Age of Anger

by Pankaj Mishra

  Savarkar, the chief ideologue of India’s Hindu nationalist movement, emerged from his immersion in Mazzini’s collected works to conclude that Indians, like Italians, ‘were building humanity’. The conservative Hindu thinker Lala Lajpat Rai explicitly identified Mazzini as the founder of a new religion, whose creeds of nationality, liberty and unity were to be practised with blood and martyrdom. Another close reader of the Italian, Bipin Chandra Pal, used him to promote the cult of Bharat Mata (Mother India), revealing an allegedly ancient Hindu idea of the divinized and spiritualized nation, or the nation as mother, to be derived almost entirely from European nationalist notions.

  Another devotee of Mazzini was Liang Qichao, China’s foremost modern intellectual, and an inspiration to many writers, thinkers and activists across East Asia. Exiled to Japan in 1898, Liang produced a large inspirational history of Italy aimed at galvanizing his Chinese compatriots. Typically, he placed Mazzini at the centre, minimizing the latter’s differences with Cavour, and his eventual failure and irrelevance. Liang believed at this early stage in his career in the necessity of violence or what he termed ‘destructionism’ for the revival of Chinese civilization: ‘After catastrophes that arise in the cause of liberty,’ he wrote, ‘one can expect to reach modern civilization at some point.’ He was under the impression that Italy by the end of the nineteenth century was a successful nation state with a formidable military and industrial power: ‘the shame inflicted on generations of forefathers is now removed,’ he wrote, ‘and the glory of a 2,000-year-long-history is restored’.

  Liang hoped to restage in his own country the glorious resurrection of an ancient civilization. Mazzini also offered to him a model for personal heroism, journalistic fluency and a thrilling revolutionary politics. The Chinese intellectual, exiled like his hero and engaged in futile plots and secret societies, didn’t examine Mazzini’s ideas so much as find reasons in his life for self-exaltation. Eventually, Liang moved on from hazy claims and empty chatter. But by then one of his most devoted readers in the Chinese provinces, Mao Zedong, had inherited Liang’s fascination with revolutionaries who sacrifice themselves and others.

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  Mazzini’s magnetic appeal made for an extraordinarily diverse fan base, whose members tended to quickly transcend their religious and ethnic background in their search for philosophies of vitalism and action. In Egypt, the Jewish playwright James Sanua, the founder of modern Arabic drama, transmitted Mazzini’s ideas to Arab nationalists almost as soon as the Italian had formulated them. In the 1870s, Sanua’s close associate, Jamal al-din al-Afghani, the first ideologist of political Islam, established ‘Young Egypt’. Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the intellectual icon of Israel’s settler-Zionists, was briefly the editor of The Young Turk, a newspaper founded by Young Turks shortly after they took power in Turkey in 1908. Jabotinsky credited Mazzini, whose writings he had encountered in the turbulent Italy of the fin de siècle, for giving ‘depth’ to his ‘shallow Zionism’, ‘transforming it from an instinctive sentiment into a worldview’.

  A member of Mazzini-inspired ‘Young Bosnia’ assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914, triggering the First World War. Mazzini had his deepest and more enduring influence in India, where his cult far exceeded that of any Western figure, including John Stuart Mill. His books became best-sellers as early as the mid-nineteenth century, and eventually turned into how-to manuals for Hindu nationalists. Secret societies modelled on the Carboneria and Mazzini’s Young Italy arose in Calcutta in the 1870s, providing a ready platform to budding nationalists. As Surendranath Banerjea, known as the Indian Burke, wrote, ‘It was Mazzini, the incarnation of the highest moral forces in the political arena – Mazzini, the apostle of Italian unity, the friend of the human race, that I presented to the youth of Bengal. Mazzini had taught Italian unity. We wanted Indian unity.’

  But, colonized by the British, India suffered, more than even Italy, from the disadvantages of incomplete nationality; and its educated elites carried heavier burdens of irresolution – and fantasy. By the late nineteenth century many Hindus, who came from high castes that enjoyed relative power before the British arrived and constituted India’s educated elite, liked to believe that Hindus constituted a great nation by default, and that India was their sacred land.

