While it is nice to describe a beautiful rose in full bloom, it would be incomplete without a description of everything—right from its roots, the stem, the manure and nutrients that have sustained it, the fresh and dried leaves as also the thorns, in order to conceptualize the beauty of that rose in all its dimensions. Likewise, for a human being’s biography, he needs to be presented ‘as is’ and not ‘as should be’—from head to toe, nothing more, nothing less, as transparent and true to reality as one can be. Everything that can be said or unsaid, that is embarrassing or praiseworthy has to be documented without inhibitions and fears. Of course given the social and political situation that I am writing these in, despite my will, some of the details are being suppressed a little. Also, it would be a breach of trust to reveal confidential details of renowned people whom I have had the good fortune of meeting and interacting with closely in my life. Still, I hold a promise that I have revealed all that needs to be revealed, with the least of colours and bias from my side. 2
The iconoclast that he was, Savarkar also asserts that after a couple of generations if the people of India found his memoirs to be useless and of little significance, they were free to throw these away in the bins of history. Time would be the best arbiter of a man’s significance, he adds. After all, the universe is intelligent enough to remove vestiges that serve no purpose, in order to create space for the new.
With this guidance coming straight from the mouth of the protagonist, all that I needed to do was to follow his advice carefully—try to present the picture ‘as is’ and not ‘as should be’, with the documents available at my command. This book is not an apology for him, nor does it take on itself the lofty goal of correcting historical wrongs done to a national figure. If these do happen, they would be purely coincidental and not intended to be so. Stripping off any personal biases, the records must be allowed to speak for themselves. It is after all this painful process of cutting all emotional cords with the subject that has been the object of your obsession for years that determines whether the narrative that follows thereafter is an objective biography or a eulogizing hagiography. I wish to believe that I have tread the path of the former and the rest is for the readers of these volumes to decide.
Meanwhile, with the coming back to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party helmed by Narendra Modi in 2014, the displaced plaque at the Cellular Jail was reinstalled in July 2015, exactly eleven years after it had been removed. The same Ram Naik did the honours of laying the new foundation stone. History seemed to have come full circle. In the ever-changing electoral fortunes of the world’s largest democracy, it is a historian’s hope that the legacy of Savarkar, and of men like him, do not become political footballs in the ugly arena of toxic public life.
Dr Vikram Sampath
Bengaluru, March 2019
1
The Early Years
9 July 1879, Poona
Sir Richard Temple had a fairly long innings as a civil servant in British India. Few contemporaries could boast of the kind of knowledge he possessed about the country and its public opinion, especially about the British Empire. During his Indian term from 1847 to 1880, Sir Temple had held several important positions in Punjab, Central Provinces, Bengal, and the crowning glory of this stellar career was his appointment as the governor of Bombay from 1877 to 1880. With this vast experience behind him, a troubled Sir Temple wrote two confidential letters to the viceroy, Lord Lytton. 1 Given the many spelling and grammatical errors in these letters, it is obvious that Sir Temple had penned them in considerable haste. He had reason to worry, since there was serious trouble on hand. As recently as 1875, there had been several agrarian riots in the districts of Ahmednagar, Poona, Satara and Solapur in the Bombay Presidency. In 1876–77, the Deccan had suffered an acutely miserable famine and epidemics of cholera, plague and smallpox. These had led to a commission of inquiry and eventually to the Deccan Agriculturists’ Relief Act of 1879. The Act sought to protect farmers against arrest for their inability to repay their debts. But it was too little, too late. The discontent had already gained ground across the Deccan. Wasudev Balwant Phadke, whom Sir Temple had dismissed as a petty Brahmin ‘brigand leader’, 2 had led a bloody uprising against the British. It was obvious that there were rumblings in paradise and that public disaffection was simmering against alien rule.
But it was not these recent incidents alone that Sir Temple narrated at length to Lytton. Instead, he presented a historical sweep of the region and its people since that eventful year of 1818 when the British had managed to snuff out the mighty Maratha Empire under the Peshwas. ‘It is commonly said,’ wrote Temple, ‘that it was the Mahomedans whom the British displaced as rulers in India. This is true only in a restricted sense. It would be nearer the truth to say that it was the Mahrattas in the main, whom we displaced.’ 3 Given the expanse and influence of Maratha rule across India by 1818, the observation was accurate. Unlike the Sikhs whose fighting spirit was vanquished and who somehow forgot the ignominy of defeat following the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848–49, the thorn of the 1818 debacle stuck in the flesh of self-respecting Marathas. And more so, as Sir Temple elucidated, in the community of the Chitpawan Brahmins of the region. But who were these Chitpawans who sent such shivers down the spine of the mighty British Empire?
