Repackaging Hedgewar, and the RSS

In the centenary year of the RSS, Sachin Nandha’s Hedgewar: A Definitive Biography seeks to explore the intellectual legacy of its founder, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889–1940). However, instead of being a “reflective” biography, which invites the reader to critically engage with the personality, Nandha’s “definitive” biography treatment forecloses the possibility of divergent interpretations of both Hedgewar and the RSS. Moreover, for someone who describes himself as a philosopher, Nandha’s exploration of Hedgewar’s ideas seldom breaches the territories of the known and the obvious. Ironically, he gives Hedgewar’s politics and philosophy short shrift, only to prioritise a verbose description of Hedgewar’s social milieu instead.

One part of the reason for this is that Nandha largely falls into the category of those sympathetic writers who want to repackage the polarising public image of the RSS as an organisation that essentially works for the relief of everyday people. This attempt at repackaging comes with a plethora of cultural buzzwords, including terms like “cultural revival”, “civilisational ethos”, “inner struggle”, and “saatvik leadership”, to name just a few. Nandha’s desperation to emphasise the profundity of these traits is palpable, as he projects Hedgewar as a global personality in the introduction itself. He writes: “Not since Jesus Christ has an obscure pauper inspired such devotion or been so calamitously misrepresented.” He continues: “Like Marx, Hedgewar is not what he appears at first glance.”

This global dalliance continues throughout the book by showing overlaps of Hedgewar’s thought with a liberal sprinkling of quotes from Western philosophy, ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilism to Karl Popper’s views on tolerance. If the first two names are used to project Hedgewar as a global voice, the latter, along with a few others, are invoked to draw parallels between these thinkers and Hedgewar’s thoughts based on a few quotes. Nandha is consistent with such perfunctory treatment even while engaging with the secondary literature on the RSS.

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Nandha accuses “academics” of naively framing the rise of the RSS in the context of European nationalism. We are not informed who these “academics” are. Nandha deploys synonyms to add more mystery. Sample this: “Modern-day pundits and commentators in India and abroad seldom, if at all, talk about the RSS, or Hedgewar, in any meaningful way.” Again, who are we talking about?

A few chapters into the book, these pundits and commentators get transformed into “the intellectual descendants of the British”. It is no surprise that someone like Herbert Risley, a British ethnographer who was the director of the 1901 Census of India, is described by Nandha as the man who sowed the seeds of casteism in India. For Nandha, Britishers, along with their intellectual descendants, have continued to vitiate the pristine Hindu culture by concocting such artificial segmentations in Hindu society.

Apart from dealing with Christophe Jaffrelot’s work on the RSS, and that too in a minimal sense, Nandha’s reflection on the existing critical literature of the RSS remains superficial. For example, by registering his discomfort with some scholars on drawing parallels between the RSS variety of cultural nationalism and strands of European nationalism, there is no deeper engagement to explain why this is insufficient or problematic. Scholars have shown how the leaders of the Italian nationalist movement had a significant impact on the Marathi-speaking intelligentsia from the late 19th century.

As E. Fasana observes in his essay in Writers, Editors, and Reformers: Social and Political Transformations of Maharashtra, 1830-1930 (1999), the centenaries of the heroes of the Risorgimento like Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Count Camillo di Cavour, provided a propitious environment for the Marathi press to cite them as examples that Indians could follow. Or, as Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay writes in The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right, B.S. Moonje, a senior leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and someone who had a strong influence on Hedgewar, compared the military organisations in Mussolini’s Italy to the RSS that Hedgewar was building in India.

Instead, oddly enough, Nandha claims that “Western academics” have caricatured the RSS as a fascist, paramilitary organisation. This puerile Western academic theory, lumping all critical scholarship together, is reduced to one citation of Prabhat Patnaik, who is not even a Western academic. This obscurity with terms continues with Nandha further claiming that people have always viewed India through the prism of Gandhi. Again, who are these “people”?

We are provided another jaded false binary where Nandha accuses these “people” of supporting the Congress as a party that upholds the values of liberty and secularism, and the RSS as standing for the vices of authoritarianism and communalism. It is baffling to see how the enormously complex social and cultural tapestry of modern India gets constricted to this binary. Nandha’s dyadic formulation states that “people” who criticise the RSS, praise the Congress. If that is the case, then how do we understand the rich history of anti-caste movements, for instance, that have criticised both these organisations through different intellectual vantage points?

Nandha’s “definitive” biography treatment forecloses the possibility of divergent interpretations of both Hedgewar and the RSS.  | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

For Nandha, it is important to envision Hedgewar as a multifaceted personality. For him, he was a social reformer, an ascetic, philosopher, secularist, and a global thinker. And so he informs his readers that Hedgewar has had an enormous role in instilling cultural values in the minds of Indians. For Hedgewar, “India’s plurality lay in Hindu dharma, and Hindu culture was Indian culture”. The problem is that Nandha fails to provide a sufficient philosophical exploration of all the cultural traits mentioned above. A few examples would suffice.

Nandha writes that Hedgewar believed that the root causes behind the fall of Hindu society were a lack of a coherent sense of nationhood, a serious dearth of deshbhakti (patriotism), and that without deshbhakti, Hindus lacked a sense of self-respect. We are informed that Hedgewar’s thought was not religious but focussed only on deshbhakti. For a term so central to Hedgewar’s thought, Nandha fails to provide a rigorous philosophical account of it. For example, Nandha underscores the profound impact of the teachings of Pandit Samarth Ramdas, a saint and philosopher from 17th century western India, on Hedgewar’s thought. Any curious reader is bound to get instantly absorbed into this interesting premise. However, Nandha concludes this profundity in a few perfunctory paragraphs.

Nandha observes that Hedgewar was critical of Hindu society. Sample this sentence: “Privately, however, he was building a substantial critique of Hindu society with a view of reforming the basic individual from the ground up, with an abiding mission of instilling nobility and character, wrapped around patriotism rooted in the age-old idea—dharma.” Again, what do we mean by “reforming the individual”? Whose “nobility” and “character” are we talking about? And how do we reconcile “age-old idea of dharma” with Ramdas’ 17th century “Maharashtra Dharma” and deshbhakti, which was a term that gained prominence only from the 19th century?

At the same time, Nandha informs us that the Hedgewar family was the repository of ancient Hindu culture. In other words, culture is flawless, whereas it is Hindu society that has degenerated. In Nandha’s words: “Hedgewar was fighting for the protection and revitalisation of an ancient culture that was rooted in the soil of ancient India…. therefore not fighting for a political state.”

By outsourcing the origins of communal disharmony to the Muslims, Nandha constantly repeats the point that for Hedgewar Hindu society had become weak, even rotten, and needed urgent reform. For Nandha, this point is crucial, as the RSS evolved through this vulnerability. At no point does Nandha address the main question: who was responsible for this vulnerability? Also, is there any possibility of exploring the reasons for this decline within Hindu society?

Clearly, for Hedgewar, becoming weak and rotten necessarily must be contingent on how “outsiders” have made Hindus vulnerable. “Reform” needs the adversarial presence of the outsider. Hindu society’s degeneration is down to another dyadic formulation of Hindus being perpetually servile and Muslims being the constant aggressors. Nandha’s penchant for puerile formulations is once again discernible while writing on Hindu society, where he remarks: “Almost every historian accepts that Hindu society is rooted in a primordial past.” Again, who are these historians?

Hedgewar vs Savarkar

To be fair to Nandha on one specific aspect, he does caution his readers repeatedly about the hagiographical veneer of the existing literature on the RSS. One of the issues he seeks to explore is the frosty relationship between V.D. Savarkar and Hedgewar. For Savarkar, the RSS was too soft. It was akin to a centrist reformist organisation. Savarkar believed in direct confrontation with the adversary instead of the Hedgewarian gradualism of individual capacity and organisation-building. Even with this premise, where Nandha attempts to explore internal fissures and tensions within Hindu nationalist groups, he fails to provide concrete answers to certain questions.

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For example, Nandha’s documentation of Hedgewar being closer to Savarkar’s brothers than to Savarkar himself largely remains an unresolved mystery. There is a distinct lack of specificity to Nandha’s reasoning for this uneasy relationship. This can be understood in Nandha’s own words: “The truth is that Hedgewar, throughout the thirties, attempted to distance himself from the Mahasabha, and although he respected Savarkar, he never particularly liked the man and kept him as far away as possible from the RSS.”

Nonetheless, this quote does prompt an important question. Who has had a bigger legacy: Savarkar or Hedgewar? For Hedgewar, according to his deshbhakti philosophy, Indian Muslims are Hindus, both in a geographical and a genetic sense. Savarkar’s fatherland and holy land theory counters this assertion. It is also important to study whether Hedgewar’s principles were accepted in toto by the RSS leaders who succeeded him. As Pralay Kanungo has observed in RSS’s Tryst with Politics: From Hedgewar to Sudarshan (2002), prominent RSS leaders like Golwalkar, the immediate successor of Hedgewar, rejected territorial nationalism in favour of cultural nationalism. In any case, in the centenary year, it will be interesting to see whether the RSS will seek to re-envision its intellectual relationship with Savarkar. 

Surajkumar Thube is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Political Science Department, Ashoka University.