  These pupils of Mazzini belonged to the first and second generation of upper-caste South Asians educated in Western-style institutions in the new cities and towns created by British colonialists. Resentments abounded among these upper-caste Hindus, who had no real power, and were seen by their overlords as backward and effeminate. India’s most famous novelist of the nineteenth century, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, typified the tendency to cringe and hate. A high official in the Bengal bureaucracy, he spun garish fictional fantasies about militant Hindu saviours. Anandamath (1882), his most famous novel, describes a band of holy warriors rescuing ‘Mother India’ from barbaric foreign invaders.

  Like the early Zionists, who embraced many anti-Semitic stereotypes, these late nineteenth-century Indian nationalists internalized British clichés about Indians as weak, unworldly and unmanly. Longing for martial valour, these men were too fastidiously conscious of their high-born status to turn into a boldly left-wing revolutionary intelligentsia, like the Russian one. The political ideology that seemed a natural fit for these educated, progressive but marginalized Hindus was a radicalism of the right.

  They reinvented and reconfigured tradition itself as part of an effort to create a Hindu nation. As Pal confessed, ‘all these old and traditional gods and goddesses who had lost their hold upon the modern educated mind have been reinstalled with a new historic and nationalist interpretations in the thoughts and sentiments of the people’. (Predictably, it did not occur to them to ask, as B. R. Ambedkar, the devastating critic of upper-caste delusions, did: ‘How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation?’)

  Many of these insecure Hindus were vulnerable to the inherent teleology in Mazzini’s religion of humanity: the God who loved progress and made man the carrier of the Divine Spirit. Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, one of the nineteenth-century religions of humanity, had actually fought in Italy with Garibaldi and befriended Mazzini in London, before fixing on India as the place for the next great awakening. Various mystical doctrines and occult organizations in the West in the late nineteenth century were informed by European scholarship in Hinduism and Buddhism. Arriving in India, they found many eager and gullible adherents (including the teenaged Jawaharlal Nehru, who was initiated into the Theosophical Society by the Fabian socialist gadfly Annie Besant).

  Many of these Hindus were particularly susceptible to a scheme that promised the achievement of modernity through their tradition: a national rebirth that would revivify what was perceived by British liberals and Utilitarians to be stagnant and degenerate. For instance, the idealized image of the woman as nation could be made to seem spiritually superior to the unruly and demanding modern wife (and used to control her). The chauvinism of these Hindus was boosted by the general expectation that a new age of mankind was at hand, and that, as devotees of Bharat Mata, they might be called upon to lead it. At the same time, they couldn’t help but despair at the lack of real ingredients for such a Hindu nation.

  Apathetic masses and an infinitesimal, politically insignificant middle class drove them into obsessive daydreams of sacrifice and martyrdom. It was among these upper-caste Hindus, often irreligious if not militantly secular, that the idea of ‘Hindutva’, a form of political Hinduism that organizes and militarizes the Hindus, grew. And from these messianic figures emerged the men who assassinated Gandhi, and whose intellectual progeny now rule India.

  Learning from (While Exterminating) the Brutes

  The most important of these Indian exceptionalists now seems to be Savarkar, the chief theorizer of Hindutva, whose intellectual spurs were almost all European. He was born in 1883 in the western Indian city of Nasik, into a Brahmin family tha
t not long after his birth fell into financial difficulties. In 1902, Savarkar agreed to marry the daughter of a family friend on the condition that his father-in-law would pay for his education at Fergusson College in Pune. He first read Herbert Spencer in Pune, and was enthralled by his vision of struggle. At the age of twenty-three Savarkar went to England on a scholarship set up by one of the English writer’s devoted Indian students. He spent the next four years in a daze of Mazzini worship.

  A true disciple of the Italian nationalist, Savarkar abhorred conventional religion while embracing a secular notion of salvation. But, conforming to a general pattern of escalation, he went much further than his hero in making Hindu nationalism an ideology of hate and violent revenge. In this he had learned the lessons of Wagner’s Germany most effectively: ‘Nothing makes the Self conscious of itself,’ Savarkar wrote, ‘so much as a conflict with [the] non-self. Nothing can weld peoples into a nation and nations into a state as the pressure of a common foe. Hatred separates as well as unites.’

