In Hindutva and Violence , Vinayak Chaturvedi examines Hindutva ideologue V.D. Savarkar’s central claim that “Hindutva is not a word but history.” For Savarkar, says Chaturvedi, this history was strategic. He selected “chief actors” from the past who had turned to violence in a permanent war for “Hindutva” as the founding principle of a Hindu nation. At a time when there was a fragmenting of Hindu identity at multiple levels, Savarkar’s strategy was to build solidarity with the construction of “Hindu” through an argument of common blood, in which all blood was.
impure. An excerpt:
Inscribed within Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s analysis of blood was a trenchant critique of any argument about the purity of blood — and by implication the purity of any given race. He asserted that all humans have the same blood — human blood — as it is the essential biological characteristic of all humans. He rejected the claim that some human blood was “pure,” arguing that this was not possible based on the libidinal urges of all humans through history: “Sexual attraction has proved to be more powerful than all the commands of all the prophets put together.” Rather, he argued, all blood is necessarily tainted or polluted. But while it may be true analytically that there is no pure blood and all humans have impure blood, affectively it was necessary for Hindus to assert that they “feel” their blood is pure in comparison to all other blood.
Purity of races
Savarkar’s argument was not only strategic, it was also essential in providing a critique of the purity of races and jatis. His point in this critique was that his arguments had come under scrutiny for being partial or prejudiced in favour of Hindus. This he felt should not be surprising because no Indian political party or organisation was making universal claims for the creation of a Human State or a global Human Community. National or racial resolutions to the problems facing all humans were universally posited, so those in favour of Hindus could hardly be faulted. All forms of identity were “provisional,” “makeshift,” and “only relatively true.” All distinctions between “races” (or jatis and nationalities) were really obstacles created throughout the world to prevent the interactions and “commingling” of people.
Savarkar was able to accomplish two things in arguing for both an analytical and affective interpretation of blood. Analytically, he acknowledged the idea of the universal human. Hindus have “impure” blood, just like every other human being: there is no such thing as pure blood, just human blood: “Truly speaking all that any one of us can claim, all that history entitles one to claim, is that one has the blood of all mankind in one’s veins. The fundamental unity of man… is true, all else is relatively so.” And yet globally no “race” actually accepted the idea of the universal human.
Affectively, Savarkar’s claim that Hindu blood was pure had a powerful consequence for uniting all Hindus. It allowed Savarkar to argue that Jains, Buddhist, and Sikhs all shared the same blood as “Hindus,” but so did all “untouchables,” low-castes, and tribals. Needless to say, this was a radical assertion that challenged the essence of social hierarchies encompassed within the existing caste system. It allowed Savarkar to establish a bloodline between all Hindus — across time — and thus the argument that historically all individuals sharing Hindu blood were responsible for creating a unified race or jati. In fact, Savarkar suggested that his turn to Hindutva was to create a new Hindu universal that conceptualised caste and class differences in ways that were inclusive for all Hindus. To accomplish this goal, Hindus only needed to feel that they shared their blood with all other Hindus.
[I]n Essentials of Hindutva, he saw additional intellectual contexts for arguing that Hindus shared common blood. His idea of linking diverse races and jatis together as a composite form of Hindus happened in a period of debates about the colonial census, in which the category “Hindu” was contested. Savarkar pointed out that the colonial census had fragmented Hindus by demanding that they classify themselves under multiple categories. The problem for him was that some Hindus had stopped identifying as Hindus in the government’s taxonomies. What the census had accomplished, in the effort to enumerate population sizes, was disaggregate Hindus into castes and tribes. He saw the census as a fissiparous exercise that had bifurcated and fragmented Hindus, and created tensions and divisions within what he saw as a singularity. Individuals and communities who had long identified as Hindus now had the opportunity to select categories that privileged caste, sub-caste, tribe, and sub-tribe.
This story was originally published in thehindu.com . Read the full story here