Unabashed the most unpredictable becomes a headline the most volatile outrageous behavior unsubstantiated narratives a battle of personalities welcome to gr tamasha a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Hindustan times I’m your host mil invasion of in today’s India there are few historical figures whose writing and thinking help
Explain the current ideological Zeitgeist more than vek dadar savaker despite this newfound attention is often viewed in black and white as a staunch Hindu nationalist who devoted his life to expounding the virtues of conservative Hindu majority rule a new book by the Berkeley historian jiki buckl savaker and the making of hindutva
Paints a much more nuanced picture of the hindutva idealogue savaker was certainly a Hindu Champion but he was also an anti-c Progressive a pioneering advocate for gender rights and a patriotic poet to talk more about saker’s multiple identities and his legacy in today’s India I’m pleased to
Welcome joh Buckley to the show for the very first time johi congratulations on this truly sort of monumental book thanks so much for taking the time it’s my pleasure thank you for the invitation so I want to start with a question about the origin story um as you write in the
Preface to this book after you published your first book a book called two men in music your husband Nicholas stks who is a renowned scholar of India in his own right many of our listeners will be familiar with him and your former adviser partha chattery another well-known academic they both encouraged
You to write a quote unquote QuickBook on Saker and as you say the book is done it wasn’t necessarily quick uh tell us why they encouraged you to pursue this project so I actually am am uh incredibly pleased because I put that line in my acknowledgements so you read
My acknowledgements as well there you go even before the preface yeah so I’d finished writing a book on these two men bhand and palar and in the course of writing that book there was a question that had occurred to me on which I punted and the question
Was this was there’s something about the space of hindustani classical music and in Maharashtra in particular that allowed for a temporary suspension of the quotidian easily voiced casual expressed anti-muslim sentiment that could be routinely hurt but somehow um that prejudice had to be suspended in large measure because so
Many many many cayal gaks so many many kayal musicians were Muslim and um and that was a question that sort of nagged at me but in the course of writing the first book I punted on it I couldn’t go there I couldn’t quite get to that
Question and so I was musing about this question the kind of everyday easily voiced anti-muslim sentiment and um linked to that was another question and that one was a simple question and it was how was it that in a very short time 50 years in the span of things in
Historical time is not a huge amount of time but in a few or in that span of time 50 years after Independence and regardless of one’s criticism of the Gandhi Neu discourse or the Gandhi nouvian State a right-wing ideology had acquired consensus had worked on acquiring consensus had acquired popular support
And how had Savar who had to some extent been on the margins of politics despite his leading the Hindu mahasabha how had saer sort of roared back into the center how had a sarite ideology roared back in the center and so I thought I’d write a quick biography and uh both Baro and
Nick said you know you read marati um if you want to address this question you know read sa in marati and write a quick book and so that is how it began and and and here we are many years and many pages later uh you know one can hardly
Say that savaker has been ignored as a historical figure you yourself count I think upwards of 250 books written about him mostly in morati but also several in English several that have come out in recent years uh in fact mostly in English uh I I guess I want to ask you
You know as you think about this subject this historical figure who of course is has become so much more prominent in in recent times what is the niche that you hop this book would fill right what was the sort of Gap how did you go about researching it right and I think that
Probably the two are intimately connected yes they are they are connected as you point out um there’s plenty written on Saar and so when I decided I was going to write about it I started like like all of us do all of us historians you start sort of scoping out
The lay of the land and I discovered with a great deal of dismay that I simply could not say that you know there isn’t enough literature on saakar everyone writes about saakar everyone journalists Scholars doctors lawyers people who’ve met him once people who haven’t met him people who
Affiliate him with fascism people who affiliate him with patriotism RSS members VB pandere book is a recent example Vikram samut’s books are a recent example the chatur’s books book is a recent example but what I found in the first instance I found after sort of making my
Way through all of this literature I found two particular facets and the first was this that there were minimally three sufferers there was one in in shall we say the kind of national anti-colonial National frame there was one in Maharashtra and then there was one of
