M. S. Golwalkar’s Views on Hindu Nationalism and Minorities

What does it take to truly belong to a nation? For Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, the second chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the answer had nothing to do with where you were born or where you lived. It had everything to do with culture, history, and a shared sense of belonging to a single civilisational stream. Golwalkar’s vision of the nation placed Hindu culture at its centre and treated the position of minorities as one of the most pressing questions of nation-building. His ideas, laid out in We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) and Bunch of Thoughts (1966), remain among the most debated formulations in modern political thought. Understanding them is essential for grasping how cultural nationalism defines who belongs and who does not.

The foundation of Golwalkar’s nationalism 🔗

Golwalkar’s thought rests on a simple but consequential claim: a nation is not the same thing as a state. A state is a political and administrative arrangement tied to territory and government. A nation, in his view, is something far deeper, an organic community bound together by shared culture, memory, and feeling. This distinction shaped everything else he wrote about minorities.

To define what makes a nation, Golwalkar set out five elements that he called the Five Unities. According to his framework, a people become a nation through five factors: a common country (geography), a common race, a common religion, a common culture, and a common language. When these elements converge over a long history, a nation is born. For Golwalkar, the Hindus already possessed all five. They considered the land their motherland, shared a civilisational heritage, and had developed a distinct way of life over thousands of years.

Why he rejected territorial nationalism 🔗

The dominant idea of nationhood in the modern world is territorial nationalism, the view that anyone born within a country’s borders, regardless of religion or origin, is an equal citizen of that nation. This is the principle on which most modern democratic states, including India, are founded. Golwalkar firmly rejected it.

He opposed the idea that a state should be identified simply with its territory while granting equal citizenship to everyone living within it. To him, mere residence in a common territory did not make different communities part of one nation. A nation, he insisted, was older and more fundamental than the modern state, and it could not be created by drawing lines on a map. This rejection of territorial nationalism is the key that unlocks his entire approach to minorities.

Hindu nationalism and the question of minorities 🔗

If the nation is Hindu by culture and history, where does this leave Muslims, Christians, and other religious minorities? This is the central tension in Golwalkar’s writing, and his answer was assimilation into the Hindu cultural mainstream.

Golwalkar held that the Hindu community in India constituted the nation because it regarded India as both its motherland and its holy land. Religion, race, language, culture, and history had fused the Hindus into a single national community. For minorities to belong, he argued, they should Indianise themselves, accept the traditions and culture of the country as their own, and integrate into the national community. The path to belonging, in other words, ran through cultural conformity rather than constitutional citizenship.

What assimilation meant in practice 🔗

Golwalkar’s concept of assimilation was demanding. He did not envision a pluralistic coexistence in which different communities retained equal standing while sharing the same territory. Instead, he expected minorities to subordinate their separate identities to the dominant culture.

In We, or Our Nationhood Defined, he argued that minorities should not claim special rights and should assimilate into Hindu culture, treating non-Hindus as outsiders unless they did so. The book even held up the European model of national homogeneity as something for India to learn from. Golwalkar rejected the civic nationalism that includes all people born in the land and accepted only the cultural nationalism of a single Hindu culture. Minorities, in this scheme, were expected to defer to Hindu cultural symbols and abandon claims to a distinct national status. [Image: A conceptual diagram contrasting territorial nationalism (citizenship based on birthplace) with cultural nationalism (belonging based on shared culture)]

The problem of extra-territorial loyalty 🔗

One distinction in Golwalkar’s thought was decisive. He drew a sharp line between minorities who, in his view, looked outside India for their spiritual and emotional allegiance and those who did not. This is what is meant by extra-territorial loyalty.

Golwalkar argued that those whose holy lands lay outside India could not be fully trusted to give their undivided loyalty to the nation. His solution was to seek the assimilation of minorities into the Hindu mainstream by requiring them to give up these external allegiances. Notably, he treated communities differently based on this criterion. He regarded Parsis and Jews as model minorities who, in his assessment, did not disturb Hindu society, while reserving far harsher views for Muslims and Christians, whom he linked to historical invasion and foreign religious centres.

Negative and positive Hindutva 🔗

Golwalkar himself distinguished between two faces of Hindutva, and this framework helps clarify his stance on minorities. He described one as negative and the other as positive.

