Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, or Guruji as he is reverentially referred to by his followers, is regarded as the demi-god of Hindutva politics and often accorded a status higher than even the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, K. B. Hedgewar.
In 1940, when 34-year-old Golwalkar unexpectedly assumed charge of the RSS on Hedgewar's death, the Hindu militia was still in its nascent stage, with pockets of influence mainly in Maharashtra. Under Golwalkar's leadership over the next three decades, the RSS and its allied organizations, known as the Sangh Parivar, extended its network across the entire country and penetrated almost every aspect of Indian society.
Golwalkar's ideological influence was enormous-and it did not end with his death. Golwalkar's prescriptions in his incendiary book We or Our Nationhood Defined, published in 1939, now became central to the ideological training and radicalization of youth dedicated to the idea of a Hindu Rashtra. Horo, Golwalkar prescribed a solution to India's 'minority problem' based on the Nazi treatment of Jews in the Third Reich. As Dhirendra K. Jha conclusively establishes in this book, this would eventually provide the core of the Sangh's credo and, as events in the recent past have borne out, have a lasting influence on Indian politics.
Drawing from a wealth of original archival material and interviews, the deeply researched and scholarly Golwalkar: The Myth Behind the Man, the Man Behind the Machine pierces through the many legends built around the RSS chief in the biographies written by his loyalists during his own lifetime. Jha traces Golwalkar's path from a directionless youth to a demagogue who plotted to capture political power by countering the secularist vision of nationalist leaders from Nehru to Gandhi, Ambitious, insecure, tactical and secretive-Jha draws a compelling and sinister portrait of one of the most prominent Hindutva leaders, and of the RSS and its worldview that evolved under him.
Dhirendra K. Jha is a Delhi-based journalist. He is the author of Gandhi's Assassin: The Making of Nathuram Godse and His Idea of India; Shad-ow Armies: Fringe Organizations and Foot Soldiers of Hindutva; and Ascetic Games: Sadhus, Akharas and the Making of the Hindu Vote. He is the co-author of Ayodhya: The Dark Night-The Secret History of Rama's Appearance in Babri Masjid.
In 1939, months before Hitler forced the world into a catastrophic global war, a book that proposed a Hindu nationalist approach to India's minority communities, especially Muslims, along the lines of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany, was published quietly in India. The book's author, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, was thirty-three years old. He was slim and spirited and smoked cigarettes continually. His dark eyes were bright and communicative, and his long black hair merged with the overgrown bushy beard that gathered below his chin, elongating his thin face. He had grown up in mofussil towns of central India and studied Zoology at Banaras Hindu University in the quintessential holy city of Varanasi on the Ganga. At the time, Golwalkar was yet to be thoroughly assimilated into the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu militia set up in 1925, although he had been hovering around its leader, Dr. K. B. Hedgewar, for more than a year. The publication of the book, We or Our Nationhood Defined, may have been a subdued affair, but it served Golwalkar well. His status grew rapidly, and a little over a year later, upon the death of Hedgewar in 1940, he shot to the top of the RSS, becoming its second leader.
In short order, even as everyone's attention was on the Second World War, Golwalkar set out to take full control of the RSS.
With his book as the guiding force, he restructured the RSS to an unprecedented degree and packed it with highly passionate Hindu radicals given to strict subordination, discipline and devotion.
These ceaselessly active individuals lent the RSS an intimidating tone and turned it into a powerful political instrument that was to work in mission mode to satisfy his craving for power and authority. In his effort to be everything at once, he became its chief architect, its principal organizer, the author of its ideology, its supreme teacher, its master tactician and its demagogic leader.
From its start, the RSS was ideologically rooted in Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, the 1923 text by Hindu supremacist ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar that claimed the whole of (pre-Independence) India for Hindus by virtue of the fact that they alone, and not Muslims or Christians, considered its territory sacred. But it was through Golwalkar's prescriptions in We or Our Nationhood Defined that the RSS obtained Nazi anti-Semitism as a model for dealing with India's minorities. Golwalkar's political clarity, which now became central to the ideological training of the RSS men, brought to the militia a sense of confidence it had never experienced before. It ensured that the credo of Indian Muslims as a 'foreign race' wielded the most lasting ideological influence upon members of the RSS.
Golwalkar found himself imperilled only once, when a member of his organization, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948. The sense of loss from Gandhi's death was so colossal that it numbed the newly independent nation of India and gave way to a violent public fury and a massive government crackdown against the RSS and its leaders. Golwalkar was put behind bars, and the RSS was banned. But a little over a year later, in July 1949, he made his way out of jail, and got the ban on the RSS revoked, by accepting all conditions of the government and promising complete loyalty to India's secular, democratic Constitution.
Golwalkar now stopped talking about We or Our Nationhood Defined. But the book's thesis continued to remain at the core of the RSS ideology, a fact that was noted by J. A. Curran Jr., an American researcher who produced the first well-investigated book on the RSS two years after the ban was revoked. Following his extensive interactions with Golwalkar and a large number of RSS leaders and cadres, Curran concluded in his 1951 book that despite the ban and massive public outrage against the RSS in the wake of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, the organization's real ideology continued to be based on We or Our Nationhood Defined. 'We can be described as the R.S.S. "Bible"," Curran wrote. 'It is the basic primer in the indoctrination of the Sangh volunteers. Although this book was written twelve years ago, in a national context different from the contemporary one, the principles contained in it are still considered entirely applicable by the Sangh membership.'
Hindu (935)
Agriculture (118)
Ancient (1086)
Archaeology (753)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (910)
Biography (702)
Buddhist (544)
Cookery (167)
Emperor & Queen (565)
Islam (242)
Jainism (307)
Literary (896)
Mahatma Gandhi (372)
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist