The Ideology of Hindu Nationalism by V. D. Savarkar

When people debate Indian identity, citizenship, or the meaning of “the nation” today, they are often arguing with ideas first set down by one man nearly a century ago. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966) was a revolutionary, poet, and political thinker who gave Hindu nationalism its first systematic theory. While imprisoned and later under house arrest at Ratnagiri, he wrote a slim but explosive book that defined who, in his view, truly belonged to the Indian nation. That book turned a religious label into a political identity, and its influence still shapes the country’s most heated controversies.

Who was V. D. Savarkar? 🔗

Savarkar was born in 1883 in Bhagur, in present-day Maharashtra. He began his political life as a fierce anti-colonial revolutionary, organising against British rule as a young man and later in London. His activities led to a long imprisonment, including years in the notorious Cellular Jail at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. He spent roughly 14 years in prison and another 13 under house arrest after the British released him in 1924.

It was during this confinement that his thinking shifted. The anti-British revolutionary increasingly turned his attention to what he saw as the internal weakness and disunity of Hindu society. Out of that concern came his most consequential work. Savarkar developed the ideology of Hindutva while confined at Ratnagiri in 1922, and he would go on to lead the Hindu Mahasabha as its president from 1937 to 1943.

The book that defined Hindutva 🔗

Savarkar’s central ideas appeared in a pamphlet titled Essentials of Hindutva, also known as Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? He wrote it secretly in prison, and it was first published in 1923 under the pseudonym “A Maratha.” The work was reissued in 1924 and circulated widely thereafter, becoming the founding text of organised Hindu nationalism.

The timing matters. Savarkar was writing against the backdrop of the Khilafat movement, a pan-Islamic campaign by Indian Muslims to defend the Ottoman caliphate. Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress had collaborated with Muslim leaders in that movement, and Savarkar viewed this through a lens of communal anxiety. He worried that Hindus, divided by caste and region, lacked the unity and organisation he saw among other communities. Hindutva was his answer to that perceived problem.

What did Savarkar mean by “Hindutva”? 🔗

The word Hindutva literally means “Hinduness.” But Savarkar was careful to insist that it was not the same as Hinduism the religion. He argued that Hindutva was the broader, more fundamental category. Religion was only one part of it.

This distinction is the key to understanding his thought. Savarkar’s original definition treats Hindutva as an ethnic and cultural category rather than a strictly religious one, which is why not every practising Hindu necessarily subscribes to it, and why the ideology can be framed as a “way of life.” For Savarkar, being a Hindu was less about specific beliefs or rituals and more about belonging to a shared national community with a common ancestry, land, and civilisation.

Applying European nationalism to India 🔗

Savarkar was essentially borrowing a model. In Hindutva, he applied the European framework of nationalism – the idea that a nation needs a homogeneous community, a common culture, and a long shared history – to the Indian subcontinent. European nationalisms had often built their identity around shared language, race, or religion. Savarkar tried to find an equivalent unifying foundation for India.

The problem he faced was that Hinduism the religion was too diverse to serve as that glue. It had no single founder, no single book, and no single church. So Savarkar reached past religion to a wider civilisational identity that he believed could unite all the people he considered indigenous to the land.

The three-part test: who is a Hindu? 🔗

The heart of Savarkar’s argument is a definition built around three essentials. He identified these as a common nation (rashtra), a common race (jati), and a common civilisation (sanskriti), expressed through a shared history, shared heroes, and shared culture.

From these, he derived a practical test for who qualified as a Hindu. A Hindu, for Savarkar, was anyone who regarded the land between the river Sindhu (Indus) in the north and the seas in the south as both their pitribhumi and their punyabhumi. These two Sanskrit terms carry the entire weight of his theory.

Pitribhumi: the fatherland 🔗

Pitribhumi means “fatherland” – the land of one’s ancestors. This is the criterion of shared ancestry and territory. To pass this test, a person had to trace their bloodline and their roots to the soil of the subcontinent, from the Indus to the Indian Ocean. It tied national identity to descent and to a specific sacred geography.

Punyabhumi: the holy land 🔗

Punyabhumi means “holy land.” This was the more decisive and more controversial criterion. A person did not just have to call India their fatherland; they also had to consider it the cradle of their religion – the land where their faith was born and where its holy places lay.

