Vikram Sampath Quotes

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).

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.

These two volumes however are in no way an apology for Savarkar. They do not take on themselves the lofty goal of correcting historical wrongs done to a national figure. If these do happen, they would be purely coincidental and not intended to be so. Stripping off any personal biases, the records must be allowed to speak for themselves. This, to me is more a historian’s burden and a duty—to illuminate the extant records and on the basis of that let the discerning reader make up her own mind. While all the above-stated allegations have been dealt with in this two-volume biography, the intent is not for me to become Savarkar’s mouthpiece or his lawyer, as I am sure he deserves better. As a historian committed to my profession of an unending quest for the truth, bringing to light the evidences and documents in a conscientious manner is what I have honestly tried to attempt. The jury is of course out there to decide if I have succeeded in what truly seemed like a herculean task.

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’.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The next contention was that at some distance from this compound, there was another temple known as Adi Vishweshwara, which too seemed to have been demolished and near it stood the mosque of Razia Bibi. Since the word ‘Adi’ meant original, it was incorrect to say that the old temple of Vishwanath was in this Gyan Vapi compound and that if there was any, then it must have been the one near that Razia 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.

What is noteworthy is that unlike in the past decades, there is at least space for a debate and discussion around Savarkar to happen in our public realm now. The persona-non-grata that he had become and the heavy price that anyone invoking his name with any modicum of positivity had to bear, are luckily not as pronounced. The idea of these two volumes is not to create an army of Savarkar fans who have an answer to every allegation hurled against him by any loony or vested quarter. I myself disagree vastly with several of his stances and I am deeply critical of his actions at various stages of his life, as seen from the happy comfort of a retrospective review. One may hate or love him as much as one might want. But then to blackout even a discussion and debate around him, based on facts and documents, rather than rhetoric and politics (as has been the case till now) is deeply prejudicial to the tenets of liberalism and democracy, where every opposing view needs to find a platform. In his own life, Savarkar welcomed those who were opposed to his ideas and even kept a record of critical assessments of him by the press or his contemporaries.

Down south, communal riots broke out in the Nizam’s domain in the town of Gulbarga in 1924. Nearly fifteen Hindu temples were attacked, idols broken and the famous Sharana Vishweshwara temple plundered and attempted to be set on fire. Police firing resulted in many deaths. On 14 August 1924 more than fifty Hindu temples in and around the town were completely desecrated.

The discovery of their Mahadev, and more so the humiliation that he had been subjected to by concealing the idol in an ablution tank where people washed their dirty feet and spat out, overwhelmed everyone.