"Asaf Ali had described his old India House comrade Savarkar as someone who lived in the spirit of Mazzini and Shivaji, which was apt considering the fact that the Italian revolutionary and the great Maratha king were his political heroes."
"After Savarkar died, Hiren Mukherjee of the Communist Party of India stood up in the Lok Sabha to demand that parliament pay homage to [him].
Dange described him as a great anti-imperialist revolutionary while Indira Gandhi said Savarkar was a byword in daring and patriotism."
"His final release was widely welcomed. There was a lot of interest about his next move.
Two young socialist leaders, SM Joshi and Achyut Patwardhan, who would later become heroes of the 1942 movement, went to Ratnagiri to persuade Savarkar to join the Congress Socialist Party."
"There was Comrade M. N. Roy, who had once worked with Lenin in Moscow ... Khurshed F. Nariman, the lawyer who was recently the Congress mayor of Bombay, and a steadfast admirer of Savarkar [and] Lalji Pendse, the Marxist intellectual and independent trade union leader."
"Savarkar was famously galvanised by the example set by Joseph Mazzini, the revolutionary who helped integrate Italy into a united nation state.
He was also an admirer of Kemal Ataturk, calling on Indian Muslims to learn from the Turkish example, and join the modern world ..."
"Another improbable person he had a high regard for was Lenin.
Narayan Sadashiv Bapat, a member of Savarkar’s inner circle at Ratnagiri,who later became a Royist,wrote how Savarkar would urge colleagues to read Lenin.
Some lectures on Lenin were given by a young Nathuram Godse"
"[He] argued in the opening pages of 'Hindu Pad Padshahi' that it is the task of modern societies to overcome the strife of the past.
... added that people should read history not to perpetuate the old strife but to seek a way out of it by identifying the causes of such strife."
"A Hindu Nation is in no way inconsistent with the development of a common Indian Nation...in which all races and religions, castes and creeds, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Anglo-Indians, could be harmoniously welded together into a political State on terms of perfect equality.”
"Such a warm reception for Savarkar from across the political spectrum seems almost unbelievable today.
The man who even his political rivals once respected has thus been lost in a fog of either hagiography or demonisation."
Great find, @akshayalladi!
swarajyamag.com/ideas/time-for…
An essential component of any revolutionary anti-colonial or anti-imperial movement is that national liberation and integration come first.
It is only upon that foundation that the institutions of monarchy or socialism or liberal democracy can be built.
Any country that experiences foreign tyranny, be it medieval Turkocracy or modern Western colonialism, experiences a historical trauma - their culture degraded, knowledge destroyed, people enslaved.
The cure is a unifying ideology of national liberation.
The left-right, libertarian-authoritarian model is dead, because it never really existed outside the Anglosphere.
Welcome to the real world.
Instead of labelling historical figures based on juvenile American political culture, understand their ideas and take them forward today.
It is reductionist to simplify complex historical personalities to fit contemporary political debates and labels. It only prevents us from understanding the past.
That holds true across cultures, continents, and centuries, be it Saladin, Garibaldi, Bismarck, or Haile Selassie.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.