Dhirendra Jha unpacks Golwalkar's controversial legacy in this new book

GOLWALKAR: The Myth Behind the Man, the Man Behind the Machine

Author: Dhirendra K Jha

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: Rs 899

  Except for slightly more than a decade, in almost a hundred years of its existence, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has been perceived as a shadowy organisation. For a highly restrictive collective that harps on privileging the sangathan (organisation) over vyakti (individual), it has had just seven sarsanghchalak (chief), excluding stop-gap head, L V Paranjape, for seven months in 1930-31 when founder-sarsanghchalak Keshav Baliram Hedgewar was in jail after participating in a protest movement that ran parallel to the Civil Disobedience Movement. Extraordinarily lengthy tenures in the saddle have been the primary reason for so few people being in command — Hedgewar and his successor, the second sarsanghchalak and subject of this magisterial biography, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, were at the helm for 48 years—the former for 15 and the later for 33 years. Even the third chief, equally important for significant policy shifts, social and territorial expansion during his tenure, Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras, was in the saddle for the next 21 years, till 1994.

 

Dhirendra Jha begins the book with a stunning claim — a curtain-raiser to one of the many principal contentions in the book. His version on the controversy surrounding one of the two books for which Golwalkar is revered by clanspersons and closely scrutinised by adversaries. Golwalkar’s two most contentious books, also held as gospel by Hindu nationalist individuals or groups, are We or Our Nationhood Defined and Bunch of Thoughts. The first edition of the former book was published in 1939 when Golwalkar was yet to carve a niche for himself in the RSS hierarchy, and it considerably enabled him to secure legitimacy within the tightly-knit circle of the organisation. Mr Jha’s painstakingly researched book provides a vivid look into Gowalkar’s mind when he was in his early 30s.

 

With the same rigour, the book continues to present unknown details of the subject’s life. Mr Jha depicts the young Golwalkar as someone who is orthodox and conservative in his social outlook, a person who consciously stays away from adopting anti-colonial positions. He is also an individual who is not just conscious of his Brahminical status, but also considers it “a basic premise of his existence.”

 

In We or Our Nationhood Defined Golwalkar stated that it was greatly inspired by a Marathi book, Rashtra Mimansa, written some years ago by Ganesh Damodar Savarkar, also called Babarao Savarkar (elder brother of the more famous V D Savarkar). In the years after the publication of his book and assuming the leadership of the RSS from June 1940 (an episode to which Mr Jha turns his probing gaze and presents hitherto unknown details), Golwalkar continued being engaged with Babarao’s work, even as the book’s translator.

 

In 1963, Golwalkar raked up a massive controversy over We or Our Nationhood Defined. At a celebration to mark V D Savarkar’s 18th birth anniversary, Golwalkar declared that he was not the author of this book; it was an “abridged translation” of Babarao’s book from the mid-1930s. So far, most authors, from Walter K Andersen and Shridhar D Damle, contended that Golwalkar bluffed his way in 1939 when he needed to acquire intellectual gravitas and passed off Babarao Savarkar’s writing as his own. But in 1963, with his position safeguarded, Golwalkar chose to come clean.

 

Mr Jha inverts this proposition and argues that We or Our Nationhood Defined was actually Golwalkar’s but in 1963 he wished to distance himself from it because he was petrified of being identified with the parallels he drew in his book between the Jews in Germany and Muslims in India and suggesting that the Hindus should draw on Nazi templates. Mr Jha contends that We or Our Nationhood Defined was no longer under the spotlight and efforts to resurrect it were being made from an adversarial position and this could harm Golwalkar because Jawaharlal Nehru was staunchly against Hindu majoritarian forces. The author also argues that Bunch of Thoughts was toned down because he did not wish to run afoul of the government. This is not the only time in the otherwise exhaustive biography that Mr Jha resorts to the use of conjecture, stating that this “could” have happened.

 

Yet Bunch of Thoughts was not a sterile book. One chapter contended that Muslims are said to have adopted a two-fold strategy after Partition — “direct aggression”, and “swelling numbers”, and that the problem was a “time-bomb” because they had neither forgotten nor learnt anything and were working towards creating “miniature Pakistans”. The problematic nature of the book forced the Sangh Parivar to frequently distance itself from it, contending that some of the articles or speeches were made in specific political contexts and had become dated, so their removal is justified.

 

Determining the truth about We or Our Nationhood Defined  can be left for another occasion; instead, readers are better served by focusing on other sections of Mr Jha’s book, including grossly disturbing aspects of Golwalkar’s politics. For instance, in December 1947, when Mahatma Gandhi was camping in Delhi, trying to restore sanity among the city’s violent mobs, Mr Jha ferrets out from Delhi Police records Golwalkar’s address to a crowd of 2,500 RSS workers near Rohtak Road, where he says that if “Gandhi continued to protect Muslims, he could even be ‘silenced’.”

 

One last word: A significant amount of Mr Jha’s source material was translated from Marathi and Bengali by Krishna Jha, co-author of Mr Jha’s 2012 book, Ayodhya: The Dark Night and her husband. These translated documents give great strength to Mr Jha, the painstaking researcher. 

The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer and journalist.@NilanjanUdwin