Was Guru Golwalkar a Nazi ?
Dr Koenraad Elst.
The following paper is a short version of chapter 2 of my forthcoming book The Saffron Swastika, Voice of India, Delhi, September 1999.
1. Guruji's first book
It is routinely alleged in press articles and even in scholarly publications that Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, second sarsanghchalak ("chief guide of the association") of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ("national volunteer association") from 1940 till his death in 1973, and colloquially known as Guruji, was an open admirer and emulator of Adolf Hitler. Thus, according to Sudip Mazumdar (Newsweek, 27-5-1996), Golwalkar was "a supremacist who openly admired some of Hitler's ideas on racial purity".
However, from his fairly copious writings, public statements and interview transcripts during his term at the head of the RSS (1940-73), no indication of such Hitlerian sympathies has ever been quoted. The case is based entirely on a few lines in Golwalkar's first book: We. Our Nationhood Defined, published by Bharat Publications, Nagpur 1939, self-described as "this maiden attempt of mine" (We 1939, p.3), and completed "as early as the first week of November 1938" (We, p.4/p.3; where two page numbers are given for the same quotation, the first refers to the original 1939 edition, the second to the 1947 reprint of the second edition).
1.1. Story of the book
In his foreword to We, Golwalkar explains that this 77-page book is largely an adaptation from Rashtra Mimansa ("reflection on the nation"), a Marathi book by Ganesh Damodar Savarkar, brother of the then president of the Hindu Mahasabha, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, which in turn acknowledges the influence of 19th-century European liberal nationalists like Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72) and Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (1808-81). We should not explain Golwalkar's reference to Savarkar as a kind of disclaimer, as some defensive RSS sympathizers do: like most ideas which people have, the nationalist vision expounded in We was largely borrowed from others but interiorized by the author. It was very much Golwalkar's own conviction eventhough it was not invented by him.
The book had all the marks of an immature first publication. Apart from being largely second-hand in contents, it was often confused in its reasoning and intemperate in its language. This criticism is even made in the preface of the book itself, completed on 4 March 1939 by M.S. Aney, a Hindutva-oriented Congress activist and member of the Central Assembly: "I also desire to add that the strong and impassioned language used by the author towards those who do not subscribe to his theory of nationalism is also not in keeping with the dignity with which the scientific study of a complex problem like the Nationalism deserves to be pursued." (We 1939, p.xviii) In the revised edition, some of the strong language has been toned down -- and Aney's foreword left out.
The revised edition of We went through several reprints, the last of them brought out in 1947. Not long after that, Golwalkar and his closest lieutenants in the RSS decided to withdraw the book from circulation. References in the present paper are to both the first edition, published in 1939, and to the final 1947 reprint of the revised edition.
1.2. Two popular quotations
Most critics who devote half a page to Golwalkar (e.g. Frontline editor N. Ram: "The fascist basis of Hindutva", Observer of Business and Politics, 19-1-1993; and CPM politburo member Sitaram Yechurey: Pseudo-Hinduism Exposed, CPI(M), Delhi 1993, p.2-3, and "What is this Hindu Rashtra?", Frontline, 12-3-1993, or p.14 of its republication as a separate booklet: What Is this Hindu Rashtra?, Frontline, Madras 1993) never miss the opportunity to quote the following two passages from Golwalkar's book We. Our Nationhood Defined:
� "From this standpoint, sanctioned by the experience of shrewd old nations, the foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e. of the Hindu nation, and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race; or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment -- not even citizen's rights." (We, p.47-48/p.55-56)
� "To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by." (We, p.35/p.43)
In the present paper, we will discuss these quotations in their proper context, and the typical and trend-setting use made of them by N. Ram and by Sitaram Yechurey. But to give an idea of just how routinely these two quotations are employed to build the Hindutva movement's image, let us first mention their presentation in a BBC documentary on the Bharatiya Janata Party ("Indian People's Party"), broadcast on 17 June 1993.
Typically, the speaker announcing the documentary, who spent no more than two sentences on its contents, already said that it would "reveal the connections of the organization behind the BJP with Nazi Germany", this organization being the RSS. In the documentary, an actor dressed and made up to look like Golwalkar in his younger days, read out the two paragraphs. However, no actual connection between the RSS and Nazi Germany was revealed. In fact, the entire 45 minutes did not contain any other information about or quotations from the RSS's ideological classics: not from Golwalkar's later publications, nor from any other Hindutva ideologue. Till today, and even in academic publications, it is very common to see the anti-BJP rhetoric built entirely on these few sentences in Golwalkar's pamphlet of more than sixty years ago.
When this "information" trickles down to journalistic publications, we get something like this statement from the leading Flemish daily De Standaard (5-3-1998): "In the 1930s, one of the RSS leaders, Gowalkar (sic), made a plea for 'racial purity' and called Hitler's campaign against the Jews 'a source of inspiration'." Note that Golwalkar's text mentions "racial purity" as Germany's concern but does not "make a plea" for it, and that he never described Hitler as "a source of inspiration". The latter are Christophe Jaffrelot's words of interpretation, for this passage is obviously based on Christophe Jaffrelot: The Hindu Nationalist Movement (Viking, Delhi 1996, now by far the most-consulted source among Western India watchers), p.54: "Here Golwalkar claims inspiration from Hitler's ideology: 'To keep up the purity of the race..'".
That alleged Golwalkar quotations turn out to be excerpted from the invective of his critics, is symptomatic of Hindutva-watching in general: first-hand information is spurned in favour of hostile second-hand claims made by unscrupled commentators. In most journalistic and academic publications on Hindutva, the number of direct quotations is tiny in comparison with quotations from secondary, hostile sources.
2. The RSS and ethnic cleansing
2.1. No privileges for the minorities
The single oftest-quoted Hindutva statement in the whole Hindutva-watching literature is definitely the first one quoted above from Golwalkar's We, about non-Hindus being requested to "glorify" the Hindu culture, and otherwise "stay in the country" though "without privileges, not even citizen's rights". While certainly open to criticism, the meaning of this passage is by no means as terrifying and inhuman as the critics insinuate. It has nothing to do with genocide or ethnic cleansing, for it says explicitly that the non-Hindus "may stay in the country".
Further, it says that the religious minorities must "not claim any privileges", something with which any democrat and secularist would wholeheartedly agree: privileges on the basis of creed are against the equality principle which is fundamental to the law system of a modern state. It is one of the absurdities of Indian "secularism" that it contains a number of communal inequalities in law:
� Separate family law codes for Muslims, Christians and Parsis, epitomized by the Muslim right to polygamy; this constitutes the denial of the very first defining principle of the secular state, viz. legal equality of all citizens regardless of religion;
� exemption of mosques and churches (as opposed to Hindu temples) from intervention in their management and appropriation of their funds by the secular authorities;
� special safeguards of the communal character (in recruitment of teachers and students, in the contents of the curriculum) of Christian and Muslims schools all while retaining their subsidies, which are denied to Hindu denominational schools (Art. 30 of the Constitution);
� a large number of occasional advantages for the minorities in everyday political practice, e.g. subsidies for the Muslims who perform the pilgrimage to Mecca, as contrasted with pilgrimage taxes to be paid by Hindus going to Amarnath and other Hindu places of pilgrimage.
Before independence, the situation was even worse, with separate electorates and highly disproportionate privileges conceded to Anglo-Indians and other Christians and to the Muslim community. It was perfectly legitimate for Golwalkar in 1938 to champion the cause of genuine secularism by denouncing the system of privileges on the basis of religion. Indeed, the remarkable phenomenon is not that Hindus stand up for legal equality and against the Muslim privileges, but that supposedly scholarly and objective India-watchers, almost to a man, decry equality before the law (esp. a Common Civil Code, that long-standing Hindu demand) as "communal" and support minority privileges on the basis of religion as "secular", in blatant disregard for the dictionary meaning of "secularism" and "communalism".
2.2. The Muslims as non-citizens
The only disputable part in Golwalkar's oftest-quoted line is that the minority people must "not claim even citizen's rights". This would mean that Muslims would get the same status in India which Christians and Jews (and sometimes Pagans) "enjoy" under the Zimma (charter of toleration) dispensation in an Islamic state: they may "stay in the country" (the native country of the hospitable Hindus c.q. the native country of the dispossessed Zimmis, who are suffered to stay in their own country which Islam took from them), but far from claiming any privileges, they do not even enjoy citizen's rights.
Indeed, the Shari'a prescribes, as a matter of consensus between all the Islamic schools of jurisprudence, that Jews and Christians can be tolerated by the Islamic state, on condition of the payment of a high toleration tax, the jizya, plus the observance of more than twenty humiliating restrictions. It is an intrinsic part of this status that they are excluded from the political decision-making process. To a greater or lesser degree, this inequality has been reinstated in most Muslim countries after decolonization.
So, at worst, one could interpret the controversial paragraph in Guruji's book as amounting to a proposal for reciprocity with the treatment which non-Muslims get in Islamic states. Any indignation about the paragraph should therefore imply the same indignation about the treatment which Islam prescribes to the non-Muslims. Conversely, protest against Golwalkar's line without protest against the Islamic provisions, which are not an individual writer's little idea but actual law enforced in Islamic states for thirteen centuries as well as in several dozen "modern" states, would demonstrate hypocrisy and double standards.
But Golwalkar doesn't even say that he wants to go as far as to inflict on Muslims the same treatment which the Shari'a prescribes for non-Muslims. The expression "not even citizen's rights" strictly means that he would give Muslims the same status which residents with a foreign passport have: protection under the law, but no participation in political decision-making. But he would not prohibit them from riding a horse, or from bearing arms, or from keeping communal meetings where non-members are excluded, to name some of the restrictions which the Khilafat imposed on Zimmis.
The denial of citizen's rights to Muslims who claim separate nation status is criticzed by M.S. Aney in his foreword to Golwalkar's book: "No modern jurist or political philosopher or student of constitutional law can subscribe to the proposition which the author has laid down in Chapter V. (...) No person born in the country, of parents whose ancestors enjoyed rights of citizenship for centuries together, can be treated as a foreigner in a modern state on the ground that it follows a religion different from that of the majority population which naturally dominates and controls it." (We, p.xiv-xv)
Embarrassing as Aney's remark may have been for Golwalkar, he does confirm our thesis that Golwalkar was basically applying to the Muslims an arrangement developed by Islam itself: "Except perhaps in States following Islam which has as one of its articles of faith the supremacy of the true believer over the infidel, and which precludes the possibility of any true national fellowship between the convert to Mohammedanism and an infidel follower of another religion, one can not expect recognition of such a fanatic position in the constitution of any civilised state." (We, p.xv-xvi) Aney reprimands Golwalkar for stooping to the uncivilized level of the intrinsically "fanatic" position of the Islamic states.
Of course, Golwalkar's scheme does not live up to modern standards of secularism. That is why it was never reiterated in later RSS or BJP documents. Maybe it is also why Golwalkar's booklet was withdrawn from circulation. But those who say that it amounts to "fascism", will only sound convincing if they add that by these standards, the Shari'a is far more consistently "fascist".
2.3. The context: the Two-Nation theory
In judging Golwalkar's position, one should keep in mind the political atmosphere in 1938, when the book under discussion was written. Though the Muslim League had not yet officially adopted the Pakistan resolution (which it would in March 1940), the talk of a separate state for the Indian Muslims was already very much in the air. The basis for this Muslim demand was the so-called Two-Nation Theory, which held that Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations, to whom the principle of the "self-determination of nations" should apply. This principle was internationally accepted since it was applied in the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian, Czarist and Ottoman empires; it was also verbally supported by Lenin and theoretically applied in the establishment of the Soviet Union. Therefore, these two nations, Hindu and Muslim, would each have a right to its own "nation-state".
To the British rulers, this view seemed eminently reasonable: as Jinnah had pointed out, the Muslims were distinct from the Hindus by religion, language, dress, food habits, marriage customs, inheritance laws, holy days, arts, and they often lived in separate neighbourhoods, so that they lived an entirely separate life and were fit to be considered a separate nation. And while it was reasonable to the modern British rulers, it was equally self-evident to the guardians of Islamic orthodoxy (from Abul Kalam Azad to Abul Ala Maudoodi): the Quran and Hadis unambiguously describe and define the Muslim community as a separate nation (ummah). It is a different matter that in the orthodox view, the Muslim nation should lord it over other nations the way they had done in the Middle Ages, so that, rather than fleeing the Hindus by creating a separate state, they should try to capture power in the whole of united India. Fact remains that the orthodox agreed with the modernist Jinnah and with the latter's British allies on the theoretical principle that the Muslims constituted a separate nation.
The "fascist" aberration which Golwalkar made in the paragraph under discussion actually consists in accepting the Muslim-cum-British view of the Muslims' separate nationhood, and thinking through its implications for the status of Muslims in a Hindu state. To him (at least at the time of writing), the Muslims were indeed, in accordance with their own self-definition, a nation separate from the Hindu nation, and it logically followed that they could not be full citizens of a state constituted by and for the Hindu nation. Most Muslims supported the two-nation theory (the overwhelming majority of the Muslim electorate voted for the Muslim League in 1946, while no sizable section of the non-enfranchised lower-class Muslims expressed its opposition, on the contrary), so it was on their own premise that they could not be full citizens of a non-Islamic Indian state,-- unless they changed their attitude and chose to identify with India rather than with the Ummah.
Golwalkar explicitly gave them that option: the Muslims may glorify Hindu culture, and only "otherwise", in case they refuse to identify themselves as Indians rather than as Muslims, does he explicitate the alternative option of staying within the country without citizen's rights. If giving the Muslims a choice between their country and their religion seems unjustified, it may be noted that the same choice was given to President Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic president of the USA, and for this reason suspected by Protestants of being an agent of the Popish Plot for world domination. He was asked whether his loyalty was primarily with his country or with his Roman Catholic religion, and he replied without hesitation that in case of conflict between the two, "I would choose my country". This is exactly what Golwalkar expected of the Indian Muslims, in which case he would treat them as full citizens. It is only in case they refused this first loyalty to India that he provided for a second-best option of staying within the country in a kind of Zimmi status, without citizen's rights.
3. Did Golwalkar applaud Hitler?
At first sight, Guruji's seemingly laudatory reference to Nazi Germany is embarrassing. We will first look into the matter using only that information about his book We which those who are fond of quoting it, are willing to put at the reader's disposal. For now, let us accept the CPI(M)-BBC reading that he held the Nazi Germany of October 1938 up as an example to be emulated by the Hindus.
3.1. Outside perspectives on Nazi Germany
In 1938 Hitler was immensely popular worldwide as an economic miracle-worker and as a challenger to the supremacy of the colonial powers. The bad press he received, including the stories of his oppression of the Jews, was ascribed to the propaganda of the colonial powers, themselves veterans of many a massacre.
Those who remembered the British "information" about the Germans in World War 1 had reason enough to be skeptical. The world had been told about how German soldiers bayoneted Belgian babies and cut off the breasts of Belgian women, and how German factories had made soap out of the bodies of prisoners. In November 1918, when the Germans left Belgium, humanitarians came to the country to help the suffering population, but found to their surprise that after the initial brutalities of the conquest, the German occupation there had been fairly benign. The British depiction of the Teutonic furor turned out to be crass war propaganda. Consequently, for Indians struggling against Britain and out of touch with European politics, it was perfectly normal to ignore the British version of the facts concerning Nazi Germany.
In 1938, the mortal victims of Nazism were a thousand times fewer than those of Communism, yet numerous Western and westernized intellectuals could applaud Communism and call for its implementation in their homelands. Some of them knew they were lying, e.g. New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty privately estimated the death toll of the Ukrainian famine genocide of 1932-33 at ten million, but in his journalistic despatches he denied the genocide completely. Others, well, were they really that stupid? Jawaharlal Nehru could come home from a propaganda trip around Moscow as a zealous convert, blind to the omnipresent repression. The same wilful blindness afflicted numerous Western intellectuals. Against this background of widespread collaboration with the most monstrous political system in human memory, Golwalkar's alleged blindness to the horrible potential of pre-war and pre-Holocaust Nazism, even if verified, should warrant only limited censure.
It would have been different if he had defended Nazism while the Holocaust was taking place, which he didn't; or afterwards, which he didn't either -- unlike numerous Leftists with posh position from Harvard to JNU, who denied the crimes of Communism while they were taking place, thus thwarting effective protests and thereby helping the crimes to continue, and who often go on denying or minimizing them till today. Moreover, it can be shown that even in 1938, Golwalkar was by no means defending Nazism.
3.2. Hitler's popularity
Hitler was very popular in India. Elderly Indians have told me that in 1938, it was common among Indian boys to describe something brave and impressive as Hitlerwala. Both Hindus and Muslims were enthusiastic about his aura of effectiveness, and both also had their own special reason for sympathizing with him.
Hindus, who already had a soft corner for the German pioneers of Sanskrit studies, heard that Hitler was a vegetarian and a celibate (not wasting his precious fluid but transforming it into spiritual energy), and that he had given a pride of place to the Indian term Arya and to the Hindu symbol, the Swastika. Certain sections of the freedom movement also saw Germany as a potential ally, regardless of its regime. Before 1918, the revolutionary terrorists often dreamed aloud of taking German help in their struggle against Britain, and it is no coincidence that the Congress leader who ended up collaborating with Germany in World War 2 was one who had been close to this movement: the Leftist Subhash Chandra Bose.
Muslims had been aroused into solidarity with their Palestinian co-religionists, who were increasingly in open conflict with the Jewish settlers, and supported Hitler's anti-Jewish line. There was also the Khaksar Muslim militia, founded on the model of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA, "storming department") by Allama Inayatullah Mashreqi, who had returned from Germany full of enthusiasm for the national resurgence he had witnessed there.
The Muslim League, while in alliance with the British, also had a soft corner for Hitler: "When Nehru returned after a brief visit to Europe in 1938, he was struck by the similarity between the propaganda methods of the Muslim League in India and the Nazis in Germany: 'The League leaders had begun to echo the Fascist tirade against democracy... Nazis were wedded to a negative policy. So also was the League. The League was anti-Hindu, anti-Congress, anti-national... The Nazis raised the cry of hatred against the Jews, the League [had] raised [its] cry against the Hindus.'" (B.R. Nanda: Gandhi and His Critics, OUP, Delhi 1993 (1985), p.88)
In spite of this Hitler craze, Golwalkar chose not to tap into this facile enthusiasm for a foreign model. In the circumstances, the remarkable thing is not that he mentioned Germany, but that he did not utter even one sentence of praise for Hitler, or the Nazi Party, or any specific Nazi policy. If he had been a Hitler fan, he could easily have said so in public: England was not yet at war with Germany (these were the days of "peace in our time" euphoria), and Indian public opinion would not have been scandalized. Yet, all he said was that developments in Germany proved that two nations living in one state are bound to come in conflict sooner or later, or "how well-nigh impossible it is" for two nations to co-exist within one state. The statement may be wrong (though the general tendency to conflict between peoples forced to coexist in one state is regularly verified by events, as lately in ex-Yugoslavia), but cannot honestly be read as an endorsement of the crimes of Nazism.
3.3. Golwalkar and the democratic ethnostate
And it is not just that Nazism was a foreign doctrine, which Golwalkar refused to entertain simply because of its foreignness. For, to the satisfaction of all those Hindutva-watchers who allege that Hindu nationalism is but a calk on Western ideologies, Golwalkar explicitly writes that Hindus should learn from the West. When introducing his discussion of the definition of "nation", Guruji explains that the Indian political class is confused about it, that their "notions today about the nation concept are erroneous" and "not in conformity with those of the Western Political Scientists", whom he implicitly accepts as normative. (We, p.16/p.21)
He summons the Indian nationalist leadership to ponder the question: "What is the notion of Democratic states about 'Nation'? Is it the same haphazard bundle of friend and foe, master and thief, as we in Hindusthan understand it to mean? Or do the political thinkers of the democratic West think otherwise?" (We, p.16/p.21) The "haphazard bundle of friend and foe" is a reference to the Congress position of denying the Hindu-Muslim conflict except as a British "divide and rule" ploy. Against this, Golwalkar's position is that the Hindu-Muslim disunity is very serious and a threat to India, which will either become homogeneous or get entangled in a civil war or some other sad fate awaiting multi-communal states. In practice: to avoid civil war and partition, the Muslims must be assimilated or somehow politically neutralized ("not even citizen's rights").
