Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who passed away on 26 February 1966, Bombay [now Mumbai])
was a Hindu and Indian nationalist and leading figure in the Hindu Mahasabha (“Great
Society of Hindus”), a Hindu nationalist organization and political party.
While a student of law in London (1906–10),
Savarkar helped to instruct a group of Indian revolutionaries in methods of
sabotage and assassination that associates of his had apparently learned
from expatriate Russian revolutionaries in Paris. During this period, he wrote The Indian War of Independence, 1857 (1909), in
which he took the view that the Indian Mutiny of 1857 was the first
expression of Indian mass rebellion against British colonial rule.
In March 1910 Savarkar was arrested on various
charges relating to subversion and incitement to war and was sent to India
for trial and convicted. In a second trial he was convicted of his alleged complicity
in the assassination of a British district magistrate in India, and, after
sentencing, he was transported to the Andaman Islands for detention “for
life.” He was brought back to India in 1921 and released from detention in
1924. While imprisoned he wrote Hinditva: Who
Is a Hindu? (1923), coining the term Hindutva (“Hinduness”),
which sought to define Indian culture as a manifestation of
Hindu values; this concept grew to become a major tenet of Hindu nationalist ideology.
Savarkar resided in Ratnagiri, India, until 1937, when he joined the
Hindu Mahasabha, which militantly defended the Hindus’ claims of religious and
cultural supremacy over Indian Muslims. He served as president of the Mahasabha
for seven years. In 1943 he retired to Bombay. When Mohandas K. Gandhi was
assassinated in 1948 by a former member of the Mahasabha, Savarkar was
implicated, but he was acquitted in his subsequent trial because of
insufficient evidence.