Mythical accounts of the origins of the Chitpawan Brahmins can be traced back to Parashuram, a saint considered an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Their fair complexion, light eyes, and their large settlements along the western coast of India, particularly Ratnagiri, suggest that they may have come from Iran to Maharashtra by sea. 4 Organized into fourteen patrilineal groups, or gotras, they had no formal caste leadership or guidelines for conducting their social lives, but instead owed a loose allegiance to their religious pontiff, the Shankaracharya of Sankeshwar. From the hilly and economically depressed Konkan strip along the western coast where they initially settled, earning them the title of ‘Konkanastha’ Brahmins, the Chitpawans, who accounted for nearly 20 per cent of the Maharashtrian Brahmin population as per the 1901 census, migrated eastwards towards the ‘desh’ or mainland. Here they were up against their fellow caste-mates, the Deshastha Brahmins, who outnumbered them and composed the traditional elite of the region. From being cultivators, priests and petty traders in their home strip of the Konkan, the newly arrived Chitpawans soon became administrators, diplomats and even martial soldiers. They quickly appropriated all the skills needed to rise up the political and economic ladder, and left the Deshasthas to occupy lower positions in administration or continue as priests.
This pre-eminence of the Chitpawan Brahmins in administration was firmly rooted following Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s death in 1680 and the establishment of the Peshwa rule by the early eighteenth century. The Peshwas, prime ministers of Shivaji Maharaj’s descendants, were Chitpawan Brahmins themselves. They became the de facto political authority after Shivaji, while his descendant and grandson, Shahu Maharaj, occupied the ancestral throne at Satara. From the appointment of Balaji Vishwanath Bhat as the Peshwa in 1713, the Chitpawans found their way into all the departments of government. They followed the Maratha princes everywhere from Baroda, Indore and Sangli, to Miraj and Jamkhandi. The Peshwa generously rewarded eminent Chitpawans with large grants of land. From princes or sardars, administrators, statesmen, diplomats to being landholders, bankers, merchants and commanders of the mighty Peshwa army, it was a golden era in Chitpawan history.
However, all this changed dramatically and abruptly after 1818. The British conquest destroyed the patronage of the old ruling classes and stripped the Chitpawans of their hereditary advantages. The new systems of administrative service that the British introduced necessitated new skills. Yet, it was the ever-adaptive Chitpawan Brahmin who reinvented himself even under this biggest challenge to his monopoly by becoming the first of the community to benefit in large numbers from colonial English education, thus taking up civil service positions. The key post in the Bombay services was that of the mamla
tdar (district revenue collector), and Brahmins, mostly Chitpawans, occupied nearly three-fourths of the positions in this grade. The Public Service Commission found that in the Bombay Presidency, 41.25 per cent of the deputy collectors were Brahmins. By 1886, thirty three of the 104 subordinate judges in the Presidency were Chitpawans. 5 The reason the Chitpawans benefitted so extensively under British rule was explained by Sir Temple in his letter to Lytton, stating that the pre-eminent ‘position is won not by favour but by force of merit’. 6 What then, one wonders, embittered a community that depended so much upon government service for its livelihood?