This is where the definition becomes exclusive. Savarkar added a third tie of homage to a common culture, which he called Sanskriti, naming Sanskrit as the language preserving the worthy history of the Hindus. Together, these requirements meant that sharing the land and even a common ancestry was not enough on its own. A person also had to be culturally and spiritually rooted in the subcontinent.

Who was left out, and why 🔗

The logic of the punyabhumi test produced a clear boundary. Indian Muslims and Christians, in Savarkar’s framework, could satisfy the first condition but not the second. Savarkar argued that for converts to Islam or Christianity, India was a fatherland but not a holy land, because the holy places of their faiths lay outside its borders. Their religious loyalties, he claimed, pointed to Mecca or Jerusalem rather than to the sacred geography of the subcontinent.

Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists, by contrast, were included. Because their faiths originated within the subcontinent, Savarkar’s Hindutva treated them as part of the same national community, sharing both the fatherland and the holy land. The dividing line, therefore, was not skin colour or even ancestry alone, but whether one’s deepest spiritual allegiance lay within or beyond the land itself.

The goal: forging a Hindu nation 🔗

Savarkar’s purpose was not merely to define categories. It was to build national consciousness among a community he saw as fragmented. He wanted Hindus, long divided by caste and sect, to recognise themselves as a single political people with a shared destiny.

His vision pointed toward a Hindu Rashtra, or Hindu nation. This is a majoritarian conception of nationhood that treats the cultural and political identity of India as fundamentally Hindu. It stood in direct opposition to the composite, pluralist nationalism that Gandhi and the Congress were advancing, which sought to unite all communities regardless of religion under a shared anti-colonial banner.

Hindutva and social reform 🔗

One often-overlooked dimension is that Savarkar’s nationalism required internal reform. If Hindus were to act as one nation, the divisions that weakened them had to go. He was a vocal critic of the caste system and untouchability, partly on moral grounds and partly because he believed these divisions sabotaged Hindu unity. Alongside his nationalism, he campaigned to eradicate caste barriers and build bridges among different Hindu communities, including efforts toward the upliftment of Dalits during his time in Ratnagiri.

The legacy of Savarkar’s ideas 🔗

Savarkar did not create his movement alone, and his book quickly inspired organisation. Soon after Hindutva was published, K. B. Hedgewar founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925 as a sociocultural body meant to build Hindu unity from the ground up. Savarkar himself led the Hindu Mahasabha, which emerged as a distinct party opposing the secular nationalism of the Congress.

The reach of these ideas has only grown. Hindutva became the ideological foundation for a family of organisations and parties, and it remains a central force in contemporary Indian politics. Savarkar’s framework continues to inform debates over citizenship, religious conversion, a uniform civil code, and the very question of what it means to belong to the Indian nation. Whether one admires or rejects his thought, the categories he defined a century ago still set the terms of the argument.

What do you think? Is a nation best understood through shared culture and ancestry, as Savarkar argued, or through shared political values and citizenship regardless of religion? And can a definition of national belonging built on a “holy land” ever fully accommodate a society as religiously diverse as India’s?

References

1. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/savarkar-and-making-hindutva
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinayak_Damodar_Savarkar
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentials_of_Hindutva
4. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hindutva
5. https://aeon.co/essays/how-savarkar-invented-hindu-supremacy-and-its-cult-of-violence
6. https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/veer-savarkar-hindutva-india/38073/
7. https://scroll.in/article/1056652/what-kind-of-constitution-did-vd-savarkar-want-a-new-book-probes-narratives-about-the-constitution
8. https://www.irenees.net/bdf_fiche-analyse-878_en.html
9. https://doccentre.net/docsweb/Communalism/Savarkar/father_holyland.html
10. https://integralresearch.in/index.php/1/article/download/12/12/25
11. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2020/07/22/book-review-savarkar-echoes-from-a-forgotten-past-1883-1924-by-vikram-sampath/
12. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2021/02/09/savarkar-savarkarism-and-hindutva-the-representations-of-an-ideologue-in-india/
13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_Mahasabha