Few figures in modern Indian history have acquired as much political significance as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Once confined largely to the ideological margins, he now occupies the centre of India’s political imagination. His portrait hangs in parliament, airports and public institutions, while his writings are tirelessly quoted in the public sphere.For supporters of Hindutva, Savarkar was the visionary who diagnosed India’s predicament as one of sovereignty long before Independence. For his critics, he remains the intellectual architect of a majoritarian politics whose consequences continue to refashion contemporary India for the worse.This fierce disagreement has generated no shortage of books. Some celebrate Savarkar as an overlooked patriot whose reputation has been unfairly tarnished by postcolonial liberalism. Others present him as little more than a precursor to religious nationalism, emphasising his role in creating the ideological conditions that culminated in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination; or, indeed, his alleged involvement in the murderous conspiracy itself.On both sides, the result has often been more polemic than history. Savarkar has become an object of defence or condemnation rather than a political thinker whose ideas demand explanation.Janaki Bakhle’s Savarkar is valuable precisely because it refuses this binary. Rather than asking readers to admire or absolve its subject, it asks how Savarkar became one of the most politically influential thinkers in modern India. Her answer is not simply that he developed Hindutva; rather, her new book argues that his influence emerged through an unusually successful fusion of political argument, historical imagination, literary production and cumulative myth-making.If Savarkar continues to matter today, it is because he provided a historical and emotional vocabulary through which many Indians have come to understand their nationhood and civilisation.Janaki BakhleSavarkar and the Making of HindutvaPrinceton University Press (2024)The book also arrives at an important moment for the study of Indian political thought. Over the past decade, historians and political theorists have increasingly moved beyond treating India’s intellectual history as little more than a dialogue with European liberalism or colonial rule. Instead, they have recovered rich vernacular traditions of political reflection that unfolded across multiple languages and regions.Intellectual biography has become one of the principal vehicles for this recovery, with as much serious academic work on Dadabhai Naoroji, Tilak, Lajpat Rai, Savarkar, Ambedkar and others accompanying the usual stream of hagiographic treatments. Moreover, these studies have reconstructed the lives and ideas of figures whose influence cannot be measured simply through parliamentary office or philosophical originality. Political ideas travelled through novels, poems, pamphlets, speeches and religious writing as much as through systematic treatises.Bakhle’s contribution belongs squarely within this emerging body of scholarship and yet it is distinctive in one notable respect. Rather than focusing primarily on Savarkar’s political tracts, she reconstructs the wider Marathi literary and cultural world from which they emerged. Poetry and devotional writing become just as significant as constitutional argument or political theory.The result is a portrait of Savarkar that is genuinely, as Bakhle describes it, ‘kaleidoscopic’. Rotate the lens and different images appear: revolutionary nationalist, rationalist, social reformer, Brahmin intellectual, literary modernist, political propagandist and uncompromising advocate of Hindu nationhood.This apparent parallax also explains why Savarkar has proved so difficult to categorise. Depending upon one’s vantage point and which aspect of his work one chooses to emphasise, Savarkar can appear surprisingly progressive or deeply reactionary. He campaigned against untouchability while leaving the underlying logic of caste largely intact. He denounced superstition while embracing civilisational myth. He defended certain rights for women while simultaneously advancing an intensely masculinist political vision.Different generations have therefore encountered different Savarkars, each assembled from a different selection of his remarkably diverse writings.One of the book’s greatest achievements is to demonstrate that these competing interpretations are not merely products of present-day political disagreement but that they were built into Savarkar’s reception from the beginning.English-language scholarship has often treated him principally as the author of Hindutva or as an anti-Muslim ideologue. Marathi readers, however, encountered an altogether broader literary figure whose poems, plays and historical works enjoyed lives independent of his explicitly political writings.Bakhle’s command of Marathi sources enables her to recover these neglected dimensions and, in doing so, explain why Savarkar’s reputation developed so differently across