Sir Temple summed this succinctly in his letter to Lytton where he spoke of the Maharashtrian Brahmins’ nostalgia for their former military and political glory over vast parts of the country. The subsequent fall from grace stirred a potent sentiment of resentment against the British since the 1820s itself. ‘The Chitpawun tribe,’ explained Temple, ‘are inspired with national sentiment and with an ambition bounded only with the bounds of India itself . . . the true Chitpawun . . . unites the hardihood and energy of a martial Commander with all the address and skill of a diplomat . . . nothing that we do now, by way of education, emolument or advancement in the public service, at all satisfies the Chitpawuns . . . Education does indeed in some respects draw them towards us—they reflect on many large matters solely through our language; they learn to use our modes of thought and to dis-use their own. On the other hand, education is certainly making their minds restless . . . They will never be satisfied till they regain their ascendancy in the country, as they had it during the last century . . . never have I known in India, a national and political ambition, so continuous, so enduring, so far reaching, so utterly impossible for us to satisfy, as that of the Brahmins of Western India, especially the dominant section of the “Concan-ust” Brahmins above described.’ 7
That many of Maharashtra’s prominent writers, educationists, social reformers, historians, civil servants, lawyers and journalists—from Mahadev Govind Ranade, Bal Gangadhar Tilak to Vishnushastri Krishnashastri Chiplunkar, Ganesh Agarkar and Gopalkrishna Gokhale—were Chitpawan Brahmins fiercely opposed to British rule reinforced Sir Temple’s analysis. It was in such a family of nationalistic Chitpawan Brahmins that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was born in 1883.
Bhagur, 1883
The little town of Bhagur is about 22 kilometres from Nashik. Given its hospitable climate and good water supply, the British established their cantonment at Deolali, about 4 kilometres away from Bhagur. The Nashik region was part of the Maratha Confederacy till 1818; it was later divided between the Khandesh and Ahmednagar districts of the Bombay Presidency. The Nashik district was created in 1869 and, as per the 1901 census, had a population of 816,504—witnessing a 3 per cent decrease in the decade 1891–1901. One of peninsular India’s largest rivers, the Godavari, originates in Nashik in the Tryambakeshwar mountain range and continues its journey eastwards in the district. Near the banks of the Godavari is one of Hinduism’s most sacred pilgrim spots—the ancient Tryambakeshwar Shiva temple, which is among the twelve traditional jyotirlinga s or mystical Shiva temples.
About seven or eight generations before Vinayak Damodar, the Savarkars had migrated to Bhagur after the Peshwa granted it as a generous jagir to the family. Their place of origin was Palshet in the Guhagar taluk of Ratnagiri district in the coastal Konkan region. Palshet had an abundance of trees named sawri. Their original surnames were Oak and Bapat, but since they hailed from the land of sawri trees, they came to be known as ‘Savarwadikar’, which, in due course, got shortened to ‘Savarkar’. 8 One of Vinayak’s ancestors was supposed to be a famed Sanskrit pundit. The Peshwa was so pleased with his scholarship that he gifted him a golden palanquin. The remnants of the palanquin that rested in the local Khandoba temple became part of their family lore. Given their eminence, after the migration of the Savarkars and their caste kin, the Dhopavkars, to Bhagur as its landlords, the fortune of the little town also shone like that of the palanquin-riding ancestor. The Savarkars, specifically an ancestor named Mahadev Dixit Savarkar, were also granted the adjoining village of Rahuri as a jagir for the aforementioned’s heroism. During the 1818 war, their ancestor, Parshurampant Savarkar, also served as an able diplomat negotiating between the Peshwas and the British.
Stories of the lavish Savarkar household, with fourteen courtyards, were passed on from generation to generation. So much so that much later, young Vinayak would eagerly count these fourteen courtyards each time an excavation in the house threw up a buried structure of the past; but he would always be disappointed that the number never squared. Rumours about the family well leading to hidden underground treasures that were guarded by a giant serpent were also part of this family’s romance with its glorious and hoary past.
Vinayak’s paternal grandfather had two sons and a daughter. His father, Damodarpant, or Annarao, was the younger of the two brothers, with a gap of about fifteen years separating the siblings. The elder uncle, who was called Bapu Kaka, was of athletic build and keenly interested in physical fitness and exercising. The legal profession deeply attracted him and he had several lawyer friends. He owned mangroves and farms but yearned for domestic bliss as his wife had died early without any offspring. Bapu Kaka never remarried and though his relationship with his younger brother remained strained, he treated his nephews and nieces as his own children, showering them with all his affection. The only sister of the two Savarkar brothers was married into the Kanetkar family of neighbouring Kothur. Her husband and Bapu Kaka were business partners.
