muslim craftsmen in the city, whose suppliers and customers were largely Hindu. To restore communal harmony, two well-known national Congress leaders, Motilal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad, went to Nagpur where they arranged a compromise between leaders of the two communities.43 Despite this agreement, the situation remained tense.
Hindu revivalists such as Hedgewar saw that organization was a necessity, but they argued that more was needed to protect Hindu interests. They argued for the Hindu community to adopt a more martial kshatriya (warrior) world view. Dr Munje expressed dismay at the alleged cowardice of Hindus, noting that
‘Out of 1.5 lakh [150,000] population of Nagpur, Muslims are only 20 thousand. But still we feel insecure. Muslims were never afraid of 1 lakh 30 thousand Hindus. So this question should be regarded hereafter as the question of the Hindus. The Muslims themselves have taught us to behave as Hindus while in the Congress, and as Hindus outside the Congress.’44
During this period of escalating Hindu Muslim animosity in Nagpur, Hedgewar began to develop the intellectual foundations of the RSS. A major influence on his thinking was a handwritten manuscript of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Hindutva, which advanced the thesis that the Hindus were a nation.45 The central propositions of Savarkar’s manuscript are that Hindus are the indigenous people of the subcontinent and that they form a single national group. Considering the obvious linguistic, racial, social and r
eligious cleavages within the Hindu community, Savarkar felt he needed to explain what Hindus had in common that could justify calling then a single national group. British opinion, both official and scholarly, tended to view India as a geographical rather than as a national concept.
Savarkar accepted the notion that the Aryan people and culture had originated in north-western India and had gradually spread out over the subcontinent. He recognized the existence of non-Aryan peoples; however, he proposed that an intermingling of blood and culture took place between the Aryans and non-Aryans of the subcontinent, producing the Hindu nation.46 He defines a Hindu as a person who feels united by blood ties with all those whose ancestry can be traced to Hindu ‘antiquity’, and who accepts India—from the Indus river in the north to the Indian Ocean—as his fatherland (pitrubhu). In addition, a person is a Hindu only if he accepts India as a divine or holy land (punyabhu).
While Savarkar’s work may have provided Hedgewar with an intellectual justification for the concept of a Hindu nation that embraced all the peoples of the subcontinent, it did not give him a method for uniting the Hindu community. Hedgewar had experimented with revolution, satyagraha and constitutional reform, but each method, he felt, had failed to achieve independence or national rejuvenation. From his youth, he had searched for a reason to explain India’s inability to ward off foreign domination. He was disturbed that a small group of colonial administrators could rule a vast country like India with such ease.47 He believed that independence and national revitalization could be achieved only when the root cause of India’s weakness was discovered. Some time in 1924–25, he satisfied himself that he had discovered the cause: The fundamental problem was psychological and what was required was an inner transformation to rekindle a sense of national consciousness and social cohesion. Once having created a cadre of persons committed to national reconstruction, he believed there would be little difficulty in sustaining a movement of revitalization, which, of course, would include independence as one of its objectives.48 The first task on the road to independence, then, was to formulate a discipline and an organization to train the cadre.
Hedgewar launched his new movement of Hindu revitalization in September 1925 on the Hindu festival of Dussehra, a festival commemorating the victory of Ram (a mythological Hindu god) over the demon king Ravan.49 The first participants were recruited from a largely brahmin locality in Nagpur.50 This early group had neither a name nor a developed programme of activities. The participants were expected to attend an akhara (gymnasium) during the week and take part in political classes on Sundays and Thursdays.51
During Hedgewar’s involvement in the revolutionary movement, gymnasiums had been his most successful source of recruits, and he again relied on them to recruit participants into his new venture. The traditional Hindu gymnasium is closely associated with the kshatriya lifestyle all over India. In Maharashtra, where brahmins served conspicuously as rulers and soldiers, brahmins also actively participated in akharas. During the communal violence of the mid-1920s in the Central Provinces, the number of akharas in Nagpur division increased from 230 to 570.52
Traditional Indian gymnasiums have a spiritual purpose as well as an athletic one, and hence, were considered by Hedgewar the ideal places to look for the cadre he was seeking to create. Youths at such gymnasiums were taught that the exercises performed were a form of worship to the god Maruti (or Hanuman). Maruti is among the most demanding gods in the Hindu pantheon, requiring physical strength, subordination, and a strict ascetic commitment from his devotees, most of whom are young men. In Maharashtra, Maruti is associated with the struggle against ‘evil’ and his incarnations appear when Hindus are ‘oppressed’. Ramdas Swami (a seventeenth-century Hindu saint) was himself a devotee of Maruti, and the god’s idol was installed in the mutts (monasteries) which he established. The Abhinava Bharat formed by V. D. Savarkar set the poetry of Ramdas to music to arouse a revolutionary fervour among the youth. Hedgewar drew on the writings of Ramdas for the same purpose.53 During the formative period of the RSS, members took their oath before the saffron-coloured RSS flag and pictures of Maruti and Ramdas.
Hedgewar selected the first mission of the young organization with great care.54 He wanted to demonstrate the value of discipline to both the volunteers and to the general public, and chose a popular religious occasion—Ramnavami—to do so. The Ramnavami festival (celebrating the birthday of Ram, the seventh avatar of the god Vishnu) was celebrated in April each year at Ramtek, a village near Nagpur. According to Hedgewar’s biographer, the chaotic conditions around the temple created great hardships for the worshippers. Moreover, many villagers were reportedly cheated by Muslim fakirs and brahmin pandits. He decided to take his volunteers to the 1926 festival to remedy the situation. For the occasion, he chose both the name and the uniform of the organization.55 The swayamsevaks, in their new uniforms, marched to the temple singing verses from Ramdas. According to RSS sources, they enforced queues for the worshippers visiting the temple housing the main idol, provided drinking water, and drove off the corrupt priests.56
Soon after this dramatic introduction to the public, lathi instruction (a lathi is a five-feet-long bamboo stick used as a weapon) and group prayers were incorporated into the RSS discipline.57 In the same year, a large open area was acquired and military training was introduced by Martandrao Jog, a former officer in the army of the maharaja of Gwalior, who was to become head of the military section of the RSS. To strengthen their sense of discipline, volunteers were required to wear their uniforms to the RSS meetings, and a bugle corps was formed to accompany the volunteers when they marched through the streets of Nagpur.58 In 1926, the first daily shakha (branch) was held, and the practice of meeting daily was quickly adopted by other RSS groups. Ninety-nine young men were accepted into RSS membership in 1928 by taking a life oath in a forest close to Nagpur. The oath was administered before the bhagva dhwaj, an ochre-coloured standard associated with Shivaji.59 In RSS ritual, this standard is a symbol of the unity of all Hindus, and it is the ‘guru’ to which each swayamsevak commits himself when he joins the organization. Some of the older RSS informants recall that the paramilitary orientation of the RSS at that time was popular among the youth of the Hindu middle class in Nagpur because it was proof to them that Hindu young men were the equal in manliness to the British soldier.
Communal riots which erupted again in Nagpur in September 1927 led the RSS to take steps which captured the attention of Hindus far beyond the city. Anna Sohani, a former revolutionary and close associate of Hedgewar, organized RSS members into sixteen squads to protect various Hindu neighbourhoods in the city. Perhaps because of the publicity generated by this move, the organizers of the December 1927 Hindu Mahasabha national conclave at Ahmedabad in Bombay province invited Hedgewar to send RSS members in uniform to the session.60
Hedgewar’s revolutionary past and the paramilitary nature of the RSS convinced the Central Provinces Home Department that the RSS could develop into a dangerous revolutionary group,61 and this suspicion continued throughout the pre-Independence period. In fact, the RSS remained scrupulously non-political and it was not until after Independence that it began seriously to consider political activities. People who knew the RSS well, such as Dr Hardikar, the leader of the Hindustan Seva Dal (the youth unit of the Congress) criticized the RSS for its refusal to get politically involved.62 V. D. Savarkar, the president of the Hindu Mahasabha after 1937, frequently denounced the RSS for its ‘purely cultural’ orientation. In his typically frank manner, Savarkar publicly stated, ‘The epitaph for the RSS volunteer will be that he was born, he joined the RSS and he died without accomplishing I anything.’63
Hedgewar’s stress on the educational role of the RSS—referred to as character building—led some of his senior colleagues, who wanted it to take a more activist stance, to leave the organization.64 Anna Sohani, one of his closest colleagues, withdrew from the RSS in 1928 when Hedgewar vetoed Sohani’s proposal to march uniformed RSS members in
front of mosques on Friday as an unnecessarily provocative act. Hedgewar in 1931 condemned the RSS general secretary, G. M. Huddar, for participating in an armed robbery, even though the money was intended to fund anti-British activities. Huddar drifted away from the RSS after his release from prison. While Hedgewar permitted RSS members to take part in political activities in their individual capacity, he was careful to keep the RSS aloof from them. For example, during his own participation in the 1931 Congress’s civil disobedience movement, Hedgewar handed over his position to Dr L. B. Paranjpe, a member of Dr Munje’s political circle, for the duration of his involvement.
Nonetheless, the RSS continued to expand. Because of this growth, Hedgewar called senior RSS figures to Nagpur in November 1929, to evaluate its work and to consider ways to link together the expanding network of shakhas.65 They decided that the organization should have one supreme guide (sarsanghchalak) who would have absolute decision-making power. He would choose all office-bearers and personally supervise the activities of the RSS. RSS literature compares the position to the head of a family who acts for the well-being of the collective unit.
By a unanimous decision of the senior workers, Hedgewar was acclaimed the first sarsanghchalak. While the term guru is never employed to describe the position, the guru model of authority governs the leadership principle of the RSS.66 A guru in the traditional sense is a spiritual preceptor who knows a path to realization, and his guidance is required for the seekers after spiritual wisdom. A novitiate is expected to obey the guru in all matters.67 Despite Hedgewar’s injunction that loyalty and veneration be focused on the organization rather than on the individual, a charismatic sanctity does surround the office. Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, Hedgewar’s successor, referred poetically to Hedgewar as an avatar (an incarnation of the divine).68 Hedgewar’s samadhi (memorial) at Nagpur is a pilgrimage centre for swayamsevaks.
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