Right from his early days in the Andamans, Vinayak encouraged people to speak in Hindi....Till then, government records were maintained in Urdu, and … - Vikram Sampath

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 The historical documents showed that this temple was constructed in an irregular manner in 1077 Hijri (1666 ce) after demolishing a temple, as per the orders of Aurangzeb.

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.

I was thereafter invited for talks and lectures at several places and during one such exposition on the Interregnum period of Haidar and Tipu, when I began quoting verbatim some of the letters of Tipu, all hell broke loose in the hall. A section of the hitherto civilized audience broke up in sloganeering, hurling paper rockets at the podium and forcing the organizers to hurriedly terminate the session and usher me inside. Amidst the din, a man reached out to my bewildered and hassled father who sat among the audience with a terse message: ‘He is your only son, advise him well if you wish to have him around you for long!’ If this kerfuffle felt like a scene from a Bollywood film, it sadly was not, but was part of my father and my lived experience. The aggression of that evening stunned us, deeply impacting my mother’s already precarious health. In our naivety, we believed that historiography meant telling the truth as it was. But its intense sociopolitical weaponization was something that we were both unaware of and yet to be confronted with.