linguistic communities. Her commitment to maintaining the link between ideas and their literary form pays methodological dividends and tells us a lot about the link between identity, passion and politics even today.Political thought rarely succeeds because of conceptual sophistication alone. It succeeds when ideas become emotionally compelling, historically plausible and culturally memorable. Savarkar understood this instinctively. For him, history, poetry and political philosophy all became instruments for constructing a shared Hindu past capable of producing a united Hindu future.Seen from this perspective, Bakhle’s biography is not simply about one controversial political figure. It is also about the making of modern political myth. Every nationalist movement constructs stories about collective origins, historical suffering and future destiny. The question is not whether myths exist but how they are fashioned, who fashions them and why some become politically durable while others disappear.Savarkar emerges as one of the 20th century’s most successful myth-makers precisely because he recognised that nations are held together not simply by constitutions or institutions but by emotionally resonant historical narratives.Yet Bakhle never mistakes political effectiveness for historical accuracy. Throughout the book, she carefully distinguishes between Savarkar’s undeniable skill in constructing national memory and the evidential basis of many of his historical claims. His histories frequently sacrificed scholarly rigour to political purpose. Facts mattered less than producing a usable past capable of binding together an otherwise fractured Hindu society.This tension between history as critical inquiry and history as political mobilisation runs through the entire biography. It also explains why Savarkar remains such a powerful and divisive figure in India today. The debates surrounding him are ultimately not only about the past but also about competing understandings of the nation itself and questions of who belongs to it, what binds it together and which version of history should guide its future.It is this larger argument, rather than its meticulous archival research alone, that makes Bakhle’s biography one of the most relevant books yet written on Savarkar. Rather than reducing him to either villain or visionary, she asks how he became politically imaginable in the first place. That question is considerably more illuminating than deciding whether he deserves admiration or condemnation.The question Bakhle repeatedly returns to is not simply what Savarkar believed, but how his beliefs acquired such political durability. Her answer lies in tracing the relationship among three mutually reinforcing projects: the making of a revolutionary hero, the construction of an existential Muslim ‘other’ and the reimagining of Hindu society as a unified political community.The first of these begins, paradoxically, with the British Empire itself. Savarkar’s years under surveillance and transportation to the Cellular Jail in the Andamans have long been central to nationalist memory. Bakhle demonstrates that these episodes were not merely biographical milestones but were instrumental in creating the mythology that later surrounded him.Bakhle has drawn extensively on colonial intelligence files and administrative correspondence to show how British officials projected their own anxieties onto Savarkar. They imagined him as the embodiment of revolutionary conspiracy, linking him to broader fears of anti-imperial violence and pan-Islamic insurrection. Ironically, the colonial archive itself became one of the principal sources from which Savarkar’s heroic reputation was later assembled. Surveillance magnified his cultural influence, turning an imprisoned revolutionary into a legendary figure within nationalist politics.Yet Bakhle also resists romanticising this story. The colonial state did not simply repress Savarkar, it also deployed him politically. Officials frequently contrasted his uncompromising nationalism with Gandhi’s experiments in mass mobilisation and Hindu-Muslim cooperation. Colonial anxieties surrounding the Khilafat movement encouraged officials to treat Savarkar’s hostility towards Muslims as politically useful, revealing the complicated ways imperial governance shaped the ideological terrain from which both nationalism and communal politics emerged.If colonial imprisonment helped produce the legend, Bakhle argues that anti-Muslim politics supplied its organising principle.Bakhle rejects the claim, sometimes advanced by sympathetic interpreters, that Savarkar’s hostility towards Muslims emerged only after the hardships of the Cellular Jail. Drawing on intelligence reports, Bakhle demonstrates that these prejudices predated Savarkar’s imprisonment, even if incarceration intensified them.The significance of the Khilafat movement and the Moplah rebellion, therefore, was not in changing Savarkar’s mind but in confirming convictions he already held. They enabled him to organise disparate observations into a seemingly coherent political theory. Muslims, he increasingly argued, possessed an exceptional capacity for disciplined collective violence and their loyalties extended beyond India’s territorial boundaries. His conclusion was that Hindu survival depended upon recognising this permanent civilisational antagonism.The book carefully shows that this worldview depended upon selective historical narration. Savarkar repeatedly assembled episodes of violence into a continuous story of Hindu victimhood while minimising episodes that complicated this narrative. The point was not simply to recount history but to produce a political memory capable of generating solidarity. Violence became evidence of a long-term civilisational conflict rather than the outcome of particular historical circumstances.However varied Savarkar’s writings may have been, their political coherence ultimately rested upon a single organising assumption. Hindu nationhood was inseparable from a persistent conviction that Muslims constituted the principal obstacle to its realisation. Photo: PTI.History, for Savarkar, was a political technology tasked with producing the memories of shared struggle and triumph that national solidarity demanded. While colonial historians had portrayed India as supine through chronic division, Savarkar sought to reverse this narrative by recovering moments of Hindu courage and military glory.Nor does Bakhle shirk the responsibility of explaining Savarkar’s sometimes contradictory views on caste. Admirers have often presented Savarkar as a remarkably progressive social reformer because, unlike many conservative contemporaries, he publicly advocated temple entry for Dalits and encouraged inter-caste dining. These interventions continue to feature prominently in contemporary attempts to distinguish Hindutva from older forms of Brahmanical orthodoxy.Bakhle does not deny these reforms but asks what purpose they served, and her answer is striking. Savarkar’s critique of caste was almost never ethical because he did not challenge caste on the grounds that it violated principles of equality or justice. He did, however, identify caste as a strategic weakness. A society fractured by internal divisions could neither resist external enemies nor sustain national sovereignty. Social reform, therefore, became an instrument for political consolidation.Unlike B.R. Ambedkar, who regarded caste itself as a system of oppression requiring annihilation, Savarkar sought primarily to remove those features of caste that obstructed Hindu cohesion. From first to last, the objective remained to forge a politically unified Hindu nation capable of collective organisation and resistance to perceived external threats.The book’s exegesis of Marathi intellectual culture locates these arguments within a wider regional context. Savarkar’s proposals were not simply abstract political theories but interventions in ongoing debates among Maharashtrian reformers and literary figures. At the same time, however, she shows that caste reforms remained embedded within an unquestioned Brahmanical framework. While advocating practical changes to ritual practice, drawing on Brahmanical sources, Savarkar left the deeper philosophical assumptions of the Sanskritic social order intact.Savarkar’s reinterpretations of figures such as Shivaji did not merely celebrate historical heroes; they transformed complex regional rulers, otherwise embedded in the realities of caste politics, into symbols of an eternal Hindu nation united by superhuman willpower and martial virtue. This imaginative labour was as politically important as any constitutional argument. If Hindus could be persuaded to remember themselves as a single historical people rather than a collection of castes, sects and regions, then the political community imagined in Hindutva would already possess emotional foundations.If the earlier chapters explain how Savarkar fashioned a political imagination, the final sections of Bakhle’s biography ask how that imagination survived. After all, Savarkar died in 1966. The Bharatiya Janata Party did not come to power for decades. Between those moments lay long periods in which Hindutva remained electorally marginal, while Nehruvian secularism and the Congress system appeared to define the intellectual consensus of postcolonial India.Explaining Savarkar’s contemporary significance therefore requires more than an account of his ideas. It requires an account of how those ideas continued to circulate despite often unfavourable political circumstances.The English-language scholarship on Savarkar has understandably concentrated on his better-known political writings and their relationship to Hindu nationalism. Bakhle widens the archive considerably. She draws attention to an extraordinary body of Marathi memoirs, biographies, commemorative writings and devotional literature that has largely escaped scholars outside Maharashtra. More than 250 Marathi books on Savarkar have appeared over the decades. Collectively, they sustained an image of him that was often quite different from the one found in