Facts and faultlines

Iconisation is always an ideological process that involves the reconstruction and distortion of facts relating to the individual being iconised. The multi-layered process involves political ideology, parties, institutions, channels of communication and planned strategies.

Arun Shourie’s The New Icon is an exemplary analysis of the iconisation of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a complex multifaceted leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and a powerful ideologue of Hindutva. The spirited and concerted attempts to iconise him as a supreme patriot and revolutionary ideologue have drawn the interest of writers and researchers, many of whom have tried to unravel how Savarkar has been reconstructed as an icon.

Arun Shourie advises the readers to read not Savarkar’s biographers but Savarkar himself. This is also the plan and structure of the book. Throughout, we read and listen to Savarkar himself with the author’s comments few and far between nudging the reader towards the juxtapositions of what Savarkar himself wrote and said and what the iconisation wants us to believe. What emerges from such a reading are the contradictions, prevarications, strategic shifts, exaggerations, and confident but ungrounded assumptions through which Savarkar carried out and communicated his ideological positions.

Ideological ambitions

Nor are these attributed to his quirks or temperamental flaws. Shourie’s intention is to demonstrate how Savarkar’s ideology is based on assumptions taken for facts, conceptual and methodological faultlines masked under rhetoric, and constant revisions of the connections drawn between various arguments. These are laid before the reader by Shourie with unhurried and detailed references to Savarkar’s prolific writings. This is necessary because the ideological ambitions of Savarkar were huge involving a reconstruction of the history of Indian civilisation, categorisation of major world religions, rewriting of medieval and modern history, multipronged political commentary on contemporary India and creating the ideology of Hindutva. His overtures have had serious political consequences, especially in the contemporary context.

It is Savarkar himself who makes a clear distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva. He considers Hinduism as a religion which advocates tolerance, pluralism and non-violence, which in his view, make it weak and vulnerable. It lacks the belligerence and aggression to deal with ‘other’ religions, which supposedly possess those qualities. What comes as a surprise to those who are familiar with the iconised Savarkar is the first section of Shourie’s book in which they confront the uncompromising rationalist attacking Hindu practices such as cow worship with stunning sarcasm and ridicule.

He condemns irrational practices and blind beliefs of populist Hinduism. He argues that on two accounts, the Hindu religion has failed in protecting itself and in creating the Hindu Rashtra. The need of the day is Hindutva, which he describes as aggressive, willing to avenge itself and retaliate with ‘super-barbarity’, ‘super cunning’ and justified violence (all Savarkar’s original expressions).

Selective and flawed?

In the historical context of British imperialism and threats from the ‘others’ inside and outside Aryavarta, it is Hindutva alone which can save us, not Hinduism with its ‘foolish’ ideas of tolerance and forgiveness, he goes on to say. Savarkar argues that the Maratha empire founded by Shivaji came closest to creating a Hindu empire but all was lost because of the failure to create a pan-Hindu consciousness among rulers and people. Shourie draws attention to the highly selective and flawed historical construction he uses to support such arguments.

Savarkar’s long political career went through many phases, especially in its relationship with the British. From the early phase of an extremist position by Navbharat to the mercy petitions promising total subservience, as a vocal representative of Hindu Mahasabha (which he argued was the sole representative of the Hindu community), many shifting stances ranging from demand for absolute independence, dominion status and finally, the dream of Akhanda Bharat. The book provides profuse details of Savarkar’s complex political career. The brief authorial interventions by Shourie raise troubling questions regarding how much of all that was genuine, how much was self-serving and the gulf between statements and action.

The section on Gandhi’s assassination, the trial and the Kapur Report is short but the arguments are powerful. The analysis of how ideological brainwashing can create robots who commit violent acts in the name of patriotism is disturbing. It resonates with the present world of ideological violence. Arun Shourie concludes with a plea to the readers, ‘Save Hinduism from Hindutva’. 

(The reviewer is an author and literary critic. Views are personal.)