  The pathological hatred of foreigners that overcame Heinrich von Kleist also drove Savarkar. He lamented the ‘suicidal ideas about chivalry to women’ that prevented Hindu warriors of the past from raping Muslim women. (Savarkar’s emotional impairment is confirmed by his virtual silence about his marriage and family life in his autobiographical writings.) In his book on the Indian Mutiny in 1857, he carefully described European women and children being slaughtered by Indians during the risings. ‘A sea of white blood spread all over … body parts floated in it.’ He concluded the description of each atrocity with a gleefully specific reference to the historical injury thereby avenged.

  Violence for Savarkar always seems to have been a form of emancipation. He relates in his autobiography how as a twelve-year-old boy he led a gang of schoolmates to vandalize his village mosque ‘to our heart’s content’. In his world view, revenge and retribution were essential to establishing racial and national parity and dignity. But the Hindus needed to have proper enemies against which to measure their manly selves.

  To this end, Savarkar built a lurid narrative of Muslims humiliating Hindus; but he also played up Muslims’ ‘fierce unity of faith, that social cohesion and valorous fervour which made them as a body so irresistible’. He gushed enviously about the Prophet and the world dissemination of Islam through a deft use of the ‘sword’. His praise of Muslims, duty-bound to ‘reduce all the world to a sense of obedience to theocracy, an Empire under the direct supervision of God’, stressed all the qualities that he thought overly philosophical and politically fractious Hindus sorely lacked.

  The Hindu self, in other words, needed to learn from the Muslim non-self. Indians had to abandon values like ‘humility, self-surrender and forgiveness’ and nurture ‘sturdy habits of hatred, retaliation, vindictiveness’. Indians had been misled by their metaphysical and religious traditions, such as Buddhism, which could not compete with the ‘fire and sword’ of India’s invaders. Moreover, they had to learn from the modern Europeans, who had defanged Islamic civilization, in another twist in the cycle of civilizations. Echoing Herzl’s notion of ‘Darwinian mimicry’, Savarkar hoped for Hindus to adapt themselves to, and then rise in, a world that was ‘red in tooth and claw’.

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  Trying to work up hatred as a categorical imperative, Savarkar found Gandhi’s non-violence ‘sinful’. Much of his life was defined by his antipathy to Gandhi, a ‘crazy lunatic’, as he put it, who ‘happens to babble … [about] compassion, forgiveness’. The two men knew each other in London early in their careers, and there was some talk of working on the common cause of Indian freedom. In 1906 they met at a lodging house for Indian students and aspiring revolutionaries in Highgate. In one account of their encounter, Savarkar, who was frying prawns, offered them to Gandhi. When Gandhi, a vegetarian, refused, Savarkar allegedly said that only a fool would attempt to fight the British Empire without being fortified by animal protein.

  Gandhi seems to have taken due note of Savarkar’s political as well as culinary choices. The Hindu activist had friends among a range of expatriate Indian revolutionaries, who partook of the general trend of assassination in Europe and America, believing in Mazzini’s notion that ‘ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs’. One of his upper-caste disciples assassinated a British official in the first successful act of terrorism in India. In 1909, Savarkar inspired another murderous assault on a senior British official in London; he then helped set up scholarships in the name of the assassin.

  Gandhi, who had arrived in the British capital a few days after the killing, condemned it as a ‘modern political act par excellence – terrorism legitimized by nationalism’. ‘India,’ he cautioned, ‘can gain nothing from the rule of murderers.’ During his stay in England, Gandhi was much disturbed by the appeal of terroristic violence among Savarkar and his associates. He may have already decided to reinterpret Mazzini in order to rescue him from the Hindu militants. In any case, on the way back to South Africa from England, Gandhi feverishly wrote, in nine days, his manifesto for Indian freedom and denunciation of modern civilization, Hind Swaraj.

  In this book he devoted a whole chapter to the topic ‘Italy and India’. Gandhi, worried that Mazzini’s religion of humanity could be appropriated for sectarian ends, blended the Italian’s idea of patriotic duty and education into his own quasi-Hindu ideal of spiritual independence (Swaraj, or self-rule, as distinct from self-government). ‘Mazzini has shown,’ he argued, ‘in his writings on the duty of man that every man must learn to rule himself.’ As distinct from Savarkar’s duty, which was to kill for one’s religious community, Gandhi wrote of the necessity of a non-violent social order.