What Golwalkar is looking for, is the opinion of the democratic Westerners, and in particular those who have articulated the connection between democracy and the need for a homogeneous population, e.g. John Stuart Mill (Considerations on Representative Government, 1861, p.292-294): "Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. (...) it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities." (Mill is mentioned as a source of inspiration for Hindu nationalists by M.S. Aney in his foreword to Golwalkar: We, p.ii.) That Golwalkar was so particular about looking to democratic authorities for advice is of course never mentioned in the secondary literature seeking to portray him as a Nazi.
To Golwalkar, the guidelines for steering India away from the looming abyss of Partition and civil war are not to be found in Nazi sources (of which he doesn't quote or mention any), nor in more traditional Rightist authors, nor of course in the confused and pseudo-democratic Congress leadership, but in the theorists of successful Western democracies. Underlying successful democracies is either a relatively homogeneous nation, as in the 19th-century unification of Italy (which was a democracy before the rise of Mussolini), or a strong mechanism of homogeneization, as in the American "melting-pot". Indeed, M.S. Aney (We, p.ii), who also mentions a long list of inspiring thinkers on nationhood in his foreword (and again none of them a Nazi), includes Israel Zangwill, the Anglo-Jewish playwringht who was both a Jewish nationalist and the author of The Melting-Pot (1908), a parable on assimilation.
As M.S. Aney writes (We, p.ii), the most important Western influence on the Hindu nationalist movement was the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, "by common consent still regarded as the greatest interpreter of Nationality". Indeed, Lala Lajpat Rai wrote a brief biography of Mazzini, Surendranath Banerjee also wrote about him, and V.D. Savarkar himself translated Mazzini's autobiography into Marathi in 1907. Aney (We, p.iii) quotes Mazzini to give the flavour of his integrationist and harmonious vision: "Humanity is the association of peoples; it is the alliance of peoples in order to work out their missions in peace and love. To forget humanity is to suppress the aim of our labours, to cancel the nation is to suppress the instrument by which to achieve the aim."
This was hardly a fascist vision, on the contrary: "Fascism no longer believed as Mazzini did in the harmony of various national interests. It dedicated itself to the preparation for the 'inevitable' struggle that forms the life of nations." (Hans Kohn: Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, Krieger Publ., Malabar CA 1982 (1965), p.79) While the Hindu nationalists rejected Mahatma Gandhi's passive pacifism and envisaged the necessity of preparing for confrontation, they never entertained the nihilistic or vitalistic belief in war for war's sake which is so typical of Fascism.
Nor did they nurture grand schemes of empire, to name a related trait of Fascism, which had been born from Italy's demand for a larger share in the spoils of the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War 1, and which had embarked upon a policy of conquest in the Balkans and Africa. Nazi Germany, of course, pursued a Lebensraum policy; though at the time of Golwalkar's writing, it had only been limited to bringing German-speaking territories (Austria and Sudetenland) heim ins Reich, Hitler's sabre-rattling in preparation of larger conquests was widely audible. Fascism and Nazism believed in a permanent struggle between nations, bringing out the strongest on top; by contrast, RSS literature frequently mentions as one of Hindu India's glories the fact that no Indian ruler ever set out to conquer territories outside India. The Hindu nationalists had a vision of India taking its place in the comity of nations, not some high-strung dream of world conquest or other negative excesses of nationalism.
That is why Golwalkar (We, Ch.3-4) repeatedly invokes the authority of the League of Nations in explaining his vision of nationhood and international relations. This would be rather odd for a "fascist" in 1938, considering that Fascist Italy had left the League of Nations in 1937, defiantly turning its back on the very principles which Golwalkar was extolling.
3.4. Golwalkar and the Holocaust
Hitler became a symbol of absolute evil by the Shoah or Holocaust, the attempted extermination of the Jews and, in additional order, the Gypsies and other groups. Without that, he would have been just one of the warlords who take turns in their hundreds at brutalizing sections of humanity. In fact, he would have been one of the most successful dictators in history, considering his near-abolition of unemployment by means of public works, his restoration of national sovereignty and his unification of most German-speaking people within the borders of his Reich. At the time of Golwalkar's writing, Hitler's "final solution" only consisted of legal discriminations and vague plans to banish the Jews either to Madagascar or to Palestine (there were secret negotiations between Nazis and Zionists, as pro-Palestinian authors keep reminding us, vide Lenni Brenner: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago 1983), i.e. removing them from Germany rather than killing them.
Though the oppression of the Jews was already serious, in 1938 it was "only" of the same order as the oppression and expulsion of non-Muslims in Islamic states today. The leading opinion among World War 2 historians, the so-called "functionalist" school (as opposed to the "intentionalists" who believe that the Shoah had been planned since before Hitler's take-over), is that various policies vis-�-vis the Jews were tried out by Hitler, and that the decision to exterminate them was only developed in stages and in reaction to changing circumstances, in particular the war with the Soviet Union (from 22 June 1941) and with the USA (from 11 December 1941). Had the war somehow been averted, it is quite conceivable that a master plan for the resettlement of the Central-European Jews in some colonial domain would have been agreed upon between the European powers, and implemented. In 1938, the Shoah was not yet a reality, not even an articulate project, and by no means an inevitability.
When Golwalkar wrote that Germany was proving (in a way which he explicitly considered "shocking") the impossibility of culturally distinct nations to live together, he was not referring to the Shoah, which was still three years in the future, but to the removal of Jews from office, their loss of citizenship and their resulting exodus from Germany, phenomena paralleled by the treatment of non-Muslims in Muslim countries even today. And even these pre-War Nazi policies vis-�-vis the Jews were by no means recommended or approved by Golwalkar. At no point did he say that "pogroms are the answer" or that in India, on the German model, "expulsion of minority professors from the universities is the way to avert Partition".
Golwalkar neither applauded the fact that Germans were staging a struggle against Jews, nor the German perception of why the Jews were unwelcome to stay, much less the specific methods adopted by the Nazis vis-�-vis the "Jewish question" in any phase of their term in power. All he did was point out that the co-existence of two nations within the German state had led to conflict, and that this was an intrinsic liability of any such co-existence, proving the need to make nations homogeneous by assimilating the minorities into the national mainstream.
3.5. Golwalkar's assimilationism
Nothing indicates that Golwalkar understood the exact nature and antecedents of the anti-Jewish policies in Germany and other countries. The intricate story of anti-Judaism in Europe was beyond his politically uneducated intellect. Though many RSS people consider Guruji a great thinker, his assessment of contemporary political phenomena including Nazism was amateurish and poorly conceived when not downright mistaken. Rather, it seems he simply projected his Indian concerns on a world situation of which he knew little and understood less.
In particular, if he assumed that the cultural distinctness of the Jews in Germany could be equated with that of the Muslims in India, he was way off the mark (along with all the anti-RSS polemicists who keep on making that same equation). First of all, historically there was simply no comparison, for Germany had never been conquered and ravaged by the Jews the way India had been brutalized and oppressed by Islam. Coming to particulars, the Jews had become less and less distinct from the 18th century onwards, more and more assimilated, and therefore more and more part of German society including its upper layers. Without benefiting from any institutional privileges (another contrast with Muslims in India), they had worked their way to the top or at least to well-to-do positions in society.
Meanwhile, the Muslims in India had, ever since their ancestors' conversion from Hinduism, been increasingly dissimilating themselves from their mother society. Under British rule, when they were no longer in a position of power and prestige, they had been wilfully ghettoizing their own community, and this assertion of a separate identity had gained in intensity with the Khilafat (Caliphate restoration) and Tabligh (Islamic-purist propaganda) movements of the 1920s. In the 1930s, a new political articulation was given, viz. Muslim separatism crystallizing around the demand for Partition. This had no parallel at all in the situation of the Jews in Germany.
While Golwalkar wanted the Muslims to identify with India rather than with their transnational community, Hitler wanted to dis-identify the assimilated Jews with the German nation and to push them back into their transnational communal identity. The contrast can be illustrated with the aspect of physical recognizability. Hitler forced the Jews, who had long given up their distinctive clothing and hairstyle, to make themselves visible again by wearing the yellow David star. This was a practice modelled on the enforced recognizability imposed on the Jews in the medieval Islamic empire, typically by means of a yellow strip of cloth. (This is not a thing of the past: in October 1998, the Taliban government in Afghanistan imposed on the fifty remaining Hindu families in Kandahar the following dress code: "Under the Taliban decree, every Hindu in this southern Afghan city has to wear a yellow piece of cloth", according to Indian Express, 24-10-1998.) But in India, the vast majority of Muslims were readily recognizable as such, and every Tabligh sermon led to the sprouting of beards or the donning of veils on the faces of those Muslims who had not yet sufficiently dissimilated themselves from the Hindu mainstream.
Golwalkar says in so many words, in the very line which is always quoted to prove his Hitlerian leanings, that he wants "the foreign races in Hindusthan" to "adopt the Hindu culture and language" and to "lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race". His words indicate that he had swallowed the common Indian Muslims' self-definition as "foreign", which they have traditionally buttressed with faked genealogies leading up to the Prophet and his companions, and with Arabic names and dress codes and other wilfully foreign cultural elements. But the point is that he wants them to abandon these transnational affectations and to assimilate themselves into the majority culture, the very opposite of what Hitler wanted from the Jews.
If at all we need a comparison, Golwalkar's position is closer to that of the Jacobin rulers in Revolutionary France, who wanted the non-French (Basque, Breton, Corsican, Flemish, German) minorities in France's conquered border regions to assimilate. Their methods included prohibiting minorities' self-organization and the use of their languages in education; the latter prohibition is still in force in France. A related Jacobin streak in Golwalkar was his plea against the administrative division of India into linguistic states (grudgingly conceded in the 1950s by Jawaharlal Nehru), and in favour of a strictly unitary state. This is in stark contrast with the current decentralizing and federalist position of the BJP, e.g. its carving a new state Uttaranchal out of Uttar Pradesh. Mercifully, Golwalkar had no stated intention of using the French Revolutionary methods of oppression and terror.
At any rate, Golwalkar can be fully exonerated of the one thing which N. Ram, Sitaram Yechurey, the BBC and the whole host of India-watchers insinuate against him: support for National-Socialism in its historical meaning of a genocidal authoritarian regime. Whether he ever praised Hitler before the full facts became known, we shall examine shortly, but even the professional critics of the RSS have to admit implicitly that he never praised Hitler after the Nazi crimes had become known to the larger public: apart from the worn-out 1938 quote under consideration, they have nothing to show.
4. Golwalkar vs. Hitler
But did Golwalkar in 1938 see Nazi Germany as an example to be followed? If we do not just focus on the selected quotation (as we are led to do by those who made the selection in the first place), but read the whole book, we find that Golwalkar is definitely not asking the Hindus to emulate Nazi Germany.
4.1. Golwalkar's role models
When faced with embarrassing quotations (e.g. from the Quran), people often allege that these have been "quoted out of context", mostly without saying what that context is and how it would change the meaning of the quoted part. In this case however, the context does change the meaning of Golwalkar's offensive line considerably. It is not without good reason that those who quote the offending passage, from the CPI(M) to the BBC, keep the entire context outside the reader's view. So now, we will go beyond the limits which they have tried to impose on this debate (and which the RSS has unwittingly accepted by its refusal to re-examine and discuss the book), and see what information about Golwalkar's relation with Hitler is offered in the unquoted paragraphs.
The third chapter of We is devoted to demonstrating that five attributes are present in all successful nation-states: country, race, religion, culture, language. It is in this context that Golwalkar verifies his criteria for a number of countries, including Germany but also England and the Soviet Union (where "socialism is modern Russia's religion" and "their prophet is Karl Marx", We, p.37/p.45), with the Nazi pre-1939 situation being just one variety of nation-building among others.
What strikes the educated reader is the clumsiness of Golwalkar's attempt to straitjacket the rather different situations in these countries into his preconceived scheme, as well as his confused and defective knowledge about them. For an example of the lack of clarity in his argument: while being opposed to English imperialism and specifically complaining about the "notorious" British propensity to impose the English language, in Ireland and Wales as much as in Calcutta and Mumbai, he still upholds "the Englishman's pride in his 'national' language" as a model for the Hindus. (We, p.34/p.42)
For an example of his lack of factual knowledge: he claims that "the Russian nation adheres with religious fervour" to Communism, at a time when Stalin had just murdered millions of Russians and Ukrainians, and when popular enthusiasm for Communism fell short of "religious fervour" by a rather large margin. (We, p.37/p.45) This alleged anti-Communist did not even know that Russia had been turned Communist by brute force (the October 1917 coup d'�tat a.k.a. "Revolution") rather than by the people's will. Not misguided political sympathies but utter amateurishness in his analysis of world politics is the verdict which we can deduce from a close reading of his book.
Golwalkar's opinion on Hitler should be read against its own background, just like that of an American student who travelled around Europe in the 1930s and who wrote in a letter to his parents that Communism is the right system for Russia, fascism is right for Italy and Germany, and democracy is the thing for England and the US; his name was John F. Kennedy. That "the real is rational", that somehow the existing order is God-given and right, that somehow all nations have got the regimes they deserve, is unfortunately a very common prejudice. At that time, Communism's victims were counted in millions, Nazism's in hundreds, yet both JFK and Golwalkar didn't even think of questioning the legitimacy of the Bolshevik regime. The most reprehensible thing about both JFK's and Guru Golwalkar's utterances, taking into account the information then available to them, was their unquestioning acceptance of Stalinism as the legitimate and fitting political system for Russia.
4.2. Golwalkar on Czechoslovakia
Some parts of the book conclusively refute the thesis that Golwalkar was a Hitler supporter. First of all, one of the countries in his list of models of nation-building to be studied by Hindus is Czechoslovakia, one of Hitler's first victims. And there, his sympathies, unlike Hitler's, are divided between the Sudeten Germans and the Czechs.
Here again, selective quoting has done the job of misleading the readers and creating a different impression. What is sometimes quoted is the following: "Austria for example was merely a province [in] the Germanic Empire. Logically Austria should not be an independent kingdom, but be one with the rest of Germany. So also with those portions, inhabited by Germans, which had been included, after the War, in the new state of Czechoslovakia. (...) This natural and logical aspiration has almost been fulfilled". (We, p.35/p.42-43)
Is this not terrible, Golwalkar openly supporting the Anschluss of Austria and Sudetenland? Actually, no. If Hitler became a synonym for horror and evil, it is not because he fulfilled the wish of the Austrians and Sudeten Germans of joining Germany. After World War 1, the Austrian parliament had voted with the largest possible majority in favour of joining Germany. This democratic choice was overruled by the victorious powers in the unilateral treaty of Versailles. Such are the complexities of history, that the killer of democracy in Germany implemented the democratic will of the Austrian people with his annexation of Austria.
As for Sudetenland, its separation from the Czech region was likewise applauded by the vast majority of the population concerned. It was entirely in keeping with the principle of "self-determination of nations". This principle had been conceded in the case of the Czechs' separation from Austria, but overruled by the victorious powers in the case of Sudetenland because they wanted to create large buffer states around Germany (also in the case of eastern Upper Silesia, annexed by the new state of Poland in spite of a plebiscite showing 60% support for accession to Germany).
If Hitler got as far as he had gotten by 1939, it was not purely by leaning on the forces of evil, but by occasionally and selectively allying himself with forces of reason, justice and democracy. Anyone with a sense of fairness could see that the Versailles treaty was anything but a peace treaty; its premisse that Germany alone was responsible for World War 1, was factually incorrect, and its practical conclusions were likewise unjust. This is a decisive reason why the Western powers felt inhibited from stopping Hitler when he started undoing a number of Versailles clauses: restoration of German sovereignty over the Rhineland, annexation of Austria, de-annexation of Sudetenland from the new state of Czechoslovakia. Conquering colonial powers like England and France knew well enough that in similar circumstances, they themselves would have done the same thing.
However, Gowalkar's support to the Sudeten Germans' reunification with Germany is counterbalanced by his support to the cause of Czechoslovakia's unity and integrity. Golwalkar argues quite correctly that established nations victorious in the Great War do not concede to their ethnic minorities the "minority rights" devised by the League of Nations as binding on the newly created states. Thus, an American ambassador to the League is quoted articulating the principle of "completely natural assimilation" as the great unifier of the American nation, and asserting that this renders the League principle of minority rights inapplicable. (We, p.46/p.55; emphasis in the original)
This provides a background to Golwalkar's oft-quoted stricture against minority privileges, justified explicitly with reference to the assimilative approach of the major Western powers: "Naturally, there are no foreigners in these old Nations, and no one to tax the generosity of the Nation by demanding privileges as 'Minority communities' in the State. It is this sentiment which prompted the United States of America, England, France and other old nations to refuse to apply the solution of the Minorities problem arrived at by the League of Nations to their states." (We, p.46/p.54)
Golwalkar quotes with approval the warning against the principle of minority rights uttered in a speech at the League Council on 9 December 1925 by French delegate Paul Fauchille: "the recognition of rights belonging to minorities as separate entities, by increasing their coherence and developing in them a sense of their own strength, may provoke them to separate themselves from the state of which they form a part; and in view of the right of peoples to dispose of themselves, the recognition of the rights of these minorities runs a risk of leading to the disruption of states." (We, p.48-49/p.57)
To Fauchille's warning, he comments: "Prophetic words! How true they sound today after the recent developments in Europe, under the very nose of the League of Nations! The disastrous fate of the unfortunate Czechoslovakia (to which, as promised, we now refer) proves beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt, how hollow were the League's hopes and how justified the fears of Paul Fauchille." (We, p.49/p.57)
The alleged fanatic Golwalkar admits that there are two sides to the argument: "And yet the decision of the League on the minority rights was the most equitable and just that could be conceived of. But even this just and equitable arrangement, instead of fostering the assimilation of the minorities into the National community, only served to increase their coherence and create in them such a sense of their own strength, that it led to a total disruption of the state, the Sudeten German minority merging in Germany, the Hungarians in Hungary, in the end leaving the national Czechs to shift for themselves in the little territory left unto them." (We, p.49/p.57-58)
To Golwalkar, the lesson to be learnt from the "disastrous fate of unfortunate.
Koenraad Elst - The Saffron Swastika.jpg
The Saffron Swastika: The Notion of Hindu "Fascism" (ISBN 81-85990-69-7) is a book written by Koenraad Elst and published as two volumes in 2001. It discusses in detail the concepts of Hindutva and Hindu nationalism. He also argues against the idea that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh are fascist in ideology. In the foreword, he writes about such allegations that “So far, the polemical arrows have all been shot from one side, replies from the other side being extremely rare or never more than piecemeal”. Furthermore, he tries to show that personalities like Veer Savarkar or Golwalkar were not fascist or racist and also writes in detail about Savitri Devi. Other topics that are treated by Elst in this book are the caste system and the swastika.
Among the numerous publishing houses in Paris, there is a fringe-rightist one called Avatar. Its name (Sanskrit avat�ra = "divine incarnation") and publishing policy are inspired by Julius Evola, d. 1971, the Italian "integral traditionalist" aristocrat who worked for the SS research department Ahnenerbe ("ancestral heritage") and who dabbled in Oriental lore as part of his esotericist musings. Avatar Editions has its nominal legal headquarters outside Dublin, Ireland, apparently to avoid problems with France's draconian anti-racist and anti-revisionist laws. One of its ongoing projects is a series of booklets called Cahiers de la Radicalit�, under the Evolian motto: "Be radical, have principles, be absolute, be that which the bourgeoisie calls an extremist: give yourself without counting or calculating, don't accept what they call 'the reality of life' and act in such a way that you won't be accepted by that kind of 'life', never abandon the principle of struggle."