Abroad so there was a kind of Savar in region in nation at the moments in which nation was being imagined and simultaneously one in the global world of underground revolutionary activity now in India um and shall we say in the National frame right or the early National frame or the
Anti-colonial national frame saer was a revolutionary nationalist um the writer of a book on 1857 the writer of of an extended essay Essentials of hindutva subsequently the writer of six glorious epochs um in the sort of revolutionary world saer was either a revolutionary nationalist or a revolutionary terrorist
As the British saw him um or he was just this sort of you know Patriot inspirational Patriot and then there was the Savar in Maharashtra but these three frames didn’t connect they didn’t connect so for instance in both the national and the shall I call it Global
Frame there was barely a mention of anything else saer had written it was all about Essentials of hindutva and the 1857 book and as I did this reading what was truly astonishing for me was that no one had read him in marati and this seemed to me kind of extraordinary I
Mean I cannot imagine taking on the work of a figure like rabindranath tagor and not reading him in in Bengali but not only had nobody read him in marati nobody had read the debates around him or in which he had participated in Maharashtra let let alone read The NeverEnding stream of a
Kind of commemorative hogra biographical work written on him and in Maharashtra I was overwhelmed by the amount written on saer and all of that writing and this gets to your question about the research made up the most undisciplined of corpuses there were comic books there were katas there were gatas there were
Charitas there were movie scripts there were stes okay prayers poems about Saar and um as you mentioned by my informal count there was something like 200 small and large biographies of Saar and they ranged from 25 pages to 500 pages 500 pages on four years okay and
There was so much of it that that it sort of moved me into just thinking about the project a little differently and so when you say how did I set about researching it it was the focus for me was on putting these three frames together okay the the saer in Maharashtra the
Safer in India and the saer abroad along with what I discovered was a kind of bated world of writing about saers there was the English writing about saer which paid no attention to the marati writing and then the marati writing on S which too in which too
Nobody paid any attention to the writing on English so there are extraordinary Works in marati okay written by by people whether Yi far or shal PR or so on and so forth and none of them take account of the kind of incredible Corpus of Indian history written in English by
Scholars in the US Academy the UK Academy so I was trying to put these three sers and the three frames together and that took my research in a lot of directions that I did not anticipate and which is why it took so very long to write this
Book I mean that is a a common refrain surely amongst academics I I want to ask you as a historian about the role of historical contingency uh you know you mentioned that the British regarded savaker as a revolutionary terrorist uh in the book you write that his Ascent to prominence
Might not have happened had the British not released him from prison when they did and I think it might be help for our listeners if you could just remind us how saer landed up in prison in the first place and why was it that the timing of his release was so crucial
What a wonderful question so saer and his family I should say his older brother was really the Revolutionary in the family and saer kind of follows his lead but but you know when you read through the material that I told you about in marati you see Saar
As a precocious kid as a precocious young man extraordinarily intellectually gifted this is something that um that I had to actually address in lots of different ways and you know participates in what was a kind of anti-colonial nationalism fairly early on and fairly typically for young men of his generation quickly
Radicalized into anti-colonial nationalist Politics as a college student uh he published patriotic poetry he he um had a bonfire of foreign cloth during the swadeshi movement he made all kinds of fiery speeches about uh the British he wrote In fact extraordinary poetry even as a young man even as a
Young boy which was published in Publications in Maharashtra so he was he was somebody that the colonial police placed under surveillance very early very early and so you have to imagine um the kind of literary output this is a this is a kind of detour away from your
Question I’m just going to say this um it’s not something that I address in my book I hope anybody who’s listening to it will take this up as a question but his entire Corpus of writings is written under surveillance okay virtually his entire Corpus of writings so the British
Surve him from when he’s a teenager and then after Independence he’s under surveillance by the national state so this is somebody who’s under surveillance considered dangerous considered the leader of a conspiracy um the police file is very revelatory of what the British actually thought about
Him and I was very very fortunate to get that entire file um and so he is arrested in England and he’s arrested um by the terms of The Fugitive offenders act so the presumption is that he’s a fugitive from Justice and because of that they have to the British have to
Indict him for a crime that he committed years earlier and so the British go through this kind of extraordinarily legal wrangling all to arrest him they arrest him they don’t try him in England because juries in England were far more sympathetic to revolutionary nationalists and so they bring him back
To India and then they try him and send him off to the adaman islands in theory to serve out two life terms and then there’s the clemency there’s George V’s clemency in which he releases political prisoners and at this time you can see saer actually let me
Let me rephrase that what the police file tells you is that saer has a very acute sense of himself as a kind of political leader and so almost from the moment he enters prison he starts petitioning you know there is a kind of um a war of petitions almost that he
Engages in with the British he he’s Relentless he writes letter after letter pleading for this pleading for that and when he is finally released what the police correspondence reveals is some dismay even a sense of Gloom they know he’s dangerous they don’t want to release him and in this moment there is
In saar’s letter for Clement very long passage in which he says you know there is the ticket of leave system you know all I want to do is live a quiet life with my wife um I have not had the pleasures of a domestic life and
They could have they could have um done an end run around the clemency you know they could have said okay we’ll bring his wife over and uh it release him to the Andaman Islands thereby you release him but don’t bring him back to India and they don’t do it and they can’t do
It and why they can’t do it I’m not entirely clear but they don’t do it in the police file there is also a letter which I did not actually find in the course of trying to do research on Savar per se but I found in the course of
Doing research for you know another chapter which focuses on Kila and in those files I found a letter that uh again this is correspondence between one police officer and another in which you know there’s a sense of Gloom in that letter ah we’ve just we’re going to have
To release him now that he’s written this clemency letter but which prevents us from using him the way we would have liked to have used him I’m paraphrasing that may not be the exact quote i’ have to look back at the book for the exact quote but it’s
Clear that they would have liked to have used him and could not so so he’s an particular particularly important figure he’s considered the leader of a conspiracy and as you can imagine um you know arresting the foot soldiers in a conspiracy does not do as much or is not
As effective as as arresting a leader so rather than finding the foot soldier who fires a gun you you go after the leader of a conspiracy who can then Inspire lots of people to fire a gun and so he is considered that important by the British so you know savaker was very
Clearly triggered by Gandhi’s support for the kavi movement which you just alluded to a second ago uh through which Gandhi put the Congress party’s weight behind the idea of maintaining an Islamic caliphate following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and for Gandhi as you note among other
Things this was a way to recruit Muslim support for his kind of nationalist cause but you note that you know if you go back and look prior to the kath movement savaker believed that Muslims Who Loved India could be tolerated but after the movement he believed Muslims
Were not uh a quote authentic minority and I just wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what explains this shift in his worldview so my argument is that Kila actually tips the Ballance for him but but my argument is not that there is a complete absence of
Anti-muslim sentiment in his writings and and partly what I was arguing against or at least what I what I sort of discovered in the course of reading all of his poetry right reading um just about everything that he had written and I do want to I do want to say that you
Know my book stops at 1937 so it was really the kind of formative making of this project right and um what what struck me was that in the marati literature and so you know all through this book I’m sort of working with the what does the English literature say
What does the marati literature say and in the marati literature there’s a kind of unanimity and this is a unanimity across sort of gandhian ambedkarites saites in who are writing in marati that there’s something terrible that happens in the islands and that’s what turns him anti-muslim and it didn’t seem like that
Was a good enough explanation it didn’t seem like that was a good enough explanation for the simple reason that you know if there are five Muslims that could turn you anti-muslim you need six good Muslims to turn you Pro Muslim right it’s it’s not a it’s not that it’s
Not a change of mind that that you’re talking about here was much deeper than that um and so what I I did was was sort of go back into the reading and and show you where for instance a kind of late 19th early 20th pretty standard kind of anti-muslim prejudice Saar is by
No means unusual in this right you find it in just about everybody else’s writings either the sense that Muslims are Fanatics or they foreigners but with Saar there was kind of excess and that excess shows up only after Kila and that excess is connected to his sense that