  Gandhi then indulged in some historical revisionism. He blamed the violent aspects of the Risorgimento on Garibaldi: ‘He gave, and every Italian took, arms.’ As for Mazzini, he stood ‘aloof from the petty compromises’; he was superior to Cavour in realizing that ‘true liberty does not consist in the right to choose evil, but in the right to choose the ways that lead to good’. This was why Mazzini’s ambitions were unrealized in Italy and a ‘state of slavery’ prevailed there. Gandhi ignored altogether Mazzini’s faith in science and progress, or his fantasy of a Third Rome (and the Italian’s dismissive views of Hinduism). He used the Italian’s writings to cement his argument that ‘to observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions’ and that India ought not to aspire for independence through violence. The Indians who thought otherwise were ‘intoxicated by the wretched modern civilization’, which is predicated on violence.

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  Savarkar and Gandhi’s paths diverged sharply after 1909. Savarkar was arrested in 1910 for his involvement in the murder of a British official in India, and condemned to fifty years in prison. After just two months at a draconian prison in the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, he was writing mercy petitions to the British – an exercise in abject self-cancellation that came to light many decades later.

  In one such supplication, Savarkar described himself as a ‘prodigal son’ knocking on ‘parental doors of the government’. He promised to ‘be the staunchest advocate of constitutional progress and loyalty to the English government’ and to ‘bring back all those misled young men in India and abroad who were once looking up to me as their guide’.

  As the First World War broke out, he wrote ‘I most humbly beg to offer myself as a volunteer to do any service in the present war, that the Indian government think fit to demand from me.’ Savarkar was denied his moment on the battlefield (unlike his Zionist coeval Jabotinsky, who helped found the Jewish Legion, and fought with the British during their fateful conquest of Palestine in 1917). Nevertheless, he seems to have got a vicarious ‘thrill of delight in my heart’ on hearing of Indian soldiers participating in the slaughter of the First World War: ‘Thank God! Manliness after all is not dead yet in the land.’ He pointed to the common dangers to Hindus and Christians of Turko-Afghan hordes to the north of India,
writing that ‘every intelligent lover of India would heartily and loyally cooperate with the British people in the interest of India herself’. The British eventually commuted his sentence after fewer than fourteen years in prison. But they also forced Savarkar to cease his anti-imperialist activities. Interned in a small western Indian town, he was left to define the Hindu self in opposition to what it was not.

  His prison library in Andaman had contained writings by Treitschke and Herbert Spencer, and the complete works of Mazzini. He deployed his obsessive readings in the Italian to write Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (1928), the book that comes closest to defining the ideology of modern Hindu nationalism. According to Savarkar, Hindutva embraced ‘all the department of thought and activity of the whole being of our Hindu race’. Closely imitating Mazzini’s imprecisions, he wrote, ‘India was the land of Hindus, their culture was Aryan, and their roots traced back to the Vedic times.’

  There was a bit more clarity in Savarkar’s call to ‘Hinduize all politics and Militarise Hindudom.’ Such aims could at least appear to be achieved by identifying Muslims as the enemy within. They were undeniably alien to India: ‘Their holy land is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently, their names and their outlook smack of foreign origin.’ (Savarkar characteristically forgot that the holy places of Christian Europe are in Palestine.)

  Savarkar himself had no time for any of India’s indigenous faiths or traditional ways of life. ‘He [Mazzini] savagely attacked,’ Savarkar wrote approvingly, ‘the notion of the gates of Heaven, if there be such a thing, being open to anyone who had neglected to serve the nation, whiling away his time in empty rituals of religion.’ Savarkar was as much forward-looking and scientistic as any of the fascists, communists and Zionists bred during the fin de siècle. ‘If you want success on earth,’ he wrote, ‘you must acquire earthly power and strength. If your movement has material strength you will succeed whether or not you have divine blessing for it … Has not atheist Soviet Russia become a World Power?’