The second booklet in the series is Le National-Socialisme et la Tradition Indienne, ("National-Socialism and Indian Tradition") by the French-Greek lady Savitri Devi Mukherji, n�e Maximiani Portas (born Lyons, 8h45 a.m., 30 Sep. 1905, died Sible Hedingham, Essex, shortly after midnight, 22 Oct. 1982), a republication of two of her last papers, now otherwise hard to find. The first one, L'Inde et le Nazisme, from ca. 1978, resumes parts of her autobiography, Souvenirs et R�flexions d'une Aryenne ("Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Lady", written in 1969-71 and privately published, Delhi 1976). The other, Hitl�risme et Hindou�t�, is the French translation of "Hitlerism and the Hindu World", originally published in The National-Socialist, #2, end of 1980. The book further includes a homage to Savitri Devi from 1978 by Vittorio de Cecco; and new scholarly introductions by the rightist-traditionalist intellectuals Claudio Mutti, a political scientist specialized in Hungarian and Rumanian nationalisms and a convert to Islam; and Christian Bouchet, a law scholar by training but mainly a researcher on religion and "Tradition".
1. Critics and believers
There is a considerable distance between Mutti's and Bouchet's critical accounts of the relation between Nazism, India and "esotericism", and the exalted, fanciful accounts by de Cecco and Savitri Devi. Thus, the latter two have totally lapped up the twin myths of the "esoteric" Thule-Gesellschaft, of which Hitler's older friend Dietrich Eckart had attended some meetings, as (1) a profound vehicle of ancient secret knowledge, and as (2) an influential body with a deep impact upon Nazi thought and politics. Bouchet, by contrast, affirms that "the fairy-tales about this esotericism are very largely later inventions which only gained a certain trendiness after the end of World War 2", and that "the Thule Society was nothing at all, or close to" (p.91). Mutti explains how these myths were invented and propagated during the Nazi era by Thule founder Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, real name Adam Glauer, who tried to claim a role as the F�hrer's original mentor in the then successful Nazi movement (p.21-22). A second source of the same tendency, though with opposite motives, was ex-Nazi exile Hermann Rauschning, who tried to feed the foreign press a sensational "insider" account of Hitler as an occultist weirdo.
Both men were shameless liars. Sebottendorf (cited here in evidence by Savitri Devi on p.96), Freemason, Turkish national by choice and wounded veteran on the Turkish side of the second Balkan war (1912-13), was one of those typical occultist conmen with false academic and nobility titles, though his initiation into Turkish Sufism may have been genuine. He was exposed and denounced as a self-serving myth-monger by other Thule and Nazi insiders immediately upon the publication of his book Bevor Hitler kam ("Before Hitler Came", 1934). Rauschning's book Gespr�che mit Hitler ("Conversations with Hitler", 1939) remained in use as a popular source about Hitler's alleged temperamental and religious eccentricities until the 1980s, both among neo-Nazis like Savitri Devi (citing it here on p.63, and numerous times in her autobiography) and anti-Nazis like Bernard-Henri L�vy (L'id�ologie fran�aise, 1980), as well as among the whole crowd of sensationalist confabulators like Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (Le matin des magiciens, 1960; The Morning of the Magicians, 1971) or Trevor Ravenscroft (The Spear of Destiny, 1972). Around the time of Savitri Devi's death, Rauschning's account was definitively exposed as spurious, e.g. he was shown not to have been present at most of the private conversations on which he claimed to "report". Contemporary histories of the Nazi period have expunged it from their bibliographies, and Mutti (p.21) correctly dismisses it as "totally unfounded". Savitri Devi's reliance on Rauschning illustrates how, contrary to the belief common among her neo-Nazi admirers, she really had no direct contact with any important Nazi insiders who could have informed her on the inspiration, occult or otherwise, behind Nazism. In her writings, she herself does little to promote this belief: apart from making tall claims about Nazism being part of an esoteric tradition and the germ of a new solar religion with Hitler as its prophet, she doesn't really try to establish credibility by means of claiming direct initiation into the remainders of Nazi esotericism nor even by means of some clever name-dropping. In asserting her beliefs about Nazism, she openly presumes and supposes, she cites the communis opinio or invokes anonymous third-hand sources. She had missed the whole Nazi period in Germany and her contacts after the war had been limited to third-rank Nazi followers, not including a single witness to any secret or inner workings of the Nazi apparatus (or even worse for the veracity of her account, the occasional high-ranking Nazis she met were equally unaware of any esoteric lineage underlying their political movement). She was so poorly informed that she didn't even see through a totally fraudulent account like Rauschning's.
More importantly, she never ever divulges any Nazi teachings worthy of being called esoteric, or otherwise philosophical or religious or profound. It is like with the Nazi expedition to Tibet, as reported in detail by Christopher Hale (Himmler's Crusade, The True Story of the 1938 Nazi Expedition into Tibet, Bantam Press, London 2003): you turn page after page, curious to learn all the esoteric secrets that the Nazi occultists are supposed to have exchanged with the Tibetan mystics, and all you get is racialist skull measurements, swastikas and the dreary details of a difficult journey through snow and ice. Myth-mongers like Savitri Devi may explain this as the result of the secrecy to which esotericists are sworn, but it's simply obvious that nothing is reported because there was nothing to report in the first place.
At any rate, nothing in her writings establishes her as some kind of authority on Nazi history or on the putative philosophical essence of Hitlerism. This status has only been accorded to her ca. 1970 by the German-Canadian neo-Nazi publisher Ernst Z�ndel and by the Chilean neo-Nazi diplomat Miguel Serrano. The whole of her "information" on the alleged esoteric dimension of Nazism could have been written by anyone vaguely familiar with the then-available popular lore on the subject.
2. Paganism, Christianity and their Nazi-secular synthesis
Instead of claiming any privileged access to inside sources, which is the least you could have expected from an "esoteric" account, Savitri Devi bases her belief in a deeper layer of Nazism on quasi-logical suppositions made from her armchair, e.g.: "It is at least logical to think that it was the Ahnenerbe which was, within Hitler's Black Order [= the SS] the depository of the Tradition" (p.32); and on generally-available rumours or snippets of information, often true but hardly consequential or mysterious, e.g.: "The nature of the [Ahnenerbe's] investigations reveals a distinct interest in esoteric matters. Thus, it studied the symbolism of the harp in Ireland; the survival of genuine Rosicrucianism, i.e. groups of initiates still in possession of the full tradition of the Knights Templar, (*) reconsidered the Bible and the Kabbala, trying to draw out their hidden meaning and especially wondering about the role of number symbolism in either." (p.32-33) Note that Rosicrucianism, the Knights Templar, the Bible and the Kabbala all belong within the Judeo-Christian rather than in any Pagan worldview. She admits that "Christianity and even Judaism, like all religions or philosophies somehow linked to the Tradition, contain a part of the esoteric truth" (p.33). This is the standard view among esotericists and traditionalists, and may be contrasted with the position of activist Hindus and of some neo-Pagan ideologues, who emphasize and possibly exaggerate not the commonalities but the antagonism between the Prophetic-monotheistic (self-described as "Abrahamic") and the "Pagan" worldviews. As we shall see, even in what remains of a religious dimension of Nazism, legitimate Germanic Heathenism was completely overshadowed by nostalgic quasi-Christian romanticism, fanciful post-Christian innovations and purely secular-nationalistic motifs. Indeed, by Savitri Devi's own account, naked German nationalism was always a bigger concern of the Ahnenerbe than all religious or esoteric flights of fancy combined. She relates how Heinrich Himmler, in his "only reference to the Ahnenerbe" in public, devoted his speech to praising his archaeologists' discovery in East Prussia of plural layers of Germanic forts, "refuting the common opinion that East Prussia had once been Slavic" (p.34). Of course, the Balto-Slavic character of the East Prussia region before the 12th century is well-established and this archaeological finding cannot have altered that, except through a wrong chronology (this was well before Carbon-14 dating) or a wilful misinterpretation in a German-narcissistic sense. In looking back on the confrontation between the German and the Balto-Slavic elements in and around East Prussia, Christian sympathies are with the German colonizers led by the Teutonic Knights, who, fresh from the Crusades in Palestine, imposed Christianity; whereas neo-Pagan sympathies are with the natives who defended the last stronghold of European Paganism and even managed to keep some Pagan traditions alive under the Christian regime. Himmler's sympathies clearly were not a matter of Pagan versus Christian, but simply of German versus foreign. Yes, he sympathized with the Saxon resisters massacred in AD 782 by Charlemagne for refusing baptism, but they were Germans resisting the ambitions of a European ruler who belonged as much to Belgium and France as to Germany; by contrast, he didn't care a fig for the Baltic Pagans massacred by the thoroughbred Germans of the Teutonic Order.
(As an aside, please note the anti-Slavic thrust in Himmler's speech and in the general Nazi scheme of things, which envisioned the take-over and ethnic cleansing of most Slavic territories up to the Urals for colonization by German warrior-farmers. The Slavs are as "Aryan" as the Germans in any then-common sense of the term. They obviously speak an Indo-European language, they are white, they have an equally large percentage of fair-haired and blue-eyed people, they are on average as tall and robust as the Germans, if not more. In the German experience, Slavs were less dynamic, so that Slavic rulers in Russia and the Balkans often imported German colonists to cultivate difficult soil; yet the Russian colonization of North Asia and even Alaska must stand as a most spectacular instance of "Aryan" expansion, unmatched in scope by any German achievement. The Nazi treatment of the Slavs, such as the antagonization of the initially welcoming Ukrainians by bullying German occupation forces, or the spurning for two precious years of the collaboration offers by captive Russian general Vlassov, belies the claim by Nazi sympathizers that theirs was a "pan-Aryan" movement. Petty German nationalism directly conflicted with any vision of an "Aryan" project, and may well have cost the Germans their victory in WW2.)
In the same speech, Himmler reportedly also announced the restoration and upkeep of cultural centres devoted to "German greatness and the German past". (p.34) So, even the most "esoteric" department of the Nazi movement still put secular concerns first. In one of her rare references to Ahnenerbe mastermind Himmler, she fails to quote any occultist statement from the horse's mouth or even to imply any deeper philosophical concern beyond sheer nationalist vanity.
Admittedly, among the German heritage sites, she claims Himmler included one that is beloved of astrologers, geomancers and occultists of all stripes, the Externsteine, a curiously shaped rock formation apparently of natural origin but widely believed to have been a cultic site, a "German Stonehenge". But here again, we find a problem of interpretation. Historically speaking, the site was of course never devoted to German self-celebration (unlike the nearby Hermannsdenkmal, the giant statue of Hermann/Arminius who defeated the Romans) but to a solar or stellar cult, universal par excellence; undeterred by the sobering facts, Himmler and Savitri Devi posthumously turned it into a nationalist monument. Now consider what happened there under the care of the "esoteric" Ahnenerbe (p.34): "On the summit of the highest rock, in the place of the ancient golden Irminsul ['grand pillar' representing the Cosmic Tree] uprooted in 772 by the soldiers of the same Christian conqueror [Charlemagne], fluttered henceforth, victorious and liberating, a symbol of the reconciliation of all the contrasting aspects of German history in the consciousness of its profound unity, the red-white-black swastika flag of the third Reich."
If the Third Reich aimed at a restoration of ancient Germanic Heathenism, as some Christian polemicists now claim, then the logical thing to do would have been to restore the ancient Heathen symbol, the Irminsul, in its very own place of pride. Instead, the Reich authorities, even that segment most associated with claims of Pagan revivalism, the Ahnenerbe, preferred to replace it with the modern secular symbol of the German state and race. This was in line with the Nazi regime's basic secularism: guaranteeing freedom of religion within certain limits, but keeping the state free of religious references or commitments.
Thus, still at the level of public symbolism, the Waffen-SS didn't name its units and weaponry after Heathen gods (the way India has an Agni missile and her soldiers use "Hara Hara Mahadeva" or "Sat Sri Akal" as rallying-cries, or the way Israel has its Merkavah tank, after the Kabbalistic chariot of Yahweh), but after characters from German history, e.g. the foreign volunteer legions were named after a person or event linking their respective countries of origin with Germany, such as Charlemagne for the French, Prinz Eugen for the Balkan ethnic-Germans or Langemarck (a Flemish WW1 battle site) for the Flemings. If Pagan gods is what you're looking for, try the British Navy in WW2, many of whose battle ships had names from Greek mythology, with one submarine even Germanically called Odin; or the American space programme with its Saturn and Apollo. The Nazis didn't replace the Christian religious salute "Gr�ss Gott" with a Heathen counterpart like "Gr�ss Wotan", but with the secular salute "Heil Hitler". Turn it any way you want, but Hitler was a secularist.
3. Savitri Devi's "traditionalism"
It is remarkable how Savitri Devi highlights the element of religious co-existence and synthesis in Nazi policy, the "reconciliation of all the contrasting aspects of German history in the consciousness of its profound unity". Just like Saint Paul said that there is no longer Greek nor Jew, slave nor freeman, since all are jointly saved in Christ, Hitler held that there are no longer believers nor unbelievers, Christians nor Pagans, noblemen nor commoners, since all Germans partake of their common German nationhood and racial superiority. All over Europe, the age of Christian decline had brought forth disgruntled ex-Christians who tried to get back at Christian obscurantism with anti-Christian fanaticism, typically focused in the liberal Masonic Lodges and later on in the Communist movement. Nazi Germany too had its share of pope-devouring anti-Christians, epitomized by the leaders of the "folkish" religious movement, General Erich Ludendorff and his wife Mathilde von Kemnitz. By contrast, Hitler, conscious of his position as national leader, kept away from extreme religious positions and tried to represent the synthesis of all the influences that had fostered the German soul.
Alright, maybe Christianity had been of foreign "Asiatic" origin (like Hinduism, which Ludendorff equally despised), and maybe it had become an obsolete irrational belief system, but it had shaped German identity, it had motivated Germans to great things, such as the Teutonic Knights' conquest of the then-Pagan Baltic region or the anti-Ottoman reconquests in the Balkans by Prince Eugen of Savoye. So, in Hitler's view, Germans should let these old religious quarrels be bygones, accept all tributaries to German identity as a heritage of history, and move on as a modern and united nation. Like Prussian king Friedrich II the Great and like Second Reich founder Otto von Bismarck, Hitler was a secularist who wanted to withdraw the nation's energies from religious pursuits, not by outlawing these after the Soviet model (except that he did outlaw all fringe associations devoted to neo-Pagan and other eccentric religions as foci of anarchic or pacifist threats to public order, though not their practice in private), but by promoting the nation as the alternative focus of devotion and the modern scientific temper as the key to practical this-worldly salvation. We may now frown upon the understanding of "science" as meaning the cold analysis and re-engineering of man by racialist Darwinism, but that was common enough then, outside as well as inside Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, to the extent that religion remained relevant, such as the "positive Christianity" enjoined in the Nazi Party charter, it should be patriotic and non-sectarian in spirit, too enlightened to ever get entangled again in the demographically wasteful religious violence of the forced Christianization, the Crusades, the witch burnings or the Thirty Years' War.
The folkish tendency and the syncretic "German Faith" movement too, in spite of their anti-Christian rhetoric, and like-minded religious hobbyists such as Heinrich Himmler, applied this pro-synthesis guideline in practice. In their construction of a "truly German spirituality", they incorporated Christian mystics and philosophers such as Meister Eckhart and Nicolaus Cusanus (who taught, in the 15th century already, that all religions are but fragmentary windows upon the same and fundamentally unknowable Godhead), along with the ancient Heathen seeress Weleda or the post-Christian visionary J.W. Goethe. This is an approach which modern Gandhian or Anglo-urban Hindus would call "secular".
It seems that Savitri Devi, in the last years of her life, from which both these republished papers date, had lost the anti-Christian fire of her prime and adopted this "secular" position that had also been Hitler's, viz. to reconcile the Pagan and Christian elements. She attributes to Hitlerism a "Pagan" (quote marks hers) component which she defines not as any actual god-cult which Christians would recognize as Pagan, but as the philosophical rejection of all sentimental "anthropocentrism" (p.35).
The identification of Paganism with non-anthropocentrism has a certain pedigree, viz. Nietzsche and his commentators describe pre-Socratic cosmology as "Pagan" when contrasting it with the human-centric Socratic concerns of ethics and epistemology. Yet this is semantically unsatisfactory, for it attributes anthropocentrism to philosophers like Socrates, and elsewhere Confucius and the Buddha, who by standard definition were Pagans; so Paganism cannot be the polar opposite of anthropocentrism. At any rate, in spite of this so-called Pagan element, she emphasizes that "there was never any question of rejecting or undervaluing anything in the German or European patrimony that did honour to the Aryan genius" (p.35). She appreciated that in religious matters, Hitler "was impartial just as any sage necessarily would have to be", so that he didn't hesitate to honour the anti-Pagan emperor Charlemagne, originator of the Reich idea. Hitler knew of the dissolving effect of Christianity upon Greco-Roman civilization (which he admired far more than the fairly primitive Germanic culture), but: "It mattered little what this religion had been, if it was the cement of a conquering Germanic empire and, later, the occasion for the well-known blossoming of the arts." (p.36) Like Nehru the estranged Hindu, Hitler the estranged Catholic could appreciate the role of religion, religion in general rather than any religion in particular, in the story of his country's greatness.
Moreover: "Whatever was eternal in the warrior religion of Wotan and Thor, and earlier in the immemorial Nordic religion of Heaven and Earth and their 'Son', which [Ahnenerbe co-founder] Dr. Hermann Wirth has studied, had to survive in Christian esotericism, and in esotericism in general. (*) The deep meaning of the ancient Irminsul, axis of the world, is basically not different from the Cross detached from all Christian mythology, i.e. from the story of Christ's suffering as a historical fact." (p.37) She even agreed to acknowledge the contribution of a German Jew, Martin Buber, to the work of the Ahnenerbe: "Why not, after all, if this Jew had attained a high degree of knowledge in 'pure metaphysics' and had no political activity?" (p.66) So, in a typical Traditionalist approach, both Germanic Paganism and Christianity, and even the Jewish Kabbala on which Buber was an expert, are now seen as but manifestations of the one perennial Tradition. This late conversion of Savitri Devi to inclusive Traditionalism probably explains why the Avatar publishing house chose to highlight these papers by republishing them.
4. Aryan invasion from the Arctic
In trying to establish a link between Hinduism and Hitlerism, Savitri plays exactly two cards, though by repetition they fill up quite a few pages. I do not mean the Swastika, which the Nazis hadn't borrowed from India in the first place. The symbol is widespread among cultures on all inhabited continents (as she herself admits, p.80), though the Nazis believed it was confined to Aryan cultures and those non-Aryan ones that had borrowed from them. It had been present in Europe for many centuries, not too prominently but sufficiently for making any borrowing from Asia superfluous. No, the two purported links are the caste system and the Aryan invasion theory (AIT).
This is not the place to speak out on the historical question whether the Indo-European languages originated inside or outside of India. In the latter hypothesis, they must have been imported into India. The most commonly accepted scenario in that case is that the "Aryans" brought the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family with them when they invaded India in 1700 BC or thereabouts. The truth of this theory is totally unconnected to its political uses, but among the latter we must at any rate note the European racist use of it, both in the British-colonialist and in the Nazi scheme of things, as an instance of the expansion of the superior white race into the territory of inferior races.
Savitri Devi's alpha and omega on the AIT was Bal Gangadhar Tilak's book Arctic Home in the Vedas, Pune 1903. This version of the AIT went a little farther than most in that it specified the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans as the Arctic region, an unlikely wellspring of large population movements. It somehow didn't strike her as odd that in the intervening decades not a single independent scholar had come out with research findings supporting Tilak's theory. It is the only Indian pro-AIT source she ever quotes, in this book (p.39-40, p.79, p.96-97, plus her laudator de Cecco on p.12) and to my knowledge also in the whole of her writings, as a native echo to the European claim of an early Aryan colonization of India.
