Cultural Nationalism in V. D. Savarkar’s Hindutva

When Vinayak Damodar Savarkar sat in Ratnagiri’s confinement in 1922 and began writing a slim pamphlet, he was not simply defining a religion. He was attempting to answer a far larger question that the freedom struggle had thrown open: what binds a people into a nation? His answer, published in 1923 as Essentials of Hindutva (later titled Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?), proposed that nationhood rests not on shared territory alone but on a shared culture, history, and civilisation. This idea is what we today call cultural nationalism, and Savarkar’s formulation of it remains one of the most studied and contested doctrines in modern political thought.

What cultural nationalism means 🔗

Cultural nationalism is the belief that a nation is held together primarily by a common culture rather than by a shared state, government, or geographic boundary. The bond comes from language, religion, customs, shared memory, and a sense of common ancestry. This is different from civic or territorial nationalism, where anyone living within a country’s borders and accepting its constitution counts as a full member of the nation, regardless of their faith or background.

Savarkar’s Hindutva belongs firmly to the cultural camp. For him, the Indian nation was not a recent political creation drawn up by maps and treaties. It was an ancient civilisational community whose unity predated colonial rule. The term Hindutva was first used in a nationalist political context by Savarkar in this 1923 booklet, and from the start he framed it as a question of identity and belonging rather than worship.

Hindutva is not the same as Hinduism 🔗

One of the most important distinctions in Savarkar’s thought, and one students frequently miss, is that Hindutva is broader than Hinduism. Hinduism refers to a set of religious beliefs and practices. Hindutva, in Savarkar’s reading, refers to the cultural, historical, and national identity of a people. He himself was a rationalist who was sceptical of religious orthodoxy, yet he placed enormous value on Hindu civilisation as the foundation of nationhood.

As the scholarly consensus notes, Hindutva as an ideology must be understood as distinct from Hinduism as a religion, and not all adherents of Hinduism subscribe to Hindutva. Savarkar’s definition treats religion as one expression of a wider civilisational identity, not as its whole. This is why he could include Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists within his idea of the Hindu nation: in his view, they all drew from the same cultural and civilisational roots that originated in the subcontinent.

The three essentials of Hindutva 🔗

The core of Savarkar’s argument is a three-part definition. To be a Hindu in the Hindutva sense, a person must share three bonds with others. These are usually summarised as a common nation (rashtra), a common race (jati), and a common civilisation (sanskriti), expressed through a shared history, heroes, literature, art, law, festivals, and rituals.

Rashtra: the common nation 🔗

The first bond is territorial and historical. Savarkar argued that the people he called Hindus had occupied the land between the Indus and the seas since antiquity and had formed a single nation throughout that long history. This was a direct rejection of the colonial view that India was merely a collection of regions with no underlying unity. He treated the subcontinent as one civilisational homeland rather than an accidental administrative unit created by the British.

Jati: the common race or ancestry 🔗

The second bond is that of common descent. Savarkar held that the people of this land were bound together by ties of blood and shared ancestry stretching back to early settlers. This racial element is one of the most criticised parts of his theory, because modern scholarship rejects the idea that any large population shares a single pure lineage. Many writers classify Hindutva, on the strength of this criterion, as a form of ethnic nationalism that superimposes religion, language, sacred territory, and culture onto one another.

Sanskriti: the common civilisation 🔗

The third bond, and arguably the most important for cultural nationalism, is shared civilisation. Savarkar named this sanskriti and tied it closely to the Sanskrit language, which he saw as the vehicle that preserved the history, literature, and values of the people. According to this reading, sanskriti includes a shared history, literature, art, law, festivals, rites, rituals, and heroes. This cultural test is what allowed Savarkar to draw the boundary of his nation around culture rather than around faith alone.

Pitribhumi and punyabhumi: the test of belonging 🔗

Savarkar tied his definition together with two evocative terms. A Hindu, he wrote, is one who regards this land as both his pitribhumi (fatherland) and his punyabhumi (holy land). The fatherland criterion covers ancestry and territory. The holy land criterion adds that the sacred sites of one’s religion must lie within this geography.