Damodarpant lived in a world of his own. He was a friendly and mild-mannered man whose humility painfully extended to making him cringe with embarrassment each time honorifics were showered on him as the young jagirdar (landlord). He had completed his matriculation from Nashik High School and his teachers remembered him as an intelligent, though naughty child. He was even infamous for having thrown a ball at the school principal once. Besides being deeply religious, Damodarpant was a poet of sorts who had memorized and recited verses of great bards of Marathi and Sanskrit. He was married to Radhabai, daughter of Manohar Dixit, who belonged to the Dixit family of Brahmin scholars of Kothur. Like Damodar, Radhabai’s brother was equally interested in poetry and it was this interest in literature from both sides that rubbed off on the next generation of Savarkars. After losing two children, the couple was blessed with a son on 13 June 1879. This child too was sickly at birth and fragile health dogged him all his life. He was named Ganesh and he was lovingly called ‘Babarao’.
Four years later, on 28 May 1883, Damodar and Radha had their second son who was born in the family house at Bhagur. He was named Vinayak, but everyone affectionately called him ‘Tatya’ at home. The weak and petite Radhabai had suffered great labour pain and it was believed that she would most probably lose the baby. In 1886, Radhabai gave birth to a girl, Maina, who was called ‘Mai’. Two years later, on 25 May 1888, the youngest of the siblings, Narayan, was born. He was called ‘Bal’ at home and was the cynosure of their eyes.
Damodar’s family was picture-perfect. The young couple took strolls by the Daarna river each evening, and spent many a happy afternoon eating fresh, ripe mangoes with their children in their farms. The local Khandoba and Ganapati temples; a tree from which his father fell unconscious while attempting to pluck fruits; a dilapidated mutt; and the babul trees on the banks of the Daarna whose flowers were imagined as relatives waiting for him with open arms—were all enduring memories for the young and sensitive Vinayak. Many years later, he paid tribute to these lasting memories of his village and its picturesque and iconic spots in his Marathi poem ‘Gomantak’. He was forever lost in thought and fanciful imagination and would pen down most of it.
Vinayak was always the leader of the pack, the domineering child who loved public attention and adulation. He was fond of being pampered and ‘honoured’ as the ‘little jagirdar of Bhagur’ 9 and even as a child, he would sit amid his ‘subjects’ 10 and enact mock
courts with them. Farmers from the countryside who came home with bullock carts laden with fresh mangoes and other produce to their landlords never failed to pay their obeisance to the young boy. On his part, Vinayak would be deeply moved by their hard work, imploring them to sit in the shade, rest a bit while he served them refreshments. The petrified farmers would shriek in horror at the suggestion because entering their jagirdar’s house and sitting there would earn them the ire of the senior Savarkar brothers. To this, Vinayak would triumphantly tell them that if anyone caught them for their supposed indiscretion, they could confidently take his name and be let off. On a few occasions when Bapu Kaka walked past these squatting peasants, they would stand up in fright and seek his pardon, informing him that it was Tatya who had forced them to sit there and rest. With a broad smile on his face, Bapu Kaka would say, ‘Well, if the chota jagirdar has seated you here as his valued guests, how can I muster the courage to dislodge you? Sit, sit, enjoy yourselves!’ 11 and hurry away. This would boost the boy’s ego further.
Damodar’s maternal grandfather was known to be a brave warrior who had once commanded a battalion of horses. On one occasion, they had raided a group of dacoits and defeated them, taking away with them a beautiful idol of an eight-handed goddess—Ashtabhuja Bhawani. 12 Damodar’s mother had brought this idol to the household she had married into and it was installed at the family altar. The local priest had advised the family that being an extremely potent deity, it needed a daily animal sacrifice to propitiate it. The Savarkars being Brahmins and strict vegetarians had to hence shift the deity to the local temple where all the diurnal rituals could go on unabated. Every year, there was a grand procession of the goddess. Several years later, when Damodar built a new house, he decided to defy the priests and get the idol installed at home as the family deity. 13 The Bhawani idol attracted young Vinayak, who spent hours sitting in front of her, talking and chanting hymns. During the Navaratri festival, Damodarpant devoutly kept fasts, decorated her and made offerings of food, lamps, flowers and incense, even as Vinayak religiously sat beside him. Every time during the recitation of the Durga Saptashati when Damodar chanted ‘Namastasyai namastasyai namastasyai namo namah ’ (Repeated Salutations to you O! Mother!) in his high-pitched voice in chaste Sanskrit, Vinayak always got goose pimples.
Savarkar Page 3