In building on Tilak's theory, she makes the rather silly mistake of uncritically accepting Tilak's voice as an independent Indian confirmation of the European belief in the Aryan invasion. In reality, Tilak didn't get this notion from his traditional Brahminical upbringing, for it doesn't figure in the Vedas and in Sanskrit literature at all. He had drunk from the same source as Savitri Devi, Hitler, the Indologists and all the other believers in the Aryan invasion theory, viz. the 19th-century philologists who had tried to make sense of the linguistic kinship between Europe and North India. Tilak had acted as a "native informer" helping Indologists in their research. Most famously, he had collaborated with the German scholar Hermann Jacobi in establishing a chronology for the Vedas. It is in this context that he imbibed the new-fangled notion of a Nordic homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, whence they had expanded to all their historical areas of settlement including India.
Interiorizing this notion, Tilak then went on to develop fanciful interpretations of Vedic verses so as to make them fit the scenario of a non-Indian, indeed Arctic setting of the oldest layer of Vedic literature. Perfectly innocuous verses about the dawn or the seasons, always read in their natural meaning by one or two hundred generations of Brahmins, were suddenly contrived to reveal references to the Arctic. It is this highly artificial and totally untraditional reading of the Vedic hymns which became and remains the sheet-anchor of Aryan invasion lore in European far-rightist and new-rightist circles.
All through her life, Savitri Devi failed to notice how Tilak's theory remained without support from the legitimate keepers of Hindu tradition, the Vedic pandits, nor did she register the articulate opposition to the theory from Hindu nationalists such as Sri Aurobindo Ghose or Guru Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar. Though passing as an authority on India among her Western sympathizers, the fact is that she was hardly in touch with any consequential segment of Hindu society, whether the real traditionalists (of whom she seems to have sought out a few only when she heard of them praising Hitler, that too on the basis of very partial or plainly wrong information), the reformist Hindu nationalists, the Nehruvian modernizers or any other. As for the European scholars, they did teach one version or other of the AIT, arguing for the homeland status of the Danube or lower Volga region, or maybe Anatolia, but none of them located the Indo-European homeland in the Arctic.
Tilak was no authority on Indo-European expansion history, and likewise Savitri Devi was no authority on Hinduism, nor even on Hitlerism or esoteric philosophy or indeed anything of interest. It is simply tragic to see young people join internet discussion forums where they discuss the "work" and the "thoughts" of this once-bright woman who, suffering under the impact of the burning Indian sun, had transformed Hitler into an incarnation of the sun-god and enshrined such a flawed source as Tilak's misguided Arctic Home in the service of her Hitlercentric worldview. Come to think of it: what a sad and surrealistic buffoonery.
5. Caste
The second purported link between Hitler and Hinduism is the caste system. This is an endlessly recurring point in Savitri Devi's autobiography and in the present two papers. In the Euro-racist view, which she upheld even when it went out of fashion after 1945, the caste system was a racist institution resulting from the Aryan invasion. In a concern for their racial purity, the Aryan conquerors had imposed a prohibition on intermarriage with the natives, and this racist apartheid is what we know as the caste system.
During her lifetime, numerous scholarly and political publications have probed the underlying reasons for the institution of caste, and these have shown up a complex of causes and mechanisms far more diverse than and often also in direct conflict with the racist-invasionist explanation. But none of that ever registered in her mind.
Just briefly a few points so you get the idea. Caste and racism are two different things. In a caste society, two distinct racial groups with distinct origins and lifestyles, such as the American blacks and whites, would indeed be kept separate as non-intermarrying castes, thus preserving their racial and cultural identities. You see a spontaneous tendency to endogamy and group identity cultivation in multi-racial societies from Surinam to Singapore. In that sense, caste may have a racial component. The reverse, however, does not apply: not every two separate castes need be racially distinct. In Indian history, there are many cases where a single caste, biologically as homogeneous as humanly possible, splits up into non-intermarrying distinct castes because of long-term geographical separation, because of different professional vocations, because of one group's religious conversion, because one groups starts considering the other as somehow impure, or because one group chose the wrong side in a war.
Locating the origin of caste in a racial apartheid policy is entirely untenable, and this not only because the naked eye and the most recent genetic research show how the Indian population is a highly mixed racial continuum. A strong observance of caste taboos exists among the most remote populations of India, the hill tribes, as well as in the mutual relations between the lowest "un-Aryan" castes. When you consider that even the modern state in India fails to impose its laws in all corners of society, how could the Aryan invaders in India's Northwest have imposed the passionate observance of caste taboos on communities they never even encountered in person? This was simply beyond their mettle. Castes often came about as pre-existing tribes getting integrated in the expanding Vedic civilization with their group identities intact: tribal endogamy was preserved as caste endogamy. Regardless of their racial or geographical origins, castes were susceptible to considerable social mobility, not so much for the individual but for the community as a whole, e.g. by developing new economic sectors or by valiant participation in war. Vedic civilization acknowledges among its greatest spokesmen members of "backward" (or what Savitri Devi would call "un-Aryan") communities such as the Mahabharata's author Vyasa, the Ramayana's author Valmiki or the Tamil poet Tiruvalluvar. Its understanding of "Arya" is not as a racial nor even a linguistic term, but as a cultural term, a synonym for "Vedic", neither more nor less.
But none of that ever seems to have reached Savitri Devi's eye or penetrated her skull. This is my general criticism of the whole rightist, even the so-called new-rightist, understanding of Indian society and of the whole "Aryan" question: in their minds, time and the state of our knowledge seem to have stood still since the 1930s. They are emotionally satisfied with their worldview, so why let it get disturbed by new scholarly findings?
When encountering a certain enthusiasm for Hitler among traditional pandits (including one pandit Rajwade from Pune, quoted as predicting Hitler's defeat, p.58), she assumes readily that this is because they all see Hitler as an upholder of the caste order. But the only actual evidence to this effect is not a quotation from these scripture-hardened worthies, but a long presentation of a talk with her illiterate low-caste servant, the teenage boy Khudiram (p.74-78). In 1940, in the fish-market of Calcutta, he had picked up the perfectly false rumour that Hitler was going to enshrine the pro-caste and pro-martial scripture Bhagavad-Gita as the supreme law of the Reich. Now, sometimes the truth emanates from the mouth of an illiterate boy-servant, but it doesn't occur to Savitri Devi that she ought to verify this rumour and give her readers some better-documented reason to believe that Hitler had such plans; failing that, she ought to have conceded that the boy was simply mistaken. She implicitly does this by smiling about his Hitlerian enthusiasm, but that still leaves her without the first solid testimony for a Hitlerian connection to Hindu Dharma and the caste system.
For her own understanding of a common denominator between caste and Hitlerism, she doesn't get beyond a very general notion of "the fundamental inequality of the creatures, including the human individuals and races" (p.73). But in practice, the belief in this inequality was the norm worldwide until well after 1945, and even in theory, equality had only been enshrined as state policy in a minority of states and even there only in some respects. Hitler's enemies were just as convinced of the inequality between the sexes, the races and other classifications. Winston Churchill was an avowed racist presiding over a colonial empire full of racial discriminations, but he was not a Nazi. His country knew very steep class inequality even between native Britons, but it was not a Hitlerian society.
As for the Indian caste system, it did obviously imply a stern inequality between classes of citizens, but it did not tend to that for which Hitler's name is held in horror, viz. genocide. On the contrary, it has historically been a mechanism for resolving ethnic diversity which elsewhere might have resulted in conflict and massacre. Moreover, it was a self-structuring of civil society, never in need of control by a strong totalitarian state. No wonder, then, that what little she quotes from her orthodox Brahmin contacts fails to give explicit confirmation to her identification of Hitler as the champion of the caste system. It could hardly have been otherwise, considering that under British rule, the caste system was doing just fine and was not at all in need of salvation by Britain's enemies. The British respected caste identities, e.g. by organizing their British-Indian Army along caste lines. And this came naturally to them, because they had a soft version of the caste system within their own society. So, for caste, the Hindus didn't need Hitler, even if they were unaware that in his own society, Hitler was promoting equality between all Germans to the detriment of the old caste distinction between nobility and commoners. Savitri Devi does quote actual expressions of sympathy by traditional Hindus for Hitler, but the reasons for their Hitler sympathy seem rather to be the following.
Firstly, he was German, and Germany was the country of some leading Sanskrit scholars, including some in British employ such as Friedrich Max M�ller. They had greatly contributed to India's glory in the now-dominant West, which in turn had restored some pride in Hindu tradition among the Hindus themselves. That the Germans, not just Hitler but the German nation, had adopted the Swastika as their national symbol, further endeared them to the Hindus. There is no trace of the reverse: the German public did not get particularly sensitized to India and Hinduism, much less to its national aspiration to freedom; after all, Nazism cultivated a mood of self-celebration, not one of gratitude to some exotic nation. And contrary to what some Hindus thought, the Germans hadn't borrowed the Swastika from India in the first place. As for Hitler, from Mein Kampf (1924) till his meeting with Subhash Bose in 1942 and his ungrateful comments on Bose's small Indian Waffen-SS contingent deployed in the defence of the German empire in 1945, he never concealed his contempt for Hindus, Buddhists and related "Asiatic mountebanks". But this information never seems to have reached India nor made an impact there. Savitri Devi, of course, totally ignores it.
Secondly, there were the well-known temporary political circumstances. Though Hitler wanted the best for the British empire, a magnificent instance of white rule over the coloured races, events forced him into the role of its principal adversary. Therefore, many Hindus welcomed him as the enemy of their enemy, hence their best friend. Savitri Devi seems to have had a blind eye for India's nationalistic aspirations, which hardly figure in her writings at all. She managed not to see that elephant in the room, essentially because she never thought anything wrong of British rule; her own mother happened to be of British origin.
Thirdly, Hitler was reputed to conform to certain Hindu ideals. As a "unifier" of Europe, he filled a slot similar to that of the chakravarti, the energetic king who would bring the whole of India under one sceptre. In his private life, he was a teetotaller, a vegetarian and officially a celibate. According to Hindu belief, these observances and especially the last one confer an enormous charisma. If all parties including the enemy conceded one quality to Hitler, it was certainly charisma. From there, it was but a small step to calling him a "realized soul", a jn�ni or "knower" and what not.
In neo-Nazi circles, it is even claimed (here by Claudio Mutti on p.26), on the authority of one Sadhu Arunachala: A Sadhu's Reminiscences of Ramana Maharshi (1994, p.52) that Ramana Maharshi (d.1950), indisputably one of the greatest Hindu yogis of the 20th century, had declared: "It is possible that Hitler is a jn�ni, a divine instrument." If the account is true, Ramana's utterance sounds to me like the answer to a question posed by a visitor eager to hear a confirmation of his own idealization of Hitler: the sage did not commit himself to such a confirmation, but politely allowed that it was "possible",-- like most things. Note the difference with Savitri Devi's rendering of Ramana Maharshi's opinion: "Someone asked Ramana Maharshi (..) what he thought of Hitler. The answer was brief and simple: 'He's a jn�ni', i.e. a sage (*)." (p.73) This is her word against Sadhu Arunachala's. Either the latter has rendered Ramana's words softer and more conditional in deference to the anti-Hitlerian mood of the times, or she has rendered his words more decisive and unconditional to satisfy her own ideological preferences.
If any Hindu sages have glorified Hitler, I wouldn't be too impressed that this proves anything one way or the other. I have the greatest regard for the higher states of mind cultivated by them, but I have also noticed that this still doesn't free them from the universal law that our judgments about things and people are conditioned by the quality of the basic information fed to us. If only a rosy picture of Hitler is communicated to some recluse practising his yoga in a cave undisturbed by newspapers, he may form an opinion that is only as accurate as the original information. In that case, we are dealing with a "circular argument of authority", where someone contrives to get the authoritative person to give as his own an opinion subtly spoon-fed to him.
6. A personal testimony
The last contributor to this book, and really its editor, is the French scholar Christian Bouchet, since his youth an "integral traditionalist" in the footsteps of that great will-o'-the-wisp Julius Evola. He starts out by telling his own story. As a student in the late 1970s, he was a "national-revolutionary" militant, anti-bourgeois and anti-American, marching in support of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution in Iran. In his rightist friends' little counter-culture, the heroes were traditionalist mastermind and Muslim convert Ren� Gu�non, Japanese homosexual pseudo-samurai novelist Yukio Mishima, German war veteran and pro/anti-Nazi writer Ernst J�nger, martyred Rumanian Iron Guard leader Corneliu Codreanu, and the German National-Bolsheviks of the 1930s. After graduating, Bouchet embarked on a trip to India for the winter 1980-81, where he paid several visits to the aged Savitri Devi in her posh South Delhi apartment.
We already mentioned that she abhorred anthropocentrism, preferring nature to culture and a beautiful cat to an ugly human being. Bouchet testifies how she took this preference quite literally. She lived in symbiosis with dozens of cats that drowned her apartment in the stench of their urine. When he invited her out to dinner in a restaurant, she had to sprinkle a whole bottle of Eau de Cologne on herself to conceal the odour.
One anecdotic event tells it all: "I was interested but nothing [about her] aroused my enthusiasm. Ideologically, Savitri Devi Mukherji's discourse belonged to the parodic and fantasmic type of neo-Nazism. At the human level, her conduct embarrassed me. Back then, poverty was rampant in India and there were many beggars and hungry children in the streets. Her teacher's pension may have been small by European standards, but for India her income was considerable. So, every day she bought sizable amounts of food. Next, she spent part of the afternoon cooking meat and fish. In the evening, she went out to distribute these to* the street cats! This indifference to human beings and this disproportionate concern for animals troubled and shocked me. They still do when I think back on them." (p.86-87)
Bouchet further testifies how he never met anyone interesting in her company, nor even any Indians, only Western ladies in their declining years, ideologically mostly in the orbit of the Theosophical Society. His conclusion from his stay in Delhi was that "in order to appreciate her work, it was necessary never to meet its author" (p.87). Before calling her ideologically disreputable, we must first of all acknowledge her as a bit of a mental case.
Finally, about the reason for his visit to Savitri Devi, Bouchet wants to set the record straight. According to the oft-cited British researcher Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Hitler's Priestess, 1999; p.296 of the French translation La Pr�tresse d'Hitler, 2000), Bouchet had been one of the "neo-Nazi pilgrims" flocking to her Delhi apartment after the publicity given to her by Ernst Z�ndel. In reality: "I knew nothing about this revisionist author, not even his very existence, before I went to India, and it is precisely at Savitri Devi Mukherji's place that I first discovered his writings." (p.84)
Seeing her was not even the purpose of his trip and also didn't look like an important experience in retrospect: "During that same journey in India, I was received in private audience both by the Dalai Lama - who was easily accessible, not having become a media icon yet -- and by Kalu Rinpoche [a key figure in the implantation of Tibetan Buddhism in the West], and it is these meetings which counted for me during that trip, not the ones I had with Savitri Devi." (p.84) This is clearly a case of a historian making deductions by "connecting the dots": Z�ndel drew attention to Savitri Devi, Bouchet went to see her, ergo Bouchet was merely heeding Z�ndel's call. As an informed guess, this type of reasoning tends to have a good probability rate, but facts happen to be another matter. Not to be too harsh, we must admit that historians and more so journalists frequently rely on this kind of deduction to fill the gaps in the chain of cause and effect. But Bouchet cannot be faulted for lambasting this slick deduction by Goodrick-Clarke at his own expense.
7. Don't trust Savitri Devi
Christian Bouchet dismisses Goodrick-Clarke as a "pseudo-historian" (p.83). That seems a bit exaggerated to me, if not downright unfair. I'd rather accept the criticism of those disappointed readers who object that Goodrick-Clarke's first major book, The Occult Roots of Nazism, belies its own promising title, possibly chosen by the publisher with an eye on its sales potential, by concluding (p.217) that the so-called occult roots of Nazism are only a myth. Some would clearly have preferred Goodrick-Clarke to uphold the myth rather than debunking it. On the other hand, it must be admitted that for a debunker of "Nazi occultism" fantasies, Goodrick-Clarke is strangely persistent and attached to this subject, on which he keeps churning out hefty volumes. To Bouchet, the explanation is that, apart from having struck gold in the material sense, Goodrick-Clarke is an "anti-fascist militant" (p.83) intent on turning the biography of Savitri Devi into a support for "his delirious ideas and his conspiratorial view of history which interconnects Hollywood-type neo-Nazis, partisans of Deep Ecology, New Agers, Animal Rights advocates etc." (p.92)
Now, to come to the contents of Bouchet's criticism of Goodrick-Clarke as a historian, he alleges that: "Goodrick-Clarke has dispensed with all research work and has merely relayed Savitri Devi's own sayings without analysing or criticizing them." (p.92, likewise p.87) The problem is that this single source, her autobiography, is not supported by any independent evidence, and that she can easily have refashioned her past: "For the period from her birth until after World War 2, we have to trust Savitri Devi Mukherji for her life story. However, it is obvious that she herself has arranged her biography a posteriori in order to harmonize it with the themes defended in her books." (p.88)
Yes, everyone carries a novel in his heart: his autobiography. In this case, the authoress had the motive, the means and the opportunity to refashion her pre-1945 life story, not just in her written autobiography but first of all in her informal self-introduction to all the people she met after returning to Europe in 1946. Bouchet's suspicion against an unverified and unconfirmed self-revelation is truly the kind of attitude we may expect from a serious historian. Let us look into a few details.
Bouchet points out several glaring contradictions and improbabilities. First of all, Savitri Devi's husband Asit Krishna Mukherji seems totally unknown outside his wife's autobiography, except in another second-hand book, viz. La Spirale Proph�tique by Jean Parvulesco, which he dismisses as "delirious" and "in no case credible" (p.99). Though reportedly working for the Germans and the Japanese, first as a propagandist but during the war also as a spy, and this in Calcutta right under the nose of the British regional war command, he was never troubled by the British authorities. Now maybe he was just too clever for them, but then why is he never even mentioned in known sources about Allied vs. Japanese warfare? Why not in accounts about Subhash Chandra Bose, who Savitri Devi claims took some crucial advice from her husband? And why is the magazine he purportedly edited in 1935-37, the New Mercury, so hard to find?
Well, maybe we simply haven't searched hard enough? About the magazine, I can add that when writing The Saffron Swastika, I have tried in vain to locate it in the India Office Library in London and in several libraries and personal archives in Calcutta. I had only two days in Calcutta, and this was before the Indian libraries had computerized their data, so probably it would be easier now, if indeed copies of the magazine are extant there. Those in a position to help are welcome to do so.
Bouchet also mocks Savitri Devi's claim that already in 1938, A.K. Mukherji had eloquently spoken about the Thule society, which in reality had never been more than marginal and unimportant, and about Nazi esotericism, largely the figment of post-war confabulation. At this point, one explanation becomes inescapable: "It is evident and very clear that Savitri Devi Mukherji has 'arranged' her biography in order to construct herself a persona apt to shine in the tiny circle of neo-Nazism" (p.91). Next, Bouchet wonders how Savitri Devi can claim that Asit Krishna Mukherji was a "man of the most orthodox tradition", yet: "He marries a non-Indian, a casteless woman* In Indian culture no act is more anti-traditional and in conflict with orthodoxy!" (p.89) To this, a feeble but not altogether powerless answer might be that the case of a purely formal, chaste marriage is different. If the two had started a family together, it would have amounted to varna-sankara, "mixing of castes", but here they never set out to do so and even lived separately much of the time, effectively remaining a bachelor and a spinster. However, it remains fair to doubt that he was "most orthodox". Staying celibate without taking religious vows, like a Western bachelor, is not that rare in India, but it is certainly not orthodox.