Negative Hindutva focused on defining who did not belong. It drew the boundaries of the nation by identifying outsiders and treating the influence of foreign religions as something to resist. Positive Hindutva, by contrast, focused on internal strengthening. Golwalkar claimed that the RSS stood for positive Hindutva, which emphasised internally consolidating and strengthening the social organisation of the Hindus. In his telling, the goal was not endless hostility toward minorities but the unification and revitalisation of Hindu society, with minorities expected to fold themselves into that revitalised whole.

The two key texts 🔗

Golwalkar’s views are not uniform across his writing, and the difference between his two major works matters. We, or Our Nationhood Defined, published in 1939, contains the most uncompromising version of his ideas. Its hardline stance on minorities and its references to European models of homogeneity drew sustained criticism. The RSS itself eventually distanced itself from the book in 2006, and some scholars argue Golwalkar merely translated rather than authored it.

His later work, Bunch of Thoughts (1966), restated many of his core ideas in a different register but remained controversial. It famously categorised Muslims, Christians, and communists as internal threats to the nation. Together, the two books form the textual core of debates over how Hindu nationalism treats those outside the Hindu fold.

The scholarly critique 🔗

Academic analysis of Golwalkar has placed his ideas within a wider global context. The political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has argued that Savarkar and Golwalkar crystallised the identity of Hindutva while borrowing political concepts from the West, internalising the European notion of ethnic nationalism as a way of strengthening Hindus against perceived enemies. This reading suggests that Hindutva, despite its appeal to ancient roots, was shaped by modern European ideas of the ethnically unified nation-state.

Critics raise a deeper objection about compatibility with constitutional values. Golwalkar’s vision favoured a singular Hindu culture over the composite cultural framework associated with Nehru and Gandhi. India’s Constitution rests on secularism, equal citizenship regardless of religion, and the protection of minority rights. A model of belonging that asks minorities to assimilate culturally as the price of full national membership stands in tension with that constitutional commitment.

The counter-argument from his supporters 🔗

Supporters of Golwalkar’s framework argue that his project was fundamentally about unity rather than hostility. They contend that he sought a cohesive national identity in a country fragmented along religious, linguistic, and regional lines, and that a shared cultural foundation was his answer to the problem of holding a diverse society together. From this perspective, cultural nationalism offers a stronger basis for solidarity than what they see as the thin, legalistic bond of mere citizenship. [Image: A photograph of M.S. Golwalkar, second Sarsanghchalak of the RSS]

Defenders also point out that Golwalkar did not, in principle, demand that minorities abandon their religious practices. The version of assimilation in some of his framing allowed minorities to retain their faith while adopting Hindu cultural and historical traditions as part of a common national heritage. Whether this is a genuinely inclusive offer or a demand for cultural surrender is precisely the question that continues to divide readers, and it is worth weighing both readings against the actual text.

Why this debate still matters 🔗

Golwalkar’s ideas are not merely a historical curiosity. They sit at the heart of an ongoing argument about what kind of nation a diverse society should be. The contrast he drew, between a nation defined by shared culture and a nation defined by shared citizenship, maps directly onto live debates over secularism, minority rights, and national identity.

The questions he raised remain open. Can a single cultural identity unite a society as plural as this one without marginalising those who do not share it? Or does genuine national unity require an inclusive framework that protects difference rather than dissolving it? Golwalkar offered one answer. The Constitution offered another. The conversation between the two is far from settled.

What do you think? Is national unity better built on a shared cultural identity or on equal citizenship that protects diversity? And where should the line fall between asking citizens to share common values and asking them to give up their distinct identities?

References

1. https://www.hindutvawatch.org/we-or-our-nationhood-defined-madhav-sadashiv-golwalkar/
2. https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/nationalism-golwalkars-head-of-rss-three-decades/31781/
3. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/university-of-delhi/ideas-and-institutions-in-indian-political-thought/hindutva-v-d-savarkar/92831213
4. https://www.britannica.com/biography/M-S-Golwalkar
5. https://www.thewire.in/communalism/hindutva-and-the-question-of-who-owns-india
6. https://gyanju.org/m-s-golwalkars-views-on-negative-and-positive-hindutva/
7. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseupr/2021/12/17/the-western-connect-comparing-indian-and-hindu-nationalism/