English-language academic or journalistic debates.This vernacular archive matters because political traditions are rarely preserved by formal ideology alone. They endure through stories, commemorations, school readers, biographies, local theatre, poetry, anniversaries and family memory. Intellectual historians have increasingly recognised that political ideas travel through culture as much as through philosophical argument. Savarkar did not simply leave behind a political programme – he became the subject of a literary culture.Whether Savarkar produced a systematic philosophy is ultimately less interesting than the fact that he articulated a vision of Hindu nationhood that millions of people have found coherent and emotionally persuasive. Photo: PTI.One of the striking features of contemporary Indian politics is the extent to which vernacular historical worlds have become politically consequential. Figures once dismissed by English-speaking intellectuals as regional or culturally marginal have returned to national prominence through decades of work carried out in regional languages and institutions.Bakhle hints at this broader phenomenon without fully developing it, and her account invites comparison with figures such as K.M. Munshi, oft-cited by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, whose Gujarati novels and historical writings continue to shape popular understandings of India despite never having occupied a place in the concerns of political scientists. It also helps explain why historians and commentators who confined themselves to English-language debates were frequently surprised by the political resilience of Hindutva.Measured against that standard, Savarkar was an extraordinarily effective political thinker. This is perhaps where historians and political theorists have sometimes talked past one another. Political theorists sought sophisticated normative innovation, while historians were more attentive to how ideas acquire political force in their linguistic and cultural contexts.Pleasingly, Bakhle’s biography quietly bridges these approaches. Whether Savarkar produced a systematic philosophy is ultimately less interesting than the fact that he articulated a vision of Hindu nationhood that millions of people have found coherent and emotionally persuasive. If his ideas continue to shape political life, they deserve to be studied as political thought rather than dismissed as mere propaganda.The book also speaks to a wider debate about decolonisation. In recent years, the language of decolonisation has increasingly been appropriated across the political spectrum. For some, it signifies the recovery of subaltern histories or the dismantling of colonial knowledge structures. For others, particularly within Hindu nationalist circles, it means restoring an allegedly suppressed Hindu civilisational consciousness.Bakhle does not collapse these distinct projects into one another, showing instead how Savarkar’s own historical writing could plausibly appear ‘decolonial’ from within its own intellectual framework. His historiographical rejection of Hindu weakness and insistence upon indigenous historical agency all resonated with broader anti-colonial intuitions.At the same time, Bakhle carefully demonstrates the limits of that project. Savarkar replaced one politically instrumental history with another. Colonial accounts of Indian passivity gave way to narratives of uninterrupted Hindu heroism, and historical complexity yielded to civilisational myth. The book’s resistance to caricaturing this transition is a breath of fresh air. She recognises both the political appeal and the historical cost of transforming history into an instrument of national mobilisation.The book does arrive at the inescapable conclusion that, in the pursuit of national mobilisation, however varied Savarkar’s writings may have been, their political coherence ultimately rested upon a single organising assumption. Hindu nationhood was inseparable from a persistent conviction that Muslims constituted the principal obstacle to its realisation. That hostility was not a peripheral prejudice but the thread binding together all of his reflections on Indian politics.In an era when Savarkar has become one of the defining symbols of India’s ideological contest, Bakhle’s achievement is therefore considerable. She has produced among the most sophisticated accounts yet of how a regional writer, revolutionary and polemicist fashioned an intellectual world that continues to shape Indian national politics.When debates about Savarkar are often conducted through partisan slogans and pseudo-intellectual myth-making, that insight alone makes this one of the most necessary books on Indian politics to emerge in recent years.Vikram Visana is lecturer in political theory with the School of History, Politics & International Relations at the University of Leicester.Update: The author has informed The Wire that Grammarly was “used for proofreading and sentence editing” of the draft.The Wire’s policy on AI maybe referenced here. (Updated 16:57, August 10, 2026