Also, travelling abroad forces a Hindu to all kinds of compromises in lifestyle and is therefore avoided by the orthodox; Mukherji, by contrast, reportedly spent years in Europe and the Soviet Union as a student. I would simply conclude that Savitri Devi didn't fully know what she was saying when she used the term "orthodox".
Another serious contradiction is the one between the fiercely pro-caste views in her autobiography (written 1969-71) and her work in 1937-39 for the Calcutta-based Hindu Mission, a reformist movement which tried to counter the Christian missionaries in the tribal belt of what is now Jharkhand, the forested and hilly area just to the west of Calcutta. The underlying vision of the Hindu Mission, like that of other reformist groups such as the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Nationalist organizations Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was that all castes and tribes are equally part of Hindu society, and that they should be immunized against the Christian temptation by participating more fully in the Vedic tradition. Even if not going so far as to abolish caste altogether, there was an unmistakable anti-caste and egalitarian thrust in their programme.
Bouchet highlights this deep cleavage within Hindu revivalism: on the one hand the traditionalists who want to preserve the caste system, with Swami Karpatri's marginal and now defunct Ram Rajya Parishad as its only-ever political vehicle, and on the other the reformists who concluded long ago that caste had become a millstone around the neck of Hindu society and should be discarded. Among the latter tendency, he correctly counts the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of which he notes the sympathy it has recently enjoyed in French rightist circles. He points out that they are falling for the same confusion as Savitri Devi (at least in her young days when working for the Hindu Mission), viz. to think that simply because an organization claims to work for the interests of the Hindus, it must be an upholder of ancient Hindu values such as the caste hierarchy: "Traditional and anti-Western, the BJP? National and rightist, undeniably, but this political self-positioning doesn't confer any particular qualification of traditionalism or anti-modernism. Just as the [anti-immigrant national-populist party] Front National is not the vector of Gu�non's and Evola's ideas in France, so the BJP is not the Indian incarnation of the philosophia perennis." (p.97)
Bouchet correctly points out, also against claims by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and his Indian Marxist sources (p.100), that the reformist wing including V.D. Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha sided with the British in WW2. It was the secular leftist Subhash Chandra Bose with his part-Hindu part-Muslim army who fought on the Axis side. Savitri Devi herself had already wryly noted the anti-Hitler positions of "Aryan" worthies such as the Arya Samaj movement and Sri Aurobindo, one-time editor of a periodical called the Arya. For the latter's case, she never seems to have seen the official statements issued by Aurobindo calling on the Indian National Congress to join the British war effort (as the Hindu Mahasabha had already done) and denouncing Hitler is the strongest terms. Instead, she wonders if these weren't mere rumours spread by his French-Jewish confidante Mira Alfassi (p.53), a convenient scapegoat. At any rate, the anti-Hitler stance of a cross-section of Hindu society, from pro-British loyalists to Hindu nationalists of various stripes, must have disappointed her. I surmise it may have been a factor in her breaking off all (c.q. never seeking any) contacts with Hindu reformists including the Hindu Mission and the Hindu Nationalist political parties.
To me, it seems likely that in 1937, Savitri Devi was not yet fully aware of this inter-Hindu antagonism. She enthusiastically accepted the role of anti-Christian preacher which the Hindu Mission offered her without fully realizing the contrast between this work and the pro-caste traditionalism to which she may already have been paying some lip-service. Her own explanation in her autobiography, however, is that she had simply been fooling both her tribal audience and her Hindu-reformist employers: she had merely wanted to "give the most backward and degenerate aboriginals a (false) Hindu consciousness" (Souvenirs et R�flexions, p.37) and "give them the impression" of being welcome in Hinduism on the basis of equality, purely for the sake of increasing the Hindus' numerical power, "not for the benefit of their own souls, which nobody cared about (and myself less than anyone)" (op. cit., p.39). She also claims that the Hindu Mission's leader Swami Satyananda had seen through her insincerity and told her to preach from the Hindu viewpoint and keep her private opinions to herself (op. cit., p.39).
All this would imply that she was also feigning a Hindu reformist position all through her booklet A Warning to the Hindus (Hindu Mission, 1939), which gained some popularity in Hindu nationalist circles. Though written at the height of Nazi Germany's popularity worldwide, the booklet is remarkably silent on the international situation, except for trivially mentioning that German and Japanese mothers instil patriotism in their children. This significant silence (which releases her Hindu readers from the chain insinuation of enthusiasm "for a pro-Nazi author, hence for Nazism") may then also be due to the restraining influence of her supervisors in the Hindu Mission; or it may reflect a genuine focus on serving Hindu society by promoting reform and the upliftment of the tribals.
For now, I'll leave it at registering this contradiction between her earlier and later positions without trying to decide whether she was being insincere in 1937 or insincerely claiming that earlier insincerity in 1970. It is at any rate significant for a certain type of mentality that she saw virtue in pleading insincerity.
8. In self-defence
Bouchet has read the chapter on Savitri Devi in my book The Saffron Swastika (Delhi 2001, esp. p.534-660). He slightly mocks my itinerary through "student Leftism" and "the New Age movement" to a position "favourable to the Hindu communalists" (p.102), but that's quite alright with me. I don't think too highly of my earlier beliefs either, but I have a right to my own life story. Among the few comments he offers in passing, the most important one is that, just like Goodrick-Clarke, I am said to have placed far too much trust in Savitri Devi's autobiography.
I accept that criticism, though not without pointing out a few mitigating facts. First of all, unlike Goodrick-Clarke, my book was not about Savitri Devi, but about a far broader subject, viz the hostile rhetoric of "Hindu fascism". In that context, I felt that I had to deal with the perfectly bizarre and unrepresentative case of Savitri Devi, because otherwise it would constitute a loophole through which the opposite side could still push the argument for a Hitler-Hindutva connection, seemingly exemplified by her. But it could not reasonably be expected of me that in such a sideshow, I would put in the same effort to trace biographical data as can be demanded from the writer of a proper biography.
All the same, I cannot seriously be accused of taking Savitri Devi's word for the truth of her self-presentation. Thus, I myself have pointed out (Saffron Swastika, p.600-604, "Racist distortion in Savitri Devi's mission"; p.637-640, "Doublespeak on caste") the contradiction between her reformist words and acts in 1937-39 and her later mockery of the same in her autobiography, an issue discussed above.
I have also taken the trouble of registering at least those outside testimonies that could be gathered without too much investment of time and money. Bouchet may dismiss as historically light-weight my record of the testimony by the man whose father rented out a room to A.K. Mukherji ca. 1940 (p.99), but I must note that he himself offers no similar personal testimonies at all, and that the one I have reported does contain information, or at least indications, which add to our picture of this enigmatic man, viz. in the sense of confirming his closeness to Axis representatives and in adding the troubling new information that he was a double-agent working for the British. The latter claim makes other pieces of the puzzle fall into place, e.g. why Mukherji was left such unfettered freedom even during the war, and how he could think of sending a plea to the British authorities in favour of his wife's release when she was arrested in Germany. It would have been a serious failing on my part if I had withheld that testimony. Moreover, I have not made any precocious claims of completeness or definitiveness for the scenario emanating from it. I cannot help it that it is as yet not confirmed by other similar testimonies, but incompleteness in the source material is one of the occupational frustrations inherent in the historian's job. The only solution is to hurry and interview what few witnesses are still alive and to dig deeper for documentary evidence.
Bouchet also objects to another piece of information I collected from multiple sources outside Savitri Devi's autobiography, viz. concerning her sex life: "Koenraad Elst, without basing his statements on any proofs whatsoever, puts forth the idea that Savitri Devi had been a bisexual woman of easy virtue (this when she has always affirmed that her marriage was chaste and that she remained a virgin all her life)" (p.100). So who is uncritically relying on Savitri Devi's own account now? Here again, I have considered it my duty to record what much information became available to me, even if I had no inclination to look for any further proofs,-- and I wonder what would have counted as "proof" in this matter. Several people who knew her in person have spoken to me about this to the same effect; I was in no position to pass judgment on the truth of their claim, but I had to mention it.
I can also report now that the credibility of this testimony has been increased slightly by the protest I received from one of the people concerned. Though I had never concealed I was collecting information about Savitri Devi for a book, and though I had not been asked to keep any secret, the person in question was angry that I had divulged such intimate information. Perhaps there was a generational misunderstanding: for a modern Westerner it is no longer shocking to learn that Mrs. X is "living her life" and exercising what Taslima Nasrin calls "the freedom of the vagina"; but for many people of Savitri Devi's generation, it was different. Well, sorry if I hurt anyone's sensibilities. At any rate, if my witness's testimony had not been sincere, i.e. if it had been a deliberate slur on her, I doubt that I would have received this protest.
My last word about the matter in The Saffron Swastika (p.573) was: "A different type of historian might like to pursue these details of Savitri Devi's life, at least if he moves fast enough to contact the witnesses before they leave this world." I am glad to report that an American historian has contacted me and introduced himself as just that kind of historian. I have given him what I had of references and source material, and I hope that he will come out soon with the definitive biography of Savitri Devi Mukherji. Meanwhile, the booklet just reviewed certainly adds to our understanding of the Aryan lady's ideological development and her reception in contemporary rightist circles.
Savitri Devi Mukherji: Le National-Socialisme et la Tradition Indienne, with contributions by Vittorio de Cecco, Claudio Mutti and Christian Bouchet, published in the series Cahiers de la Radicalit� by Avatar-�ditions, Paris/Dublin 2004.
(19 October 2005)
10 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org
http://www.countercurrents.org/comm-puniyani100306.htm
Beginning this twenty Fourth February, RSS combine has undertaken programs in different parts of the country to celebrate the centenary year of RSS second Sarsnghchalak (supreme dictator), Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, known in Sangh circles as Shri Guruji. What are going to be the implications of this celebration? To answer this, we will have to delve into the work of Golwlakar, who penned a small book, 'We or our Nationhood Defined' (We…), which gives an outline of his ideology and later his articles were published as a compilation, 'Bunch of Thoughts'. In both these books and also in various other outpourings of his, he denigrates democracy and pluralism on one hand and upholds fascist concept of nationhood and sectarian version of culture on the other. His writing is most intimidating to the minorities in particular. He was the chief of RSS for 33 long years and was instrumental in giving RSS a direction, which assumed menacing proportions in times to come, and strengthening the foundations of the 'hate minorities' ideology resulting in the consequent waves of violence, undermining the democratic norms in the society. He can also be 'credited' with giving the sharp formulations which laid the ideological foundation of different carnages in the country.
Golwalkar praises Lord Manu as the greatest law giver mankind ever had. It was the same law giver Manu's book, which was burnt by Dr. Ambedkar in his pursuit of getting justice for the dalits. In current times, Golwalkars' successor also demanded a throwing away of Indian constitution, to be replaced by the one which is based on Hindu holy books, implying Manusmriti, of course.
His formulations of Hindutva Fascism are so blatant that even his followers, the RSS combine, is running for cover and claiming that this book, having a naked hatred for minorities and eulogies for the likes of Hitler, We…, was not written by him. They avoid owning these ideas. But one knows that this book was penned by him. In an affidavit submitted to the charity commissioner, Rajendra Singh, a later Sarsanghchalak pleaded, "With a view to give a scientific base to propagate the idea-India being historically from time immemorial a Hindu nation-the late Shri M.S. Golwalkar had written a book entitled 'We or Our Nationhood defined', which was published in 1938." (Quoted in Islam, Undoing India: The RSS way) J.A. Curran in his classic study, RSS: Militant Hinduism in India Politics- A study of RSS: points out "The genuine ideology of Sangh is based upon principles formulated by its founder, Dr. Hedgewar. These principles have been consolidated and amplified by the present leader ( i.e. Golwalkar) in a small book called "We or our nationhood defined". It is a basic primer in the indoctrination of Sangh volunteers… (Curran 1979, p.39). Since its quotations have been brought to the notice of people, RSS publishing houses have stopped republishing this book. What does Golwalkar say in this book?
In this book he rejects the notions of Indian nationhood, India as a Nation in the making. He rejects the idea that all the citizens will be equal. He goes on to harp the notions of nationhood borrowed from Hitler's Nazi movement. He rejects that India is a secular nation and posits that it is a Hindu Rashtra. He rejects the territorial-political concept of nationhood and puts forward the concept of cultural nationalism, which was the foundation of Nazi ideology. His admiration of Hitler's ideology and politics is the running thread of the book and he takes inspiration from the massive holocaust which decimated millions of people in Germany. He uses this as a shield to propagate his political ideology. It is this ideology which formed the base of communal common sense amongst a section of the population. "German national pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races, the Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into a united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by." (We…, 1938, p.37)
In the Sangh circles this book is regarded as their Gita. The implications for Indian minorities are presented here in a forthright manner. Today the swayamsevaks brought up on this Gita, do believe in all this but the language of expression is being made more polished so that the poison is coated with honey and administered with ease. Golwalkar goes on to assert, "From the standpoint sanctioned by the experience of shrewd nations, the non-Hindu people in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and revere Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but the glorification of Hindu nation i.e. they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ingratitude towards this land and its age long traditions, but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead; in one word, they must cease to be foreigners or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, for less any preferential treatment, not even the citizen's rights." (Ibid p.52).
When the Hindutva politics came up in the late 1980s, in the beginning an unsuspecting observer could not comprehend from where has the concept of Hindu nation come up suddenly, why such an intense hatred for minorities, a glance at We… and one becomes clear that those fed on this ideology cannot but be what they are, cannot do anything else than what they did and have been doing since 1990, the Babri demolition, the anti minority violence and an open violation of democratic ethos of the country. These ideas were translated into the stories of atrocities of Muslim kings, the myth of Hindus owning this land from times immemorial and a lot of such make believe concoction. Irrespective of the fact the freedom movement rejected this ideology and its formulations, it was kept alive through the ideological indoctrination work in the RSS shakhas going on ceaselessly.
Golwalkar was also faced with some of the naïve swaymasevaks wishing to participate in the national movement, more so after the massive Quit India movement was launched. That time Golwalkar was the RSS chief and he dissuaded the people from participating in the movement, and some of them who participated did it in their personal capacity, some of them now claim that they also participated. ( e.g. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was onlooker in the anti British movement, was arrested but wriggled out of the jail and later claimed to have participated in the movement.) As matter of fact Golwalkar was very contemptuous towards the anti British movement. There is no mention of presence of RSS in the anti British movement even in most of the sympathetic accounts written about it. Even Nanaji Deshmukh, the foremost leaders of RSS puts this question, why did RSS not take part in the liberation struggle as an organization? (Deshmukh, Victim of Slander, Vision Books, 1979, p.70) Since Golwalkar propounded religion based nationalism, there was no place for anti British stance. "The theories of territorial nationalism and of common danger, which formed the basis of our concept of nation, had deprived us of the positive and inspiring content of our real Hindu Nationhood and made many of the 'freedom movements' virtually anti-British movements. Anti Britishism was equated with patriotism and nationalism. This reactionary view has had disastrous effects upon the entire course of freedom movement…" (Bunch of thoughts, 1996, p.138). In a frank defense of British colonialist he reminds the people of RSS pledge, "We should remember that in our pledge we have talked of freedom of the country through defending religion and culture. There is no mention of departure of British in that." (Shri Guruji Samgra Darshan, Vol 4, p. 2) With allies like this British could merrily pursue their policy of divide and rule!
No wonder British never repressed RSS. Also the collusion between Religion based nationalism and colonialism can be understood from such statements. Later the World saw that in tune with this pro imperialist ideology, Golwalkar was to support the US aggression on Vietnam and his successor Sudarshan defended the US aggression against Iraq.
The murder of Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindutva follower Nathuram Godse not only shocked the whole nation; it led RSS followers to celebrate this event by distributing sweets. While RSS followers were celebrating, and the links of Godse with RSS became apparent, RSS was banned and Golwalkar was arrested. They denied that RSS had any links with Godse. At that time it was easy to claim so as RSS had no written constitution and membership lists, enrollment register etc. Godse was RSS Pracharak and later he joined Hindu Mahasabha and was editing a newspaper, Agrani (leader), the subtitle of the paper was Hindu Rashtra. In the court he denied any links with RSS. Later his brother Gopal Godse, who was also an accomplice in the murder, in an interview given to Times of India (25 Jan 98) stated that his brother Nathuram spoke a deliberate lie in the court, "The appeasement policy followed by him (Gandhi) and imposed on all Congress governments' encouraged the Muslim separatist tendencies that eventually created Pakistan…Technically and theoretically he (Nathuram) was a member (of RSS), but he stopped workings for it later. His statement in the court that he had left the RSS was to protect the RSS workers who would be imprisoned following the murder. On the understanding that they (RSS workers) would benefit from his dissociating himself from the RSS, he gladly did it."
In the wake of the murder of Gandhi, RSS was banned and Golwalkar was jailed, from where he wrote a letter to the Government of India offering to cooperate with the government in 'dealing with the menace of Communism' in return for being released from the jail. Incidentally it was also the period when US was on the witch hunt of communists world over. Today, the global US agenda of demonization of Islam, and Muslims world over matches with the RSS agenda, coincidence again? Is this running parallel in the matching agenda US and RSS policies a mere coincidence?
For him the notion of Hindu Rashtra remained supreme and he could never reconcile to the secular values of Indian constitution. Time and over again he kept on harping on how UnBharat the constitution is and how Manu's rules are more desirable and profound one's. The partition of India and the consequent tragedy was registered through the Hindutva eyes, "Even to this day there are many who say, 'now there is no Muslim problem at all. All those riotous elements who supported Pakistan have gone away once for all. The remaining Muslims are devoted to our country. After all they have no other place to go and they are all bound to remain loyal…It would be suicidal to delude ourselves into believing that they have turned patriot overnight after the creation of Pakistan. On the contrary, Muslim menace has increased a hundredfold by the creation of Pakistan, which has become a springboard for all their future aggressive designs on our country." (Bunch of Thoughts, Bangalore, 1996, p. 177-78)
The way to look at Indian communities as Hindus and Muslims as uniform monoliths continues to be exhibited all through. Further he also goes on to label Muslims, Christians and Communists as internal threats to Hindu nation. And this is the 'ideological fodder ' of RSS shakhas and its practical unfoldment is visible in the regular occurrence of attacks against Muslims and Christians. With collapse of Soviet Union, the venom against communists has been given a different turn. And in the third category secularist have also been added up as a threat to Hindu nation.
It was Golwalkar again under whose stewardship the RSS gave birth to other organizations to play the divisive role in different arenas of social and political life. He was instrumental in helping bring up Bharatiya Jansangh, Akhil Bhartiya Vidayarthi Parishad, Bharatiya Majdoor Sangh, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and Vishwa Hindu Parishad, amongst others. The infiltration of RSS cadres in different wings of state apparatus; army, police, bureaucracy, judiciary, education and media was another move initiated by Golwalkar, the effects of which are visible prominently from last two decades.
While secular democratic elements, activists have a long road ahead, we need to take care that in the already vitiated atmosphere, the communal divide is not accentuated further by this move of RSS and we put forward the values of humane plural and democratic society and dispel the ideologies which have been playing a very divisive role in the society.
The Saffron Swastika
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaKoenraad Elst - The Saffron Swastika.jpg
The Saffron Swastika: The Notion of Hindu "Fascism" (ISBN 81-85990-69-7) is a book written by Koenraad Elst and published as two volumes in 2001. It discusses in detail the concepts of Hindutva and Hindu nationalism. He also argues against the idea that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh are fascist in ideology. In the foreword, he writes about such allegations that “So far, the polemical arrows have all been shot from one side, replies from the other side being extremely rare or never more than piecemeal”. Furthermore, he tries to show that personalities like Veer Savarkar or Golwalkar were not fascist or racist and also writes in detail about Savitri Devi. Other topics that are treated by Elst in this book are the caste system and the swastika.
