The Core Ideas of V.D. Savarkar’s Political Thought

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar remains one of modern India’s most debated political thinkers. He gave the country a vocabulary that still shapes its politics: the word Hindutva. To understand contemporary arguments about national identity, citizenship, and belonging, you first need to understand what Savarkar actually argued. His thought is not a single idea but a tightly connected framework built on three foundations: a civilizational definition of identity, a theory of nationalism, and a vision of the kind of society India ought to become. This post breaks down each of these in turn.

Who was Savarkar and why his ideas matter 🔗

Born in 1883 in Bhagur, Maharashtra, Savarkar began as an anti-colonial revolutionary. As a student he helped found the secret society Abhinav Bharat and later wrote a banned history of the 1857 uprising. He was arrested for sedition and sentenced to the Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands, where he spent years in harsh confinement. It was during his later internment at Ratnagiri that he developed the ideology he is best known for.

In 1923 he published Essentials of Hindutva (also circulated as Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?), written pseudonymously while he was still a prisoner. This short text became the founding document of a political tradition. Savarkar himself was a leading figure in the Hindu Mahasabha, the political party that articulated Hindu nationalist demands in the colonial period.

Hindutva: identity as civilization, not religion 🔗

The central and most misunderstood of Savarkar’s ideas is Hindutva. The first thing to grasp is that, for him, Hindutva was not the same as Hinduism. He insisted that Hinduism, the body of religious beliefs and practices, was only a small part of something far larger. As he put it, Hinduism was a fraction, a derivative, of Hindutva. Hindutva was meant to capture an entire civilization, its history, art, language, and shared memory, rather than a set of theological doctrines.

The three essentials 🔗

Savarkar defined Hindutva through what scholars often call the “triple test.” A true Hindu, in his framework, shared three things: a common Rashtra (nation or territory), a common Jati (race or shared ancestry through blood), and a common Sanskriti (culture and civilization). These three essentials were expressed, he argued, through a shared history, literature, art, law, festivals, and rituals. Sanskriti drew its name from Sanskrit, the language he believed preserved the essence of this shared civilization.

Fatherland and holy land 🔗

Savarkar then condensed this definition into a memorable test. A Hindu was someone for whom the land stretching from the Indus to the seas was both Pitribhumi (fatherland) and Punyabhumi (holy land). The logic of this dual test is crucial. Indic faiths such as Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism qualified, because their followers regard India as both ancestral and sacred. But Muslims and Christians, even those born on Indian soil, were placed outside the definition. Their holy lands lay elsewhere, in Mecca or Jerusalem, so for them India could be a fatherland but not a holy land. This is why Savarkar’s framework, despite his claim that it was inclusive, drew firm boundaries around who belonged to the nation.

Nationalism: Swaraj, Swadharma, and the Hindu Rashtra 🔗

Savarkar’s theory of nationalism flowed directly from his definition of Hindutva. If the Hindus, defined civilizationally, formed the genuine nation, then Indian nationalism was, in his words, essentially Hindu nationalism. He explicitly rejected the colonial idea that India was merely a geographical expression with no underlying unity. Instead he argued that the people who shared a common land, blood, and culture had constituted a nation since antiquity.

Swaraj and Swadharma 🔗

His nationalism combined two older ideas in a new way. Swaraj meant self-rule and freedom from foreign domination, a goal he shared with the wider independence movement. Swadharma meant duty to one’s own faith and culture. For Savarkar these were inseparable: political freedom was meaningless unless it also secured the cultural and religious life of the Hindu people. The protection of Hindu interests was therefore not a sectarian add-on to nationalism but its very core.

The idea of a Hindu Rashtra 🔗

The political destination of this thinking was the Hindu Rashtra, a state organized around Hindu cultural solidarity. Savarkar wanted Hindus to think and act as a consolidated political community rather than a fragmented collection of castes and sects. This put him at odds with the composite, pluralist nationalism championed by leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, who envisioned a nation embracing all communities equally. Savarkar also broke sharply with Gandhi over non-violence, viewing military strength and a martial spirit as necessary for a nation’s survival.

The normative vision: what kind of society Savarkar wanted 🔗

Many people are surprised to learn that Savarkar, the architect of an exclusionary nationalism, was also a fierce critic of orthodox Hindu tradition. His normative imagination, his vision of the ideal society, was in some respects strikingly modern. This is one of the most interesting tensions in his thought.

A casteless, rationalist Hindu society 🔗

Savarkar was a sharp critic of the caste system. During his Ratnagiri years he wrote Jatyuchchedak Nibandh (essays on the abolition of caste) and campaigned actively against untouchability. He founded the Patit Pavan Mandir in Ratnagiri, a temple open to people of all castes, and promoted inter-caste dining and marriage. He saw caste division as a source of internal weakness that prevented Hindus from acting as a unified nation.

His critique was rooted in rationalism. Influenced by thinkers like Bentham and Mill, Savarkar argued that religious texts were man-made and should be open to rational scrutiny. He encouraged Hindus to evaluate inherited customs by their practical utility rather than by scriptural authority alone. Notably, critics point out a limit here: while he attacked untouchability, his reform reframed caste as a social practice to be modernized rather than dismantling every element of the older varna order.

Mechanization and a strong economy 🔗

Savarkar’s economic thinking matched his rationalism. He believed that economic backwardness had left the country vulnerable to foreign conquest, and that industrialization and mechanization were essential to national strength. This directly contradicted the Gandhian preference for village handicrafts and the spinning wheel. Savarkar wanted modern technology, machines, and industrial organization to build a powerful, self-reliant nation.

Hindi as a unifying language 🔗

Language was the final piece of his cultural vision. Savarkar promoted Hindi in the Devanagari script as a common national language that could bind diverse linguistic communities together. He saw a shared language as a practical tool for communication and as a symbol of cultural unity. This stance brought him into conflict with regional and non-Hindi-speaking communities, a tension that continues in India’s language debates today.

Legacy and influence 🔗

Savarkar’s ideas did not stay confined to the Hindu Mahasabha. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925, absorbed much of his thinking about Hindu cultural unity and organized Hindu society. Over the following decades this stream of politics grew, and the term Hindutva is today most closely associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party and the broader Sangh Parivar.

His legacy is genuinely contested. Supporters celebrate him as a fearless revolutionary, social reformer, and visionary nationalist. Critics, including scholars writing in journals like peer-reviewed academic publications, argue that his racialized definition of the nation laid the groundwork for the exclusion of religious minorities and for majoritarian politics. The fact that he was charged in connection with Gandhi’s assassination, though later acquitted for lack of evidence, adds another layer to the controversy. What is beyond dispute is that the questions Savarkar raised, about who belongs to the nation and on what terms, remain at the center of political debate.

What do you think? Can a political vision that calls for the abolition of caste and embraces scientific rationalism be reconciled with one that draws sharp boundaries around religious belonging? And how should a modern democracy weigh the difference between a cultural definition of nationhood and a purely territorial or constitutional one?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinayak_Damodar_Savarkar
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hindutva
3. https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/veer-savarkar-hindutva-india/38073/
4. https://www.irenees.net/bdf_fiche-analyse-878_en.html
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentials_of_Hindutva
6. https://savarkar.org/en/encyc/2017/5/23/Veer-Savarkar-as-a-social-reformer-Part-I.html
7. https://www.aijfr.com/papers/2026/1/3796.pdf
8. https://integralresearch.in/index.php/1/article/download/12/12/25