Vinayak Damodar Savarkar

Early revolutionary activity and imprisonment

Savarkar was involved from a young age in revolutionary nationalist activity, associated with the secret society Abhinav Bharat, which he helped found. He travelled to London to study law and there joined India House, a hub for Indian revolutionary students associated with Shyamji Krishnavarma. In 1909 he published The Indian War of Independence 1857, an account of the 1857 uprising that reframed it as a coordinated national rebellion against British rule rather than a mutiny, a reinterpretation that influenced later nationalist historiography; the book was banned in India and Britain and had to be published clandestinely, appearing first in a Dutch and later a French and German-facilitated edition before being smuggled into India. In 1910 he was arrested in London in connection with revolutionary activity in India, including links to the Nashik Conspiracy Case, in which pistols traced back to his associates and his brother Ganesh had been used in the 1909 assassination of a British district magistrate, A.M.T. Jackson, at Nashik. While being transported back to India by sea, he attempted a celebrated escape by jumping from the ship, the SS Morea, at Marseille, but was recaptured with French police assistance and returned to British custody, an episode that also became the subject of a later diplomatic dispute between Britain and France over the legality of his rearrest on French soil. He was convicted and given two consecutive sentences of transportation for life, and was sent to the Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands in 1911, where he was held until 1921 before being transferred to jails on the Indian mainland. During his imprisonment he submitted petitions for clemency to the colonial government, a fact that has been read differently by historians and political commentators: some treat the petitions as a pragmatic response to conditions of imprisonment common among political prisoners of the period, while critics have characterized them as a capitulation inconsistent with his revolutionary reputation. He was released with restrictions on his movement and political activity in the mid-1920s and was fully freed from those restrictions in 1937.

Social reform and the Hindutva thesis

During and after his years of restricted residence in Ratnagiri in the late 1920s and 1930s, Savarkar also promoted campaigns against untouchability and caste restrictions among Hindus, including support for the Patit Pavan Mandir, a temple opened in Ratnagiri to admit Hindus of all castes, and advocacy of inter-dining and temple entry across caste lines, positions he framed as necessary to Hindu social and political consolidation rather than as an end in themselves. In 1923 he published Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, which defined Hindu identity in cultural and civilizational rather than strictly theological terms, describing a Hindu as one for whom India is both pitribhumi (fatherland) and punyabhumi (holy land), a formulation intended to encompass a broad range of Indic religious traditions under a shared national-cultural identity. The book became the foundational text of the political current later known as Hindutva. From 1937 to 1943 Savarkar served as president of the Hindu Mahasabha, a political organization that promoted Hindu nationalist politics and positioned itself in opposition both to the Indian National Congress's pluralist, secular nationalism and to the Muslim League's demand for a separate Muslim state. Savarkar's own writings at times described Hindus and Muslims as constituting separate nations within India, a characterization that has drawn comparison — debated among historians — with the two-nation theory more commonly associated with the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan, even as the Hindu Mahasabha under his leadership opposed the actual partition of the subcontinent. During the Second World War, breaking with the Congress's Quit India stance, Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha actively encouraged Hindu enlistment in the British Indian armed forces, under the slogan of "Hindu militarization," a position he defended as building a trained Hindu military cadre for the future rather than as support for British war aims.

Gandhi assassination case and later years

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi on 30 January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a former member of the Hindu Mahasabha who had also edited a Marathi newspaper associated with Savarkar's circle. Savarkar was arrested and tried as an alleged co-conspirator in the assassination, on the basis of testimony from an approver, Digambar Badge, linking him to the plot. He was acquitted in 1949 after the trial court held that the approver's testimony lacked sufficient independent corroboration under Indian evidence law, which requires an approver's statement to be corroborated by independent material evidence before it can support a conviction. The precise extent of Savarkar's knowledge of, or involvement in, the conspiracy remains a subject of historical dispute; a later government inquiry, the Kapur Commission (1965), reviewing the evidence after Savarkar's death, suggested closer awareness than the criminal trial had established, a conclusion that supporters of Savarkar have contested as inconclusive and based on evidence that had already been weighed and found insufficient at trial. In the years after his acquittal Savarkar largely withdrew from active party politics, though he remained a prominent, controversial figure in Indian public life until his death. He died in Bombay in February 1966, after voluntarily giving up food and medical treatment in his final weeks, a practice he had himself termed atmarpan or prayopaveshan.