The eternal return of Nazi nonsense : Savitri Devi's last writings
Dr Koenraad Elst
Among the numerous publishing houses in Paris, there is a fringe-rightist one called Avatar. Its name (Sanskrit avat�ra = "divine incarnation") and publishing policy are inspired by Julius Evola, d. 1971, the Italian "integral traditionalist" aristocrat who worked for the SS research department Ahnenerbe ("ancestral heritage") and who dabbled in Oriental lore as part of his esotericist musings. Avatar Editions has its nominal legal headquarters outside Dublin, Ireland, apparently to avoid problems with France's draconian anti-racist and anti-revisionist laws. One of its ongoing projects is a series of booklets called Cahiers de la Radicalit�, under the Evolian motto: "Be radical, have principles, be absolute, be that which the bourgeoisie calls an extremist: give yourself without counting or calculating, don't accept what they call 'the reality of life' and act in such a way that you won't be accepted by that kind of 'life', never abandon the principle of struggle."
The second booklet in the series is Le National-Socialisme et la Tradition Indienne, ("National-Socialism and Indian Tradition") by the French-Greek lady Savitri Devi Mukherji, n�e Maximiani Portas (born Lyons, 8h45 a.m., 30 Sep. 1905, died Sible Hedingham, Essex, shortly after midnight, 22 Oct. 1982), a republication of two of her last papers, now otherwise hard to find. The first one, L'Inde et le Nazisme, from ca. 1978, resumes parts of her autobiography, Souvenirs et R�flexions d'une Aryenne ("Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Lady", written in 1969-71 and privately published, Delhi 1976). The other, Hitl�risme et Hindou�t�, is the French translation of "Hitlerism and the Hindu World", originally published in The National-Socialist, #2, end of 1980. The book further includes a homage to Savitri Devi from 1978 by Vittorio de Cecco; and new scholarly introductions by the rightist-traditionalist intellectuals Claudio Mutti, a political scientist specialized in Hungarian and Rumanian nationalisms and a convert to Islam; and Christian Bouchet, a law scholar by training but mainly a researcher on religion and "Tradition".
1. Critics and believers
There is a considerable distance between Mutti's and Bouchet's critical accounts of the relation between Nazism, India and "esotericism", and the exalted, fanciful accounts by de Cecco and Savitri Devi. Thus, the latter two have totally lapped up the twin myths of the "esoteric" Thule-Gesellschaft, of which Hitler's older friend Dietrich Eckart had attended some meetings, as (1) a profound vehicle of ancient secret knowledge, and as (2) an influential body with a deep impact upon Nazi thought and politics. Bouchet, by contrast, affirms that "the fairy-tales about this esotericism are very largely later inventions which only gained a certain trendiness after the end of World War 2", and that "the Thule Society was nothing at all, or close to" (p.91). Mutti explains how these myths were invented and propagated during the Nazi era by Thule founder Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf, real name Adam Glauer, who tried to claim a role as the F�hrer's original mentor in the then successful Nazi movement (p.21-22). A second source of the same tendency, though with opposite motives, was ex-Nazi exile Hermann Rauschning, who tried to feed the foreign press a sensational "insider" account of Hitler as an occultist weirdo.
Both men were shameless liars. Sebottendorf (cited here in evidence by Savitri Devi on p.96), Freemason, Turkish national by choice and wounded veteran on the Turkish side of the second Balkan war (1912-13), was one of those typical occultist conmen with false academic and nobility titles, though his initiation into Turkish Sufism may have been genuine. He was exposed and denounced as a self-serving myth-monger by other Thule and Nazi insiders immediately upon the publication of his book Bevor Hitler kam ("Before Hitler Came", 1934). Rauschning's book Gespr�che mit Hitler ("Conversations with Hitler", 1939) remained in use as a popular source about Hitler's alleged temperamental and religious eccentricities until the 1980s, both among neo-Nazis like Savitri Devi (citing it here on p.63, and numerous times in her autobiography) and anti-Nazis like Bernard-Henri L�vy (L'id�ologie fran�aise, 1980), as well as among the whole crowd of sensationalist confabulators like Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (Le matin des magiciens, 1960; The Morning of the Magicians, 1971) or Trevor Ravenscroft (The Spear of Destiny, 1972). Around the time of Savitri Devi's death, Rauschning's account was definitively exposed as spurious, e.g. he was shown not to have been present at most of the private conversations on which he claimed to "report". Contemporary histories of the Nazi period have expunged it from their bibliographies, and Mutti (p.21) correctly dismisses it as "totally unfounded". Savitri Devi's reliance on Rauschning illustrates how, contrary to the belief common among her neo-Nazi admirers, she really had no direct contact with any important Nazi insiders who could have informed her on the inspiration, occult or otherwise, behind Nazism. In her writings, she herself does little to promote this belief: apart from making tall claims about Nazism being part of an esoteric tradition and the germ of a new solar religion with Hitler as its prophet, she doesn't really try to establish credibility by means of claiming direct initiation into the remainders of Nazi esotericism nor even by means of some clever name-dropping. In asserting her beliefs about Nazism, she openly presumes and supposes, she cites the communis opinio or invokes anonymous third-hand sources. She had missed the whole Nazi period in Germany and her contacts after the war had been limited to third-rank Nazi followers, not including a single witness to any secret or inner workings of the Nazi apparatus (or even worse for the veracity of her account, the occasional high-ranking Nazis she met were equally unaware of any esoteric lineage underlying their political movement). She was so poorly informed that she didn't even see through a totally fraudulent account like Rauschning's.
More importantly, she never ever divulges any Nazi teachings worthy of being called esoteric, or otherwise philosophical or religious or profound. It is like with the Nazi expedition to Tibet, as reported in detail by Christopher Hale (Himmler's Crusade, The True Story of the 1938 Nazi Expedition into Tibet, Bantam Press, London 2003): you turn page after page, curious to learn all the esoteric secrets that the Nazi occultists are supposed to have exchanged with the Tibetan mystics, and all you get is racialist skull measurements, swastikas and the dreary details of a difficult journey through snow and ice. Myth-mongers like Savitri Devi may explain this as the result of the secrecy to which esotericists are sworn, but it's simply obvious that nothing is reported because there was nothing to report in the first place.
At any rate, nothing in her writings establishes her as some kind of authority on Nazi history or on the putative philosophical essence of Hitlerism. This status has only been accorded to her ca. 1970 by the German-Canadian neo-Nazi publisher Ernst Z�ndel and by the Chilean neo-Nazi diplomat Miguel Serrano. The whole of her "information" on the alleged esoteric dimension of Nazism could have been written by anyone vaguely familiar with the then-available popular lore on the subject.
2. Paganism, Christianity and their Nazi-secular synthesis
Instead of claiming any privileged access to inside sources, which is the least you could have expected from an "esoteric" account, Savitri Devi bases her belief in a deeper layer of Nazism on quasi-logical suppositions made from her armchair, e.g.: "It is at least logical to think that it was the Ahnenerbe which was, within Hitler's Black Order [= the SS] the depository of the Tradition" (p.32); and on generally-available rumours or snippets of information, often true but hardly consequential or mysterious, e.g.: "The nature of the [Ahnenerbe's] investigations reveals a distinct interest in esoteric matters. Thus, it studied the symbolism of the harp in Ireland; the survival of genuine Rosicrucianism, i.e. groups of initiates still in possession of the full tradition of the Knights Templar, (*) reconsidered the Bible and the Kabbala, trying to draw out their hidden meaning and especially wondering about the role of number symbolism in either." (p.32-33) Note that Rosicrucianism, the Knights Templar, the Bible and the Kabbala all belong within the Judeo-Christian rather than in any Pagan worldview. She admits that "Christianity and even Judaism, like all religions or philosophies somehow linked to the Tradition, contain a part of the esoteric truth" (p.33). This is the standard view among esotericists and traditionalists, and may be contrasted with the position of activist Hindus and of some neo-Pagan ideologues, who emphasize and possibly exaggerate not the commonalities but the antagonism between the Prophetic-monotheistic (self-described as "Abrahamic") and the "Pagan" worldviews. As we shall see, even in what remains of a religious dimension of Nazism, legitimate Germanic Heathenism was completely overshadowed by nostalgic quasi-Christian romanticism, fanciful post-Christian innovations and purely secular-nationalistic motifs. Indeed, by Savitri Devi's own account, naked German nationalism was always a bigger concern of the Ahnenerbe than all religious or esoteric flights of fancy combined. She relates how Heinrich Himmler, in his "only reference to the Ahnenerbe" in public, devoted his speech to praising his archaeologists' discovery in East Prussia of plural layers of Germanic forts, "refuting the common opinion that East Prussia had once been Slavic" (p.34). Of course, the Balto-Slavic character of the East Prussia region before the 12th century is well-established and this archaeological finding cannot have altered that, except through a wrong chronology (this was well before Carbon-14 dating) or a wilful misinterpretation in a German-narcissistic sense. In looking back on the confrontation between the German and the Balto-Slavic elements in and around East Prussia, Christian sympathies are with the German colonizers led by the Teutonic Knights, who, fresh from the Crusades in Palestine, imposed Christianity; whereas neo-Pagan sympathies are with the natives who defended the last stronghold of European Paganism and even managed to keep some Pagan traditions alive under the Christian regime. Himmler's sympathies clearly were not a matter of Pagan versus Christian, but simply of German versus foreign. Yes, he sympathized with the Saxon resisters massacred in AD 782 by Charlemagne for refusing baptism, but they were Germans resisting the ambitions of a European ruler who belonged as much to Belgium and France as to Germany; by contrast, he didn't care a fig for the Baltic Pagans massacred by the thoroughbred Germans of the Teutonic Order.
(As an aside, please note the anti-Slavic thrust in Himmler's speech and in the general Nazi scheme of things, which envisioned the take-over and ethnic cleansing of most Slavic territories up to the Urals for colonization by German warrior-farmers. The Slavs are as "Aryan" as the Germans in any then-common sense of the term. They obviously speak an Indo-European language, they are white, they have an equally large percentage of fair-haired and blue-eyed people, they are on average as tall and robust as the Germans, if not more. In the German experience, Slavs were less dynamic, so that Slavic rulers in Russia and the Balkans often imported German colonists to cultivate difficult soil; yet the Russian colonization of North Asia and even Alaska must stand as a most spectacular instance of "Aryan" expansion, unmatched in scope by any German achievement. The Nazi treatment of the Slavs, such as the antagonization of the initially welcoming Ukrainians by bullying German occupation forces, or the spurning for two precious years of the collaboration offers by captive Russian general Vlassov, belies the claim by Nazi sympathizers that theirs was a "pan-Aryan" movement. Petty German nationalism directly conflicted with any vision of an "Aryan" project, and may well have cost the Germans their victory in WW2.)
In the same speech, Himmler reportedly also announced the restoration and upkeep of cultural centres devoted to "German greatness and the German past". (p.34) So, even the most "esoteric" department of the Nazi movement still put secular concerns first. In one of her rare references to Ahnenerbe mastermind Himmler, she fails to quote any occultist statement from the horse's mouth or even to imply any deeper philosophical concern beyond sheer nationalist vanity.
Admittedly, among the German heritage sites, she claims Himmler included one that is beloved of astrologers, geomancers and occultists of all stripes, the Externsteine, a curiously shaped rock formation apparently of natural origin but widely believed to have been a cultic site, a "German Stonehenge". But here again, we find a problem of interpretation. Historically speaking, the site was of course never devoted to German self-celebration (unlike the nearby Hermannsdenkmal, the giant statue of Hermann/Arminius who defeated the Romans) but to a solar or stellar cult, universal par excellence; undeterred by the sobering facts, Himmler and Savitri Devi posthumously turned it into a nationalist monument. Now consider what happened there under the care of the "esoteric" Ahnenerbe (p.34): "On the summit of the highest rock, in the place of the ancient golden Irminsul ['grand pillar' representing the Cosmic Tree] uprooted in 772 by the soldiers of the same Christian conqueror [Charlemagne], fluttered henceforth, victorious and liberating, a symbol of the reconciliation of all the contrasting aspects of German history in the consciousness of its profound unity, the red-white-black swastika flag of the third Reich."
If the Third Reich aimed at a restoration of ancient Germanic Heathenism, as some Christian polemicists now claim, then the logical thing to do would have been to restore the ancient Heathen symbol, the Irminsul, in its very own place of pride. Instead, the Reich authorities, even that segment most associated with claims of Pagan revivalism, the Ahnenerbe, preferred to replace it with the modern secular symbol of the German state and race. This was in line with the Nazi regime's basic secularism: guaranteeing freedom of religion within certain limits, but keeping the state free of religious references or commitments.
Thus, still at the level of public symbolism, the Waffen-SS didn't name its units and weaponry after Heathen gods (the way India has an Agni missile and her soldiers use "Hara Hara Mahadeva" or "Sat Sri Akal" as rallying-cries, or the way Israel has its Merkavah tank, after the Kabbalistic chariot of Yahweh), but after characters from German history, e.g. the foreign volunteer legions were named after a person or event linking their respective countries of origin with Germany, such as Charlemagne for the French, Prinz Eugen for the Balkan ethnic-Germans or Langemarck (a Flemish WW1 battle site) for the Flemings. If Pagan gods is what you're looking for, try the British Navy in WW2, many of whose battle ships had names from Greek mythology, with one submarine even Germanically called Odin; or the American space programme with its Saturn and Apollo. The Nazis didn't replace the Christian religious salute "Gr�ss Gott" with a Heathen counterpart like "Gr�ss Wotan", but with the secular salute "Heil Hitler". Turn it any way you want, but Hitler was a secularist.
3. Savitri Devi's "traditionalism"
It is remarkable how Savitri Devi highlights the element of religious co-existence and synthesis in Nazi policy, the "reconciliation of all the contrasting aspects of German history in the consciousness of its profound unity". Just like Saint Paul said that there is no longer Greek nor Jew, slave nor freeman, since all are jointly saved in Christ, Hitler held that there are no longer believers nor unbelievers, Christians nor Pagans, noblemen nor commoners, since all Germans partake of their common German nationhood and racial superiority. All over Europe, the age of Christian decline had brought forth disgruntled ex-Christians who tried to get back at Christian obscurantism with anti-Christian fanaticism, typically focused in the liberal Masonic Lodges and later on in the Communist movement. Nazi Germany too had its share of pope-devouring anti-Christians, epitomized by the leaders of the "folkish" religious movement, General Erich Ludendorff and his wife Mathilde von Kemnitz. By contrast, Hitler, conscious of his position as national leader, kept away from extreme religious positions and tried to represent the synthesis of all the influences that had fostered the German soul.
Alright, maybe Christianity had been of foreign "Asiatic" origin (like Hinduism, which Ludendorff equally despised), and maybe it had become an obsolete irrational belief system, but it had shaped German identity, it had motivated Germans to great things, such as the Teutonic Knights' conquest of the then-Pagan Baltic region or the anti-Ottoman reconquests in the Balkans by Prince Eugen of Savoye. So, in Hitler's view, Germans should let these old religious quarrels be bygones, accept all tributaries to German identity as a heritage of history, and move on as a modern and united nation. Like Prussian king Friedrich II the Great and like Second Reich founder Otto von Bismarck, Hitler was a secularist who wanted to withdraw the nation's energies from religious pursuits, not by outlawing these after the Soviet model (except that he did outlaw all fringe associations devoted to neo-Pagan and other eccentric religions as foci of anarchic or pacifist threats to public order, though not their practice in private), but by promoting the nation as the alternative focus of devotion and the modern scientific temper as the key to practical this-worldly salvation. We may now frown upon the understanding of "science" as meaning the cold analysis and re-engineering of man by racialist Darwinism, but that was common enough then, outside as well as inside Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, to the extent that religion remained relevant, such as the "positive Christianity" enjoined in the Nazi Party charter, it should be patriotic and non-sectarian in spirit, too enlightened to ever get entangled again in the demographically wasteful religious violence of the forced Christianization, the Crusades, the witch burnings or the Thirty Years' War.
The folkish tendency and the syncretic "German Faith" movement too, in spite of their anti-Christian rhetoric, and like-minded religious hobbyists such as Heinrich Himmler, applied this pro-synthesis guideline in practice. In their construction of a "truly German spirituality", they incorporated Christian mystics and philosophers such as Meister Eckhart and Nicolaus Cusanus (who taught, in the 15th century already, that all religions are but fragmentary windows upon the same and fundamentally unknowable Godhead), along with the ancient Heathen seeress Weleda or the post-Christian visionary J.W. Goethe. This is an approach which modern Gandhian or Anglo-urban Hindus would call "secular".
It seems that Savitri Devi, in the last years of her life, from which both these republished papers date, had lost the anti-Christian fire of her prime and adopted this "secular" position that had also been Hitler's, viz. to reconcile the Pagan and Christian elements. She attributes to Hitlerism a "Pagan" (quote marks hers) component which she defines not as any actual god-cult which Christians would recognize as Pagan, but as the philosophical rejection of all sentimental "anthropocentrism" (p.35).
The identification of Paganism with non-anthropocentrism has a certain pedigree, viz. Nietzsche and his commentators describe pre-Socratic cosmology as "Pagan" when contrasting it with the human-centric Socratic concerns of ethics and epistemology. Yet this is semantically unsatisfactory, for it attributes anthropocentrism to philosophers like Socrates, and elsewhere Confucius and the Buddha, who by standard definition were Pagans; so Paganism cannot be the polar opposite of anthropocentrism. At any rate, in spite of this so-called Pagan element, she emphasizes that "there was never any question of rejecting or undervaluing anything in the German or European patrimony that did honour to the Aryan genius" (p.35). She appreciated that in religious matters, Hitler "was impartial just as any sage necessarily would have to be", so that he didn't hesitate to honour the anti-Pagan emperor Charlemagne, originator of the Reich idea. Hitler knew of the dissolving effect of Christianity upon Greco-Roman civilization (which he admired far more than the fairly primitive Germanic culture), but: "It mattered little what this religion had been, if it was the cement of a conquering Germanic empire and, later, the occasion for the well-known blossoming of the arts." (p.36) Like Nehru the estranged Hindu, Hitler the estranged Catholic could appreciate the role of religion, religion in general rather than any religion in particular, in the story of his country's greatness.
Moreover: "Whatever was eternal in the warrior religion of Wotan and Thor, and earlier in the immemorial Nordic religion of Heaven and Earth and their 'Son', which [Ahnenerbe co-founder] Dr. Hermann Wirth has studied, had to survive in Christian esotericism, and in esotericism in general. (*) The deep meaning of the ancient Irminsul, axis of the world, is basically not different from the Cross detached from all Christian mythology, i.e. from the story of Christ's suffering as a historical fact." (p.37) She even agreed to acknowledge the contribution of a German Jew, Martin Buber, to the work of the Ahnenerbe: "Why not, after all, if this Jew had attained a high degree of knowledge in 'pure metaphysics' and had no political activity?" (p.66) So, in a typical Traditionalist approach, both Germanic Paganism and Christianity, and even the Jewish Kabbala on which Buber was an expert, are now seen as but manifestations of the one perennial Tradition. This late conversion of Savitri Devi to inclusive Traditionalism probably explains why the Avatar publishing house chose to highlight these papers by republishing them.
4. Aryan invasion from the Arctic
In trying to establish a link between Hinduism and Hitlerism, Savitri plays exactly two cards, though by repetition they fill up quite a few pages. I do not mean the Swastika, which the Nazis hadn't borrowed from India in the first place. The symbol is widespread among cultures on all inhabited continents (as she herself admits, p.80), though the Nazis believed it was confined to Aryan cultures and those non-Aryan ones that had borrowed from them. It had been present in Europe for many centuries, not too prominently but sufficiently for making any borrowing from Asia superfluous. No, the two purported links are the caste system and the Aryan invasion theory (AIT).