This twin test had a sharp consequence. As one analysis explains, to every Hindu this land is at once a fatherland and a holy land. For Indian Muslims and Christians, however, the holy land of their faith lay elsewhere, in Mecca or Jerusalem. Although they might share the territory and even the ancestry, Savarkar argued they could not fully share the third bond of civilisation, because their cultural and religious orientation pointed outward. This is the precise point at which his cultural nationalism becomes exclusionary: belonging is defined by cultural and emotional allegiance, not merely by residence or citizenship.

Why Savarkar rejected territorial nationalism 🔗

Savarkar’s theory was developed as a deliberate alternative to the nationalism of the Indian National Congress. The Congress, under leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, promoted a composite nationalism: the idea that all communities living in India, whatever their religion, together formed one nation. Savarkar found this inadequate. He believed that a nation built only on shared territory lacked the deep internal cohesion that, in his view, only common culture and history could supply.

He was writing against a specific backdrop. The Khilafat movement, a pan-Islamic effort by Indian Muslims to support the caliphate in Istanbul, convinced Savarkar that loyalty rooted in religion could pull a community’s allegiance away from the nation. His response was to define the nation in cultural terms so tightly that loyalty to the land and loyalty to its civilisation became inseparable. The slogan often associated with this outlook, “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan,” captures the fusion of language, culture, and territory into a single idea of nationhood.

The homogeneity of the nation 🔗

A striking feature of Savarkar’s thought is his insistence on the unity and homogeneity of the people he described. He argued that, China apart, few countries were as homogenous as India in their cultural foundation. He saw the diversity of castes, regions, and sects not as evidence against unity but as variations within a single civilisational family.

This emphasis on homogeneity is the engine of cultural nationalism. If the nation is one cultural body, then internal divisions such as caste are weaknesses to be overcome rather than permanent features. Savarkar personally campaigned against untouchability and caste exclusion in Ratnagiri, seeing such reform as necessary to consolidate the Hindu people into a strong, unified nation. His goal was always integration into one cultural whole.

Criticism and contrasting visions 🔗

Savarkar’s cultural nationalism has attracted sustained criticism. The most influential came from B. R. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution. Ambedkar rejected Hindutva as a majoritarian imposition and argued instead for a secular state with constitutional safeguards for minorities and the oppressed. Where Savarkar saw culture as the basis of nationhood, Ambedkar saw constitutional rights and equality as the foundation.

There were also disagreements within Hindu thought itself. Swami Vivekananda, often invoked by nationalists, treated Hinduism quite differently. Scholars point out that Vivekananda treated Hinduism as a worldview whose appeal transcends ties of nationality, race, and culture, whereas Savarkar narrowed it down to nation, race, and culture. The contrast shows that defining the nation through culture was a choice, not an inevitability.

Critics also note that the framework, by privileging one overarching cultural identity, can absorb and flatten the distinct practices of regional and non-Hindu communities. The territorial vision had political consequences too, including the basis it provided for a concept of India’s cultural identity defined in terms of Hindu civilisation and the desire to organise the nation-state around it.

Why this debate still matters 🔗

Savarkar’s framework was later carried forward by organisations such as the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, and the idea of a “Hindu Rashtra” can be traced directly to his Hindutva. Debates about citizenship, secularism, and national identity continue to circle back to the core question he raised: is the nation a cultural community or a constitutional one? Understanding cultural nationalism as Savarkar defined it is essential for following these arguments, whether one agrees with him or not.

What do you think? Is a nation best understood as a cultural family bound by shared history, or as a political community of equal citizens defined by a constitution? And can a definition of nationhood built on cultural unity ever fully accommodate genuine religious and cultural diversity?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hindutva
2. https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/veer-savarkar-hindutva-india/38073/
3. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseupr/2021/12/17/the-western-connect-comparing-indian-and-hindu-nationalism/
4. https://www.irenees.net/bdf_fiche-analyse-878_en.html
5. https://doccentre.net/docsweb/Communalism/Savarkar/father_holyland.html
6. https://swadeshishodh.org/the-ascendancy-of-nationhood-rashtratv-and-nationalism-rashtrabhav-in-bharat-after-2014/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindutva