Vikram Sampath Quotes

Now, this idea of the feminine being equal and worthy of worship is anathema and purely an alien concept to Abrahamic thought, which has no concept of a Divine Feminine.

In a moment of intense emotion, he rushed to the idol of the Ashtabhuja Bhawani in his home town in Bhagur and poured his heart out to her. He made a fervent vow in front of his family goddess that he was committing himself and his life to free the motherland through armed struggle. He declared in her presence: ‘Shatrus maarta maarta mare to jhunjen! ’ (I will wage war against the enemy and slay them till my last breath).

Savarkar is widely reviled in Indian history as an apostle of hate; through a reading of Hindutva I argue that he might better be understood as a spurned lover . . . Hindutva in its time was also a reminder to a Hindu community that even if Gandhi had left the political milieu, there was no need to worry. A political Hindu and a true nationalist was back and ready to lead India, even from behind prison walls. Hindutva was a pugilistic punch thrown against Gandhi in the competitive political ring for national leadership.

In 1376 ce, Firoz Shah Tughlaq began constructing the Atala mosque in Jaunpur by pulling down the Atala Devi temple constructed there by Jayachandra. Sukul speculates that if a prominent temple such as the Atala Devi temple in Jaunpur was demolished, it is reasonable to assume that those in Varanasi would not have been spared.37 Firoz Shah’s representative in Varanasi was vigorously constructing quite a few mosques at the site of old Hindu temples with materials obtained from demolishing them. Hence, one might assume that these temples in Varanasi had been pulled down first. The famous Arhai-Kangara mosque, the Chaukhambha mosque, and the mosque in Golaghat, as well as many others in the Alavipura ward, belong to this period, and almost the entire building scheme in Bakaria Kund was also constructed at the same time.

Another cellar was found in the mosque, which seemed much like the remains of an old temple. But the team had simply not anticipated what they were going to discover next. It was going to shake up the entire matter and create a nationwide sensation. As the day was drawing to a close the team reached the wazu khana, which was situated on the eastern side of the mosque. The wazu khana is an ablution pond where worshippers wash themselves and rinse their mouths before praying at the mosque. The plaintiff advocates noticed a well-like structure in the middle of the wazu khana. The wazu khana had been covered from all four sides by a nine-inch wall. When they demanded that the water levels there be reduced so that it could be inspected from inside, the mosque officials and the defendant side flew into fits of rage. ‘Now don’t overdo things. Enough is enough, we will not comply to everything that you ask us to do. We have cooperated enough and thus far, and no further’, they screamed. ‘It became so clear to everyone,’ Hari Shankar Jain says with a mysterious smile, ‘that there was something there that they wished to hide. Else, till now, they had been grudgingly opening up cellar rooms and even the central premises. But it was clear as broad daylight that on our making this demand, some raw nerve had been touched.’

Hence, even more than five decades after his death, Savarkar intrudes contemporary political debates like a few characters of our recent past have. Conferment of the country’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, still becomes the topic of intense contention, necessitating its inclusion even in the election manifestos of political parties. From being called a cowardly stooge who wrote groveling apologies, a casteist and Islamophobic bigot who allegedly pioneered the two-nation theory, a British-collaborator who drew pension from the government to personal slurs of a megalomaniac who penned his own biography in a pseudonym and someone who justified rapes—the basket of toxic allegations is mind bogglingly wide-ranging. The demonization is so absolutist in nature that there hardly seems to be any trace of positive virtue that his opponents can find in him.

Back in mainland India, a new movement was brewing. It is important to understand this issue because it sets the context in which Vinayak penned his magnum opus on Hindutva and his belief in the need for Hindu society to organize itself politically. The concept of Hindutva continues to be a contentious one in Indian politics even today..... Meanwhile, it was in the dark confines of Ratnagiri prison that Vinayak began writing his magnum opus on his political philosophy—his conception of what constituted a ‘Hindu nationalist identity’. These were distilled from his experiences in the Andaman and Ratnagiri jails with respect to the conversions, his own attempts at shuddhi and sangathan and the raging debates in the country surrounding the Khilafat agitation. The word that he popularized and which holds immense political currency in contemporary India was ‘Hindutva’ or ‘Hindu-ness’.

I was to slowly discover that Savarkar was a bundle of contradictions and a historian’s enigma. He simultaneously means many things to many people. An alleged atheist and a staunch rationalist who strongly opposed orthodox Hindu beliefs and the caste system and dismissed cow worship as mere superstition, Savarkar was also the most vocal political voice for the Hindu community through the entire course of the Indian freedom struggle.... A feted revolutionary who created an intellectual corpus of literature that inspired the revolutionary movement in India for decades, Savarkar was also a passionate and sensitive poet, a prolific writer and playwright, and a fiery orator. ...The social reformer in him strove to dismantle the scourges of untouchability and caste hierarchies, and advocated a unification of Hindu society.

These anecdotes are not just mine, but they could be of any historian who dares to wade through some of the no-go waters of Indian history or challenge supposed sacrosanct icons.

Glossing over his cruelties and barbaric deeds, only to sound politically correct or labour under a sad misapprehension that whitewashing these crimes would somehow magically maintain social cohesion and national unity is being extremely treacherous and intellectually dishonest.

Within just a year of ascending the throne, in 1659 ce, Aurangzeb ordered the demolition of the famous Shiva temple of Krittivaseshwara situated in Daranagar, the heart of Varanasi. In its place, the Alamgiri mosque was constructed. To this day, there is just a small, empty tank that marks the site of the first, second, and third reconstructions of this temple. It was kept open to devotees for brief worship only on the occasion of Mahashivaratri on the specific condition that the offerings were to be shared with the mutawalli (a person appointed orally or under a deed to administer a waqf property) of the mosque.

There is a mosque known as Har Tirath mosque, near the famous Har Tirath temple, which also appears to have been constructed of the materials of some old buildings. That was a temple of the Hindus known as Krittivaseshwara. The historical documents showed that this temple was constructed in an irregular manner in 1077 Hijri (1666 ce) after demolishing a temple, as per the orders of Aurangzeb.

Despite being born in an orthodox and religious Chitpawan Brahmin community, Vinayak despised the caste system right from childhood. This has been illustrated in the kinships he developed with children from various castes and strata of society, and how he dined at their homes. At a time when most members of his community forbade sea travel for fear of a loss of caste, Vinayak was among the few Brahmins who travelled to London for his education. He had no qualms about going non-vegetarian as well, unlike most Brahmins of the time. As his political thoughts matured during his long years of incarceration, he penned essays on the abhorrent practice of the caste system and untouchability and how these sapped the nation of all vitality. Advocating a strong case for their total, complete and unconditional eradication at a time when these ideas were not yet a part of the political discourse popularized by either Gandhi or Ambedkar, he was the first to envision a casteless India.

Tipu Sultan, in the early part of his reign i.e., 1783, is thus also seen as an arbiter between warring sects and also someone who permitted the procession and festivities at Melukote with pomp.29 Interestingly, this was barely a month or two before committing the cruellest atrocity on the same Sri Vaishanava community by massacring 700 families of the Mandyam Iyengars, who shared the same gotra of Bharadwaja with that of the Mysore Pradhans who were acting on Maharani Lakshmi Ammanni’s behalf.

Vinayak and his friends were absorbing from the Kesari , Pune Vaibhav and other newspapers the stories of these bloody riots and the polarized tinderbox that Maharashtra had become. Each time they heard of the attack on Hindus, they would be enraged and wondered why Hindus could not organize themselves and retaliate instead of suffering repression... Vinayak acknowledges in his memoirs that these experiences taught him how poorly organized and disunited the Hindu community was and how easy it was to subjugate them. 11 The Hindus were perpetually divided among themselves along several fault lines, especially caste, and this made them doubly vulnerable to attacks. They were full of self-doubt and suspicion about the other, and seldom committed to the ‘cause’.