This is not the place to speak out on the historical question whether the Indo-European languages originated inside or outside of India. In the latter hypothesis, they must have been imported into India. The most commonly accepted scenario in that case is that the "Aryans" brought the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family with them when they invaded India in 1700 BC or thereabouts. The truth of this theory is totally unconnected to its political uses, but among the latter we must at any rate note the European racist use of it, both in the British-colonialist and in the Nazi scheme of things, as an instance of the expansion of the superior white race into the territory of inferior races.
Savitri Devi's alpha and omega on the AIT was Bal Gangadhar Tilak's book Arctic Home in the Vedas, Pune 1903. This version of the AIT went a little farther than most in that it specified the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans as the Arctic region, an unlikely wellspring of large population movements. It somehow didn't strike her as odd that in the intervening decades not a single independent scholar had come out with research findings supporting Tilak's theory. It is the only Indian pro-AIT source she ever quotes, in this book (p.39-40, p.79, p.96-97, plus her laudator de Cecco on p.12) and to my knowledge also in the whole of her writings, as a native echo to the European claim of an early Aryan colonization of India.
In building on Tilak's theory, she makes the rather silly mistake of uncritically accepting Tilak's voice as an independent Indian confirmation of the European belief in the Aryan invasion. In reality, Tilak didn't get this notion from his traditional Brahminical upbringing, for it doesn't figure in the Vedas and in Sanskrit literature at all. He had drunk from the same source as Savitri Devi, Hitler, the Indologists and all the other believers in the Aryan invasion theory, viz. the 19th-century philologists who had tried to make sense of the linguistic kinship between Europe and North India. Tilak had acted as a "native informer" helping Indologists in their research. Most famously, he had collaborated with the German scholar Hermann Jacobi in establishing a chronology for the Vedas. It is in this context that he imbibed the new-fangled notion of a Nordic homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, whence they had expanded to all their historical areas of settlement including India.
Interiorizing this notion, Tilak then went on to develop fanciful interpretations of Vedic verses so as to make them fit the scenario of a non-Indian, indeed Arctic setting of the oldest layer of Vedic literature. Perfectly innocuous verses about the dawn or the seasons, always read in their natural meaning by one or two hundred generations of Brahmins, were suddenly contrived to reveal references to the Arctic. It is this highly artificial and totally untraditional reading of the Vedic hymns which became and remains the sheet-anchor of Aryan invasion lore in European far-rightist and new-rightist circles.
All through her life, Savitri Devi failed to notice how Tilak's theory remained without support from the legitimate keepers of Hindu tradition, the Vedic pandits, nor did she register the articulate opposition to the theory from Hindu nationalists such as Sri Aurobindo Ghose or Guru Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar. Though passing as an authority on India among her Western sympathizers, the fact is that she was hardly in touch with any consequential segment of Hindu society, whether the real traditionalists (of whom she seems to have sought out a few only when she heard of them praising Hitler, that too on the basis of very partial or plainly wrong information), the reformist Hindu nationalists, the Nehruvian modernizers or any other. As for the European scholars, they did teach one version or other of the AIT, arguing for the homeland status of the Danube or lower Volga region, or maybe Anatolia, but none of them located the Indo-European homeland in the Arctic.
Tilak was no authority on Indo-European expansion history, and likewise Savitri Devi was no authority on Hinduism, nor even on Hitlerism or esoteric philosophy or indeed anything of interest. It is simply tragic to see young people join internet discussion forums where they discuss the "work" and the "thoughts" of this once-bright woman who, suffering under the impact of the burning Indian sun, had transformed Hitler into an incarnation of the sun-god and enshrined such a flawed source as Tilak's misguided Arctic Home in the service of her Hitlercentric worldview. Come to think of it: what a sad and surrealistic buffoonery.
5. Caste
The second purported link between Hitler and Hinduism is the caste system. This is an endlessly recurring point in Savitri Devi's autobiography and in the present two papers. In the Euro-racist view, which she upheld even when it went out of fashion after 1945, the caste system was a racist institution resulting from the Aryan invasion. In a concern for their racial purity, the Aryan conquerors had imposed a prohibition on intermarriage with the natives, and this racist apartheid is what we know as the caste system.
During her lifetime, numerous scholarly and political publications have probed the underlying reasons for the institution of caste, and these have shown up a complex of causes and mechanisms far more diverse than and often also in direct conflict with the racist-invasionist explanation. But none of that ever registered in her mind.
Just briefly a few points so you get the idea. Caste and racism are two different things. In a caste society, two distinct racial groups with distinct origins and lifestyles, such as the American blacks and whites, would indeed be kept separate as non-intermarrying castes, thus preserving their racial and cultural identities. You see a spontaneous tendency to endogamy and group identity cultivation in multi-racial societies from Surinam to Singapore. In that sense, caste may have a racial component. The reverse, however, does not apply: not every two separate castes need be racially distinct. In Indian history, there are many cases where a single caste, biologically as homogeneous as humanly possible, splits up into non-intermarrying distinct castes because of long-term geographical separation, because of different professional vocations, because of one group's religious conversion, because one groups starts considering the other as somehow impure, or because one group chose the wrong side in a war.
Locating the origin of caste in a racial apartheid policy is entirely untenable, and this not only because the naked eye and the most recent genetic research show how the Indian population is a highly mixed racial continuum. A strong observance of caste taboos exists among the most remote populations of India, the hill tribes, as well as in the mutual relations between the lowest "un-Aryan" castes. When you consider that even the modern state in India fails to impose its laws in all corners of society, how could the Aryan invaders in India's Northwest have imposed the passionate observance of caste taboos on communities they never even encountered in person? This was simply beyond their mettle. Castes often came about as pre-existing tribes getting integrated in the expanding Vedic civilization with their group identities intact: tribal endogamy was preserved as caste endogamy. Regardless of their racial or geographical origins, castes were susceptible to considerable social mobility, not so much for the individual but for the community as a whole, e.g. by developing new economic sectors or by valiant participation in war. Vedic civilization acknowledges among its greatest spokesmen members of "backward" (or what Savitri Devi would call "un-Aryan") communities such as the Mahabharata's author Vyasa, the Ramayana's author Valmiki or the Tamil poet Tiruvalluvar. Its understanding of "Arya" is not as a racial nor even a linguistic term, but as a cultural term, a synonym for "Vedic", neither more nor less.
But none of that ever seems to have reached Savitri Devi's eye or penetrated her skull. This is my general criticism of the whole rightist, even the so-called new-rightist, understanding of Indian society and of the whole "Aryan" question: in their minds, time and the state of our knowledge seem to have stood still since the 1930s. They are emotionally satisfied with their worldview, so why let it get disturbed by new scholarly findings?
When encountering a certain enthusiasm for Hitler among traditional pandits (including one pandit Rajwade from Pune, quoted as predicting Hitler's defeat, p.58), she assumes readily that this is because they all see Hitler as an upholder of the caste order. But the only actual evidence to this effect is not a quotation from these scripture-hardened worthies, but a long presentation of a talk with her illiterate low-caste servant, the teenage boy Khudiram (p.74-78). In 1940, in the fish-market of Calcutta, he had picked up the perfectly false rumour that Hitler was going to enshrine the pro-caste and pro-martial scripture Bhagavad-Gita as the supreme law of the Reich. Now, sometimes the truth emanates from the mouth of an illiterate boy-servant, but it doesn't occur to Savitri Devi that she ought to verify this rumour and give her readers some better-documented reason to believe that Hitler had such plans; failing that, she ought to have conceded that the boy was simply mistaken. She implicitly does this by smiling about his Hitlerian enthusiasm, but that still leaves her without the first solid testimony for a Hitlerian connection to Hindu Dharma and the caste system.
For her own understanding of a common denominator between caste and Hitlerism, she doesn't get beyond a very general notion of "the fundamental inequality of the creatures, including the human individuals and races" (p.73). But in practice, the belief in this inequality was the norm worldwide until well after 1945, and even in theory, equality had only been enshrined as state policy in a minority of states and even there only in some respects. Hitler's enemies were just as convinced of the inequality between the sexes, the races and other classifications. Winston Churchill was an avowed racist presiding over a colonial empire full of racial discriminations, but he was not a Nazi. His country knew very steep class inequality even between native Britons, but it was not a Hitlerian society.
As for the Indian caste system, it did obviously imply a stern inequality between classes of citizens, but it did not tend to that for which Hitler's name is held in horror, viz. genocide. On the contrary, it has historically been a mechanism for resolving ethnic diversity which elsewhere might have resulted in conflict and massacre. Moreover, it was a self-structuring of civil society, never in need of control by a strong totalitarian state. No wonder, then, that what little she quotes from her orthodox Brahmin contacts fails to give explicit confirmation to her identification of Hitler as the champion of the caste system. It could hardly have been otherwise, considering that under British rule, the caste system was doing just fine and was not at all in need of salvation by Britain's enemies. The British respected caste identities, e.g. by organizing their British-Indian Army along caste lines. And this came naturally to them, because they had a soft version of the caste system within their own society. So, for caste, the Hindus didn't need Hitler, even if they were unaware that in his own society, Hitler was promoting equality between all Germans to the detriment of the old caste distinction between nobility and commoners. Savitri Devi does quote actual expressions of sympathy by traditional Hindus for Hitler, but the reasons for their Hitler sympathy seem rather to be the following.
Firstly, he was German, and Germany was the country of some leading Sanskrit scholars, including some in British employ such as Friedrich Max M�ller. They had greatly contributed to India's glory in the now-dominant West, which in turn had restored some pride in Hindu tradition among the Hindus themselves. That the Germans, not just Hitler but the German nation, had adopted the Swastika as their national symbol, further endeared them to the Hindus. There is no trace of the reverse: the German public did not get particularly sensitized to India and Hinduism, much less to its national aspiration to freedom; after all, Nazism cultivated a mood of self-celebration, not one of gratitude to some exotic nation. And contrary to what some Hindus thought, the Germans hadn't borrowed the Swastika from India in the first place. As for Hitler, from Mein Kampf (1924) till his meeting with Subhash Bose in 1942 and his ungrateful comments on Bose's small Indian Waffen-SS contingent deployed in the defence of the German empire in 1945, he never concealed his contempt for Hindus, Buddhists and related "Asiatic mountebanks". But this information never seems to have reached India nor made an impact there. Savitri Devi, of course, totally ignores it.
Secondly, there were the well-known temporary political circumstances. Though Hitler wanted the best for the British empire, a magnificent instance of white rule over the coloured races, events forced him into the role of its principal adversary. Therefore, many Hindus welcomed him as the enemy of their enemy, hence their best friend. Savitri Devi seems to have had a blind eye for India's nationalistic aspirations, which hardly figure in her writings at all. She managed not to see that elephant in the room, essentially because she never thought anything wrong of British rule; her own mother happened to be of British origin.
Thirdly, Hitler was reputed to conform to certain Hindu ideals. As a "unifier" of Europe, he filled a slot similar to that of the chakravarti, the energetic king who would bring the whole of India under one sceptre. In his private life, he was a teetotaller, a vegetarian and officially a celibate. According to Hindu belief, these observances and especially the last one confer an enormous charisma. If all parties including the enemy conceded one quality to Hitler, it was certainly charisma. From there, it was but a small step to calling him a "realized soul", a jn�ni or "knower" and what not.
In neo-Nazi circles, it is even claimed (here by Claudio Mutti on p.26), on the authority of one Sadhu Arunachala: A Sadhu's Reminiscences of Ramana Maharshi (1994, p.52) that Ramana Maharshi (d.1950), indisputably one of the greatest Hindu yogis of the 20th century, had declared: "It is possible that Hitler is a jn�ni, a divine instrument." If the account is true, Ramana's utterance sounds to me like the answer to a question posed by a visitor eager to hear a confirmation of his own idealization of Hitler: the sage did not commit himself to such a confirmation, but politely allowed that it was "possible",-- like most things. Note the difference with Savitri Devi's rendering of Ramana Maharshi's opinion: "Someone asked Ramana Maharshi (..) what he thought of Hitler. The answer was brief and simple: 'He's a jn�ni', i.e. a sage (*)." (p.73) This is her word against Sadhu Arunachala's. Either the latter has rendered Ramana's words softer and more conditional in deference to the anti-Hitlerian mood of the times, or she has rendered his words more decisive and unconditional to satisfy her own ideological preferences.
If any Hindu sages have glorified Hitler, I wouldn't be too impressed that this proves anything one way or the other. I have the greatest regard for the higher states of mind cultivated by them, but I have also noticed that this still doesn't free them from the universal law that our judgments about things and people are conditioned by the quality of the basic information fed to us. If only a rosy picture of Hitler is communicated to some recluse practising his yoga in a cave undisturbed by newspapers, he may form an opinion that is only as accurate as the original information. In that case, we are dealing with a "circular argument of authority", where someone contrives to get the authoritative person to give as his own an opinion subtly spoon-fed to him.
6. A personal testimony
The last contributor to this book, and really its editor, is the French scholar Christian Bouchet, since his youth an "integral traditionalist" in the footsteps of that great will-o'-the-wisp Julius Evola. He starts out by telling his own story. As a student in the late 1970s, he was a "national-revolutionary" militant, anti-bourgeois and anti-American, marching in support of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution in Iran. In his rightist friends' little counter-culture, the heroes were traditionalist mastermind and Muslim convert Ren� Gu�non, Japanese homosexual pseudo-samurai novelist Yukio Mishima, German war veteran and pro/anti-Nazi writer Ernst J�nger, martyred Rumanian Iron Guard leader Corneliu Codreanu, and the German National-Bolsheviks of the 1930s. After graduating, Bouchet embarked on a trip to India for the winter 1980-81, where he paid several visits to the aged Savitri Devi in her posh South Delhi apartment.
We already mentioned that she abhorred anthropocentrism, preferring nature to culture and a beautiful cat to an ugly human being. Bouchet testifies how she took this preference quite literally. She lived in symbiosis with dozens of cats that drowned her apartment in the stench of their urine. When he invited her out to dinner in a restaurant, she had to sprinkle a whole bottle of Eau de Cologne on herself to conceal the odour.
One anecdotic event tells it all: "I was interested but nothing [about her] aroused my enthusiasm. Ideologically, Savitri Devi Mukherji's discourse belonged to the parodic and fantasmic type of neo-Nazism. At the human level, her conduct embarrassed me. Back then, poverty was rampant in India and there were many beggars and hungry children in the streets. Her teacher's pension may have been small by European standards, but for India her income was considerable. So, every day she bought sizable amounts of food. Next, she spent part of the afternoon cooking meat and fish. In the evening, she went out to distribute these to* the street cats! This indifference to human beings and this disproportionate concern for animals troubled and shocked me. They still do when I think back on them." (p.86-87)
Bouchet further testifies how he never met anyone interesting in her company, nor even any Indians, only Western ladies in their declining years, ideologically mostly in the orbit of the Theosophical Society. His conclusion from his stay in Delhi was that "in order to appreciate her work, it was necessary never to meet its author" (p.87). Before calling her ideologically disreputable, we must first of all acknowledge her as a bit of a mental case.
Finally, about the reason for his visit to Savitri Devi, Bouchet wants to set the record straight. According to the oft-cited British researcher Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Hitler's Priestess, 1999; p.296 of the French translation La Pr�tresse d'Hitler, 2000), Bouchet had been one of the "neo-Nazi pilgrims" flocking to her Delhi apartment after the publicity given to her by Ernst Z�ndel. In reality: "I knew nothing about this revisionist author, not even his very existence, before I went to India, and it is precisely at Savitri Devi Mukherji's place that I first discovered his writings." (p.84)
Seeing her was not even the purpose of his trip and also didn't look like an important experience in retrospect: "During that same journey in India, I was received in private audience both by the Dalai Lama - who was easily accessible, not having become a media icon yet -- and by Kalu Rinpoche [a key figure in the implantation of Tibetan Buddhism in the West], and it is these meetings which counted for me during that trip, not the ones I had with Savitri Devi." (p.84) This is clearly a case of a historian making deductions by "connecting the dots": Z�ndel drew attention to Savitri Devi, Bouchet went to see her, ergo Bouchet was merely heeding Z�ndel's call. As an informed guess, this type of reasoning tends to have a good probability rate, but facts happen to be another matter. Not to be too harsh, we must admit that historians and more so journalists frequently rely on this kind of deduction to fill the gaps in the chain of cause and effect. But Bouchet cannot be faulted for lambasting this slick deduction by Goodrick-Clarke at his own expense.
7. Don't trust Savitri Devi
Christian Bouchet dismisses Goodrick-Clarke as a "pseudo-historian" (p.83). That seems a bit exaggerated to me, if not downright unfair. I'd rather accept the criticism of those disappointed readers who object that Goodrick-Clarke's first major book, The Occult Roots of Nazism, belies its own promising title, possibly chosen by the publisher with an eye on its sales potential, by concluding (p.217) that the so-called occult roots of Nazism are only a myth. Some would clearly have preferred Goodrick-Clarke to uphold the myth rather than debunking it. On the other hand, it must be admitted that for a debunker of "Nazi occultism" fantasies, Goodrick-Clarke is strangely persistent and attached to this subject, on which he keeps churning out hefty volumes. To Bouchet, the explanation is that, apart from having struck gold in the material sense, Goodrick-Clarke is an "anti-fascist militant" (p.83) intent on turning the biography of Savitri Devi into a support for "his delirious ideas and his conspiratorial view of history which interconnects Hollywood-type neo-Nazis, partisans of Deep Ecology, New Agers, Animal Rights advocates etc." (p.92)
Now, to come to the contents of Bouchet's criticism of Goodrick-Clarke as a historian, he alleges that: "Goodrick-Clarke has dispensed with all research work and has merely relayed Savitri Devi's own sayings without analysing or criticizing them." (p.92, likewise p.87) The problem is that this single source, her autobiography, is not supported by any independent evidence, and that she can easily have refashioned her past: "For the period from her birth until after World War 2, we have to trust Savitri Devi Mukherji for her life story. However, it is obvious that she herself has arranged her biography a posteriori in order to harmonize it with the themes defended in her books." (p.88)
Yes, everyone carries a novel in his heart: his autobiography. In this case, the authoress had the motive, the means and the opportunity to refashion her pre-1945 life story, not just in her written autobiography but first of all in her informal self-introduction to all the people she met after returning to Europe in 1946. Bouchet's suspicion against an unverified and unconfirmed self-revelation is truly the kind of attitude we may expect from a serious historian. Let us look into a few details.
Bouchet points out several glaring contradictions and improbabilities. First of all, Savitri Devi's husband Asit Krishna Mukherji seems totally unknown outside his wife's autobiography, except in another second-hand book, viz. La Spirale Proph�tique by Jean Parvulesco, which he dismisses as "delirious" and "in no case credible" (p.99). Though reportedly working for the Germans and the Japanese, first as a propagandist but during the war also as a spy, and this in Calcutta right under the nose of the British regional war command, he was never troubled by the British authorities. Now maybe he was just too clever for them, but then why is he never even mentioned in known sources about Allied vs. Japanese warfare? Why not in accounts about Subhash Chandra Bose, who Savitri Devi claims took some crucial advice from her husband? And why is the magazine he purportedly edited in 1935-37, the New Mercury, so hard to find?
Well, maybe we simply haven't searched hard enough? About the magazine, I can add that when writing The Saffron Swastika, I have tried in vain to locate it in the India Office Library in London and in several libraries and personal archives in Calcutta. I had only two days in Calcutta, and this was before the Indian libraries had computerized their data, so probably it would be easier now, if indeed copies of the magazine are extant there. Those in a position to help are welcome to do so.
