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.