Swami Vivekananda once told
Christian missionaries that their vilification of Hinduism outweighed all the
mud in the ocean. Since then, the stream of defamatory mud thrown at Hinduism
has only increased. A new line employed by Evangelists, Communists and others
is to associate Hinduism with Nazism. Doesn't the swastika tell it all? And the
Sanskrit term "Aryan"? Aha!
Contrived and malafide as this
rhetoric may be, it can hold one or two individuals up as examples of Hitlerian
Hindus. In his new book, Hitler's Priestess. Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan
Myth, and Neo-Nazism (New York University Press 1998), Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
tells the story of Savitri Devi Mukherji, a French-Greek lady who made a
synthesis of her admiration for Hitler with her own rather personal version of
Hinduism. She was born on 30 September 1905 in Lyon, France, as Maximiani Portas, daughter of a
Greek father and an English mother. Extremely gifted, she was to earn an MA in
Science and a Ph.D. in Liberal Arts. Early on, she developed strong political
sympathies and antipathies, and these would become the chief determinants of
her strange itinerary, which included India.
Ideological development
When Maximiani came of age, she
opted for the Greek nationality, and spent several years in Greece. In 1929, she visited Palestine, where she witnessed the budding
conflict between Palestinians and Jewish settlers; her sympathy was with the
former. Anti-Semitism was a predominant attitude in pre-1940 France, both Left and Right, and she had
imbibed it early on. Enamoured with ancient Greek culture, Maximiani repudiated
Christianity, though retaining its anti-Semitic prejudice. Her main objection
to Christianity was its anthropocentrism, its doctrine that God had entrusted
man with the rulership over all other creatures. This critique of Biblical
anthropocentrism has recently been revived by the ecological movement, whose
radical fringe denies that mankind is worth more than other species. Maximiani rejected
the love of mankind in favour of an ethical vitalism which she found in
National-Socialism, with "its scale of values, centred not on 'man' but on
life".
From her ideal of
"Hellenism", she reoriented towards the "Aryan" doctrines
propagated by the Nazis. Ever since Charles Darwin, culture was seen by many as
but a side effect of a biological quality, and consequently, the Indo-European
language family was identified with a hypothetical Aryan race. The linguistic
"Aryanization" of India by white Aryan invaders from Europe formed a complete case study of all
that the upcoming racist worldview stood for:
-first, whites had
expressed their natural dynamism by trekking to distant horizons, unlike the
indolent dark-skinned people who never left their shores;
-then, the whites had
proven their superiority by subduing the dark-skinned natives;
-next, with their
healthy race consciousness, they had tried to preserve their racial purity by
imposing the caste system on themselves and the natives, preventing
intermarriage between white conquerors and dark natives as much as possible;
-but unfortunately, some
racial mixing did nonetheless take place and turned the white invaders into
brown-skinned half-breeds, their intellectual and military qualities
deteriorated, and they became an easy and legitimate prey for European
colonizers who had preserved their racial purity.
This way, the Aryan Invasion Theory
(AIT) was a cornerstone of the modern
racist worldview. As Savitri Devi herself reported: "In the Third Reich,
even school-children knew from their textbooks that the Aryan race had spread
from the north to the south and east, and not the other way around." She
also believed in the AIT annexe that caste is a racial Apartheid system, with the
Aryan invaders as upper and the "aboriginals" as lower castes.
The Hindu connection
Using the money her deceded father
left her, Maximiani went to India and, with two brief interruptions,
she was to stay there from 1932 until 1945, and again in 1957-60 and 1971-81.
She studied Hindi and Bengali at Rabindranath Tagore's Shanti Niketan school
and travelled around the country. Feeling ready to face Indian audiences, she
offered her services as an anti-Christian preacher to Swami Satyananda's Hindu
Mission in Calcutta. In 1937-39, under her given Hindu
name Savitri Devi, she toured the tribal villages and had the chiefs organize
public debates between herself and the local missionaries. Thoroughly familiar
with the mentality and methods of her adversary, she could destroy the credit
of the imported religion in the minds of the villagers, and prevent or undo
many conversions. There was a sharp contradiction between her own racist and
anti-egalitarian convictions and the reformist and egalitarian programme of the
Hindu Mission. To the Hindu Mission, Hinduism was a value in itself; to Savitri
Devi, it was but an instrument of her imagined Aryan race. In her years as a
preacher, she kept her non-Hindu preoccupations to herself, but in her memoirs
(Souvenirs et R�flexions d'une Aryenne, French: "Memories and
Reflec-tions of an Aryan Lady", Delhi 1976), she declared that she
conceived of her reconversion mission as an exercise in deception: "From
the racist Aryan view-point, it was necessary to give the most backward and
degenerate aborigines a (false) Hindu consciousness."
In contrast with the Hindu
nationalists, but in tune with Indian Marxists and casteists, she believed that
the concept "nation" and a programme of "nationalism" could
not apply to India. In 1938, she used the slogan:
"Make every Hindu an Indian nationalist, and every Indian nationalist a
Hindu". In her autobiography, however, she rejected this slogan on the
plea that a "nation" could only consist of racially similar individuals,
not of racially distinct communities, as she thought the castes to be. To
genuine Hindu activists, this position is scandalous. It expresses exactly the
motives which anti-Hindu authors falsely attribute to Hindu nationalism,
because these motives logically follow from the racist theory of caste which
Indian casteists and Marxists share with Savitri Devi, but which is rejected by
the Hindu vanguard. At any rate, she gave her assent to claims routinely made
in anti-Hindu literature, e.g.:
�Islam and Christianity
are religions of equality;
�converts from Hinduism
to Islam or Christianity were attracted by these religions' caste-free
egalitarianism;
�India is not and never has been a nation.
These are exactly the ideas
propagated by Indian Communists and Christian missionaries. With friends like
Savitri Devi, Hinduism didn't need enemies.
However, the positions quoted were
uttered only in Savitri Devi's later writings, not in the pre-War period when
she was in touch with Hindu leaders including Subhash Bose and G.D. Savarkar,
brother of V.D. Savarkar and writer of a foreword to her booklet A Warning
to the Hindus (Calcutta 1939). Her most consequential acquaintance was with
Dr. Asit Krishna Mukherji, the only Indian who could honestly be described as a
Nazi. Numerous Indians were enthusiastic about Hitler's challenge to Britain's world domination, but Mukherji
was the only one with a comprehensive knowledge of Nazi doctrine. He had
studied history in London and travelled in the Soviet Union, but his interest was drawn by the
rising discourse of race, enthroned as state doctrine in Germany in 1933. In 1935-37, he published a
pro-Nazi bimonthly, the New Mercury. Savitri Devi met him on 9
January 1938,
and their conversation immediately turned to Nazi doctrine, especially its
alleged esoteric roots. According to Goodrick-Clarke, Mukherji was an early
believer in the popular claim that the Thule Society, one of many reactionary
political clubs in Munich ca. 1920, was a "secret
initiatory society behind the open political movement of National
Socialism". In an earlier publication, The Occult Roots of Nazism (London
1992), Goodrick-Clarke himself has cut such myths to size and debunked the
"wholly spurious 'facts' concerning the powerful Thule Society, the Nazi
links with the East, and Hitler's occult initiation".
After the outbreak of the war,
Savitri Devi risked being expelled from India, so Mukherji offered to marry her.
She described it as a chaste marriage, concluded purely for passport reasons.
Chastity in marriage may have suited Mukherji as a believer in the yogic powers
conferred by sexual abstinence. His bride, by contrast, was very open-minded
and easy-going about sexuality and had had affairs with men as well as women.
Mukherji played a key role in the
contacts between Subhash Bose and Axis representatives. He also spied for the
Japanese during the war, but there are indications that he was a double agent,
which would explain why he was left untouched eventhough Calcutta was the nerve centre of the
Anglo-American operations against Japan. Savitri spent the War years
writing books on Pharaoh Akhenaton (r. 1383-66 BC), the first known prophet of
monotheism. She chose him as her preferred deity in her Bhakti practice, after
a jewel she bought in Delhi displayed a solar symbol known from Akhenaton's
inscriptions; she took this as a divine hint. She had taken up devotional yoga
when a yoga master judged that her nerves could not stand the discipline of
more straightforward forms of meditation.