Bouchet also mocks Savitri Devi's claim that already in 1938, A.K. Mukherji had eloquently spoken about the Thule society, which in reality had never been more than marginal and unimportant, and about Nazi esotericism, largely the figment of post-war confabulation. At this point, one explanation becomes inescapable: "It is evident and very clear that Savitri Devi Mukherji has 'arranged' her biography in order to construct herself a persona apt to shine in the tiny circle of neo-Nazism" (p.91). Next, Bouchet wonders how Savitri Devi can claim that Asit Krishna Mukherji was a "man of the most orthodox tradition", yet: "He marries a non-Indian, a casteless woman* In Indian culture no act is more anti-traditional and in conflict with orthodoxy!" (p.89) To this, a feeble but not altogether powerless answer might be that the case of a purely formal, chaste marriage is different. If the two had started a family together, it would have amounted to varna-sankara, "mixing of castes", but here they never set out to do so and even lived separately much of the time, effectively remaining a bachelor and a spinster. However, it remains fair to doubt that he was "most orthodox". Staying celibate without taking religious vows, like a Western bachelor, is not that rare in India, but it is certainly not orthodox.
Also, travelling abroad forces a Hindu to all kinds of compromises in lifestyle and is therefore avoided by the orthodox; Mukherji, by contrast, reportedly spent years in Europe and the Soviet Union as a student. I would simply conclude that Savitri Devi didn't fully know what she was saying when she used the term "orthodox".
Another serious contradiction is the one between the fiercely pro-caste views in her autobiography (written 1969-71) and her work in 1937-39 for the Calcutta-based Hindu Mission, a reformist movement which tried to counter the Christian missionaries in the tribal belt of what is now Jharkhand, the forested and hilly area just to the west of Calcutta. The underlying vision of the Hindu Mission, like that of other reformist groups such as the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Nationalist organizations Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was that all castes and tribes are equally part of Hindu society, and that they should be immunized against the Christian temptation by participating more fully in the Vedic tradition. Even if not going so far as to abolish caste altogether, there was an unmistakable anti-caste and egalitarian thrust in their programme.
Bouchet highlights this deep cleavage within Hindu revivalism: on the one hand the traditionalists who want to preserve the caste system, with Swami Karpatri's marginal and now defunct Ram Rajya Parishad as its only-ever political vehicle, and on the other the reformists who concluded long ago that caste had become a millstone around the neck of Hindu society and should be discarded. Among the latter tendency, he correctly counts the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of which he notes the sympathy it has recently enjoyed in French rightist circles. He points out that they are falling for the same confusion as Savitri Devi (at least in her young days when working for the Hindu Mission), viz. to think that simply because an organization claims to work for the interests of the Hindus, it must be an upholder of ancient Hindu values such as the caste hierarchy: "Traditional and anti-Western, the BJP? National and rightist, undeniably, but this political self-positioning doesn't confer any particular qualification of traditionalism or anti-modernism. Just as the [anti-immigrant national-populist party] Front National is not the vector of Gu�non's and Evola's ideas in France, so the BJP is not the Indian incarnation of the philosophia perennis." (p.97)
Bouchet correctly points out, also against claims by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and his Indian Marxist sources (p.100), that the reformist wing including V.D. Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha sided with the British in WW2. It was the secular leftist Subhash Chandra Bose with his part-Hindu part-Muslim army who fought on the Axis side. Savitri Devi herself had already wryly noted the anti-Hitler positions of "Aryan" worthies such as the Arya Samaj movement and Sri Aurobindo, one-time editor of a periodical called the Arya. For the latter's case, she never seems to have seen the official statements issued by Aurobindo calling on the Indian National Congress to join the British war effort (as the Hindu Mahasabha had already done) and denouncing Hitler is the strongest terms. Instead, she wonders if these weren't mere rumours spread by his French-Jewish confidante Mira Alfassi (p.53), a convenient scapegoat. At any rate, the anti-Hitler stance of a cross-section of Hindu society, from pro-British loyalists to Hindu nationalists of various stripes, must have disappointed her. I surmise it may have been a factor in her breaking off all (c.q. never seeking any) contacts with Hindu reformists including the Hindu Mission and the Hindu Nationalist political parties.
To me, it seems likely that in 1937, Savitri Devi was not yet fully aware of this inter-Hindu antagonism. She enthusiastically accepted the role of anti-Christian preacher which the Hindu Mission offered her without fully realizing the contrast between this work and the pro-caste traditionalism to which she may already have been paying some lip-service. Her own explanation in her autobiography, however, is that she had simply been fooling both her tribal audience and her Hindu-reformist employers: she had merely wanted to "give the most backward and degenerate aboriginals a (false) Hindu consciousness" (Souvenirs et R�flexions, p.37) and "give them the impression" of being welcome in Hinduism on the basis of equality, purely for the sake of increasing the Hindus' numerical power, "not for the benefit of their own souls, which nobody cared about (and myself less than anyone)" (op. cit., p.39). She also claims that the Hindu Mission's leader Swami Satyananda had seen through her insincerity and told her to preach from the Hindu viewpoint and keep her private opinions to herself (op. cit., p.39).
All this would imply that she was also feigning a Hindu reformist position all through her booklet A Warning to the Hindus (Hindu Mission, 1939), which gained some popularity in Hindu nationalist circles. Though written at the height of Nazi Germany's popularity worldwide, the booklet is remarkably silent on the international situation, except for trivially mentioning that German and Japanese mothers instil patriotism in their children. This significant silence (which releases her Hindu readers from the chain insinuation of enthusiasm "for a pro-Nazi author, hence for Nazism") may then also be due to the restraining influence of her supervisors in the Hindu Mission; or it may reflect a genuine focus on serving Hindu society by promoting reform and the upliftment of the tribals.
For now, I'll leave it at registering this contradiction between her earlier and later positions without trying to decide whether she was being insincere in 1937 or insincerely claiming that earlier insincerity in 1970. It is at any rate significant for a certain type of mentality that she saw virtue in pleading insincerity.
8. In self-defence
Bouchet has read the chapter on Savitri Devi in my book The Saffron Swastika (Delhi 2001, esp. p.534-660). He slightly mocks my itinerary through "student Leftism" and "the New Age movement" to a position "favourable to the Hindu communalists" (p.102), but that's quite alright with me. I don't think too highly of my earlier beliefs either, but I have a right to my own life story. Among the few comments he offers in passing, the most important one is that, just like Goodrick-Clarke, I am said to have placed far too much trust in Savitri Devi's autobiography.
I accept that criticism, though not without pointing out a few mitigating facts. First of all, unlike Goodrick-Clarke, my book was not about Savitri Devi, but about a far broader subject, viz the hostile rhetoric of "Hindu fascism". In that context, I felt that I had to deal with the perfectly bizarre and unrepresentative case of Savitri Devi, because otherwise it would constitute a loophole through which the opposite side could still push the argument for a Hitler-Hindutva connection, seemingly exemplified by her. But it could not reasonably be expected of me that in such a sideshow, I would put in the same effort to trace biographical data as can be demanded from the writer of a proper biography.
All the same, I cannot seriously be accused of taking Savitri Devi's word for the truth of her self-presentation. Thus, I myself have pointed out (Saffron Swastika, p.600-604, "Racist distortion in Savitri Devi's mission"; p.637-640, "Doublespeak on caste") the contradiction between her reformist words and acts in 1937-39 and her later mockery of the same in her autobiography, an issue discussed above.
I have also taken the trouble of registering at least those outside testimonies that could be gathered without too much investment of time and money. Bouchet may dismiss as historically light-weight my record of the testimony by the man whose father rented out a room to A.K. Mukherji ca. 1940 (p.99), but I must note that he himself offers no similar personal testimonies at all, and that the one I have reported does contain information, or at least indications, which add to our picture of this enigmatic man, viz. in the sense of confirming his closeness to Axis representatives and in adding the troubling new information that he was a double-agent working for the British. The latter claim makes other pieces of the puzzle fall into place, e.g. why Mukherji was left such unfettered freedom even during the war, and how he could think of sending a plea to the British authorities in favour of his wife's release when she was arrested in Germany. It would have been a serious failing on my part if I had withheld that testimony. Moreover, I have not made any precocious claims of completeness or definitiveness for the scenario emanating from it. I cannot help it that it is as yet not confirmed by other similar testimonies, but incompleteness in the source material is one of the occupational frustrations inherent in the historian's job. The only solution is to hurry and interview what few witnesses are still alive and to dig deeper for documentary evidence.
Bouchet also objects to another piece of information I collected from multiple sources outside Savitri Devi's autobiography, viz. concerning her sex life: "Koenraad Elst, without basing his statements on any proofs whatsoever, puts forth the idea that Savitri Devi had been a bisexual woman of easy virtue (this when she has always affirmed that her marriage was chaste and that she remained a virgin all her life)" (p.100). So who is uncritically relying on Savitri Devi's own account now? Here again, I have considered it my duty to record what much information became available to me, even if I had no inclination to look for any further proofs,-- and I wonder what would have counted as "proof" in this matter. Several people who knew her in person have spoken to me about this to the same effect; I was in no position to pass judgment on the truth of their claim, but I had to mention it.
I can also report now that the credibility of this testimony has been increased slightly by the protest I received from one of the people concerned. Though I had never concealed I was collecting information about Savitri Devi for a book, and though I had not been asked to keep any secret, the person in question was angry that I had divulged such intimate information. Perhaps there was a generational misunderstanding: for a modern Westerner it is no longer shocking to learn that Mrs. X is "living her life" and exercising what Taslima Nasrin calls "the freedom of the vagina"; but for many people of Savitri Devi's generation, it was different. Well, sorry if I hurt anyone's sensibilities. At any rate, if my witness's testimony had not been sincere, i.e. if it had been a deliberate slur on her, I doubt that I would have received this protest.
My last word about the matter in The Saffron Swastika (p.573) was: "A different type of historian might like to pursue these details of Savitri Devi's life, at least if he moves fast enough to contact the witnesses before they leave this world." I am glad to report that an American historian has contacted me and introduced himself as just that kind of historian. I have given him what I had of references and source material, and I hope that he will come out soon with the definitive biography of Savitri Devi Mukherji. Meanwhile, the booklet just reviewed certainly adds to our understanding of the Aryan lady's ideological development and her reception in contemporary rightist circles.
Savitri Devi Mukherji: Le National-Socialisme et la Tradition Indienne, with contributions by Vittorio de Cecco, Claudio Mutti and Christian Bouchet, published in the series Cahiers de la Radicalit� by Avatar-�ditions, Paris/Dublin 2004.
(19 October 2005)
M.S. Golwalkar: Conceptualizing Hindutva Fascism
By Ram Puniyani
10 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org
http://www.countercurrents.org/comm-puniyani100306.htm
Beginning this twenty Fourth February, RSS combine has undertaken programs in different parts of the country to celebrate the centenary year of RSS second Sarsnghchalak (supreme dictator), Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, known in Sangh circles as Shri Guruji. What are going to be the implications of this celebration? To answer this, we will have to delve into the work of Golwlakar, who penned a small book, 'We or our Nationhood Defined' (We…), which gives an outline of his ideology and later his articles were published as a compilation, 'Bunch of Thoughts'. In both these books and also in various other outpourings of his, he denigrates democracy and pluralism on one hand and upholds fascist concept of nationhood and sectarian version of culture on the other. His writing is most intimidating to the minorities in particular. He was the chief of RSS for 33 long years and was instrumental in giving RSS a direction, which assumed menacing proportions in times to come, and strengthening the foundations of the 'hate minorities' ideology resulting in the consequent waves of violence, undermining the democratic norms in the society. He can also be 'credited' with giving the sharp formulations which laid the ideological foundation of different carnages in the country.
Golwalkar praises Lord Manu as the greatest law giver mankind ever had. It was the same law giver Manu's book, which was burnt by Dr. Ambedkar in his pursuit of getting justice for the dalits. In current times, Golwalkars' successor also demanded a throwing away of Indian constitution, to be replaced by the one which is based on Hindu holy books, implying Manusmriti, of course.
His formulations of Hindutva Fascism are so blatant that even his followers, the RSS combine, is running for cover and claiming that this book, having a naked hatred for minorities and eulogies for the likes of Hitler, We…, was not written by him. They avoid owning these ideas. But one knows that this book was penned by him. In an affidavit submitted to the charity commissioner, Rajendra Singh, a later Sarsanghchalak pleaded, "With a view to give a scientific base to propagate the idea-India being historically from time immemorial a Hindu nation-the late Shri M.S. Golwalkar had written a book entitled 'We or Our Nationhood defined', which was published in 1938." (Quoted in Islam, Undoing India: The RSS way) J.A. Curran in his classic study, RSS: Militant Hinduism in India Politics- A study of RSS: points out "The genuine ideology of Sangh is based upon principles formulated by its founder, Dr. Hedgewar. These principles have been consolidated and amplified by the present leader ( i.e. Golwalkar) in a small book called "We or our nationhood defined". It is a basic primer in the indoctrination of Sangh volunteers… (Curran 1979, p.39). Since its quotations have been brought to the notice of people, RSS publishing houses have stopped republishing this book. What does Golwalkar say in this book?
In this book he rejects the notions of Indian nationhood, India as a Nation in the making. He rejects the idea that all the citizens will be equal. He goes on to harp the notions of nationhood borrowed from Hitler's Nazi movement. He rejects that India is a secular nation and posits that it is a Hindu Rashtra. He rejects the territorial-political concept of nationhood and puts forward the concept of cultural nationalism, which was the foundation of Nazi ideology. His admiration of Hitler's ideology and politics is the running thread of the book and he takes inspiration from the massive holocaust which decimated millions of people in Germany. He uses this as a shield to propagate his political ideology. It is this ideology which formed the base of communal common sense amongst a section of the population. "German national pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races, the Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into a united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by." (We…, 1938, p.37)
In the Sangh circles this book is regarded as their Gita. The implications for Indian minorities are presented here in a forthright manner. Today the swayamsevaks brought up on this Gita, do believe in all this but the language of expression is being made more polished so that the poison is coated with honey and administered with ease. Golwalkar goes on to assert, "From the standpoint sanctioned by the experience of shrewd nations, the non-Hindu people in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and revere Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but the glorification of Hindu nation i.e. they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ingratitude towards this land and its age long traditions, but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead; in one word, they must cease to be foreigners or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, for less any preferential treatment, not even the citizen's rights." (Ibid p.52).
When the Hindutva politics came up in the late 1980s, in the beginning an unsuspecting observer could not comprehend from where has the concept of Hindu nation come up suddenly, why such an intense hatred for minorities, a glance at We… and one becomes clear that those fed on this ideology cannot but be what they are, cannot do anything else than what they did and have been doing since 1990, the Babri demolition, the anti minority violence and an open violation of democratic ethos of the country. These ideas were translated into the stories of atrocities of Muslim kings, the myth of Hindus owning this land from times immemorial and a lot of such make believe concoction. Irrespective of the fact the freedom movement rejected this ideology and its formulations, it was kept alive through the ideological indoctrination work in the RSS shakhas going on ceaselessly.
Golwalkar was also faced with some of the naïve swaymasevaks wishing to participate in the national movement, more so after the massive Quit India movement was launched. That time Golwalkar was the RSS chief and he dissuaded the people from participating in the movement, and some of them who participated did it in their personal capacity, some of them now claim that they also participated. ( e.g. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was onlooker in the anti British movement, was arrested but wriggled out of the jail and later claimed to have participated in the movement.) As matter of fact Golwalkar was very contemptuous towards the anti British movement. There is no mention of presence of RSS in the anti British movement even in most of the sympathetic accounts written about it. Even Nanaji Deshmukh, the foremost leaders of RSS puts this question, why did RSS not take part in the liberation struggle as an organization? (Deshmukh, Victim of Slander, Vision Books, 1979, p.70) Since Golwalkar propounded religion based nationalism, there was no place for anti British stance. "The theories of territorial nationalism and of common danger, which formed the basis of our concept of nation, had deprived us of the positive and inspiring content of our real Hindu Nationhood and made many of the 'freedom movements' virtually anti-British movements. Anti Britishism was equated with patriotism and nationalism. This reactionary view has had disastrous effects upon the entire course of freedom movement…" (Bunch of thoughts, 1996, p.138). In a frank defense of British colonialist he reminds the people of RSS pledge, "We should remember that in our pledge we have talked of freedom of the country through defending religion and culture. There is no mention of departure of British in that." (Shri Guruji Samgra Darshan, Vol 4, p. 2) With allies like this British could merrily pursue their policy of divide and rule!
No wonder British never repressed RSS. Also the collusion between Religion based nationalism and colonialism can be understood from such statements. Later the World saw that in tune with this pro imperialist ideology, Golwalkar was to support the US aggression on Vietnam and his successor Sudarshan defended the US aggression against Iraq.
The murder of Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindutva follower Nathuram Godse not only shocked the whole nation; it led RSS followers to celebrate this event by distributing sweets. While RSS followers were celebrating, and the links of Godse with RSS became apparent, RSS was banned and Golwalkar was arrested. They denied that RSS had any links with Godse. At that time it was easy to claim so as RSS had no written constitution and membership lists, enrollment register etc. Godse was RSS Pracharak and later he joined Hindu Mahasabha and was editing a newspaper, Agrani (leader), the subtitle of the paper was Hindu Rashtra. In the court he denied any links with RSS. Later his brother Gopal Godse, who was also an accomplice in the murder, in an interview given to Times of India (25 Jan 98) stated that his brother Nathuram spoke a deliberate lie in the court, "The appeasement policy followed by him (Gandhi) and imposed on all Congress governments' encouraged the Muslim separatist tendencies that eventually created Pakistan…Technically and theoretically he (Nathuram) was a member (of RSS), but he stopped workings for it later. His statement in the court that he had left the RSS was to protect the RSS workers who would be imprisoned following the murder. On the understanding that they (RSS workers) would benefit from his dissociating himself from the RSS, he gladly did it."
In the wake of the murder of Gandhi, RSS was banned and Golwalkar was jailed, from where he wrote a letter to the Government of India offering to cooperate with the government in 'dealing with the menace of Communism' in return for being released from the jail. Incidentally it was also the period when US was on the witch hunt of communists world over. Today, the global US agenda of demonization of Islam, and Muslims world over matches with the RSS agenda, coincidence again? Is this running parallel in the matching agenda US and RSS policies a mere coincidence?
For him the notion of Hindu Rashtra remained supreme and he could never reconcile to the secular values of Indian constitution. Time and over again he kept on harping on how UnBharat the constitution is and how Manu's rules are more desirable and profound one's. The partition of India and the consequent tragedy was registered through the Hindutva eyes, "Even to this day there are many who say, 'now there is no Muslim problem at all. All those riotous elements who supported Pakistan have gone away once for all. The remaining Muslims are devoted to our country. After all they have no other place to go and they are all bound to remain loyal…It would be suicidal to delude ourselves into believing that they have turned patriot overnight after the creation of Pakistan. On the contrary, Muslim menace has increased a hundredfold by the creation of Pakistan, which has become a springboard for all their future aggressive designs on our country." (Bunch of Thoughts, Bangalore, 1996, p. 177-78)
The way to look at Indian communities as Hindus and Muslims as uniform monoliths continues to be exhibited all through. Further he also goes on to label Muslims, Christians and Communists as internal threats to Hindu nation. And this is the 'ideological fodder ' of RSS shakhas and its practical unfoldment is visible in the regular occurrence of attacks against Muslims and Christians. With collapse of Soviet Union, the venom against communists has been given a different turn. And in the third category secularist have also been added up as a threat to Hindu nation.
It was Golwalkar again under whose stewardship the RSS gave birth to other organizations to play the divisive role in different arenas of social and political life. He was instrumental in helping bring up Bharatiya Jansangh, Akhil Bhartiya Vidayarthi Parishad, Bharatiya Majdoor Sangh, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and Vishwa Hindu Parishad, amongst others. The infiltration of RSS cadres in different wings of state apparatus; army, police, bureaucracy, judiciary, education and media was another move initiated by Golwalkar, the effects of which are visible prominently from last two decades.
While secular democratic elements, activists have a long road ahead, we need to take care that in the already vitiated atmosphere, the communal divide is not accentuated further by this move of RSS and we put forward the values of humane plural and democratic society and dispel the ideologies which have been playing a very divisive role in the society.
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