That that there is something about the Muslim Community that tends to a kind of sovereignty that if you put five Muslims together they’re going to want to control the state that if you put 12 Muslims together it’s going to be a Muslim State and kilat just I think
Sends that fear for him into a different space so that in the course of his writings when he comes back even when he’s writing about cast even when he’s composing poetry there are these moments in which his his rage at Muslims seems like it leaps off the page it’s it’s
Excessive there’s something about it which is striking now Gandhi he was not the only one I think it’s worth mentioning that you know Gandhi um that there were several other nationalists who also found Gandhi quite intolerable BR edar found him intolerable perar found him intolerable subash BOS found him
Intolerable you know the HSR bhat Singh and others found him intolerable bhagat Singh for obvious reasons Gandhi would not even appeal to have him him any for any clemency towards bhat Singh uh the Communist Party didn’t put particularly like him so you know saer is in in a
Fairly large crowd U of of anti-colonial nationalists who have a different Vision than does Gandhi but appropo of kfat you know you said an Islamic caliphate and I I would hesitate to call it that I think what I read in Gandhi is something different what I read in Gandhi
Is is a kind of um you know Fel d g has written about this the kind of um a prejudicial fraternity the recognition that there are differences between these communities that may not be reconciled but nonetheless there is a fraternity A brotherhood and that I think is correct
I think that for Gandhi who never got into the nitty-gritty of things you know what was the Kila when did it begin when did it end how does it I don’t think Gandhi went anywhere near that I didn’t see it what I saw in Gandhi’s writings were that our brothers our Brethren the
Muslim Community okay this matters to them and so it should matter to us um and and that’s where Gandhi is like where he’s not actually interested in the historical details of kfat um he’s not even interested in the idea that kfat in some ways is not supported by every every Muslim Community within
India there are some do some who don’t okay say Khan for instance in the late 19th century didn’t support it didn’t support the idea of Aila so Kila was was something that was not about the literal um instanciation of the Kila it was a kind of vehicle that expressed I think
Muslim hopes Muslim aspirations Muslim fears the fear that a community was now going to be a minority in a in a new nation and I think Gandhi understood that he understood shall we say the affective aspect of kilat what it represented I don’t think Savar did I
Don’t think Savar was willing to give it that kind of concession for saakar it was simply well not simply because there’s nothing simple about savaker um but for savaker it was a kind of proof that see okay they’re always after sovereignty and so they’re loyalty within India will never ever be um Unsuspected show together each week is a labor of love but it takes a lot of work to put out a great show every week if you’d like to support the work we do at Grand tamasha please visit cp.org donate don’t forget to subscribe to us on Apple podcast Google podcast Spotify or on
Your favorite podcasting platform so you’ll be the first to know when a new episode rolls Out so this is actually kind of May an interesting time to maybe pivot because one of the real uh eye openers of This Book Is that is vehemently anti-muslim as savaker was he was remarkably Progressive on cast uh and you suggest in the book that he didn’t want to
Reform form cast in some ways he wanted to jettison cast entirely right and and part of the reason for that uh way of thinking was that he thought doing so would help pave the way for a kind of unified category of Hindus and so I guess my question to you is to what
Extent was his anti- cast thinking principled or to what extent was it instrumental a strategy a way of unifying Hindus essentially to oppose Muslims so it’s an interesting dichotomy that you draw and it’s one that I um between the principal and the instrument or between a principle support and an
Instrumental support and I um I thought a lot about that because um because saara’s sort of cast progressivism actually takes me back to what I said right at the beginning of this conversation you know the three frames in Maharashtra for instance um if you talk about SAA you’re going to get a lot
Of things you will find out that um you know he he composed J which is almost the maharash maharash national anthem as it were right I know I’m using Regional National in in an odd way it’s performed every year it’s performed every year um he’s recognized as a poet his poems are um
Are routinely sung okay uh they were set to music by um rat meskar the mangeshkar’s were very attached to SAA and you find out that he was somebody that in Maharashtra is spoken of with great admiration as a kurogami VI a rationalist reformer um and and all of that is
Actually correct if you read him and when you read him on cast um it’s it’s really quite eye openening he will go after in America you have a saying you know you’re are loaded for bear as they say in America right and and he’s loaded
For bear at the sonates so he in in a sense inserts himself into a conversation about cast and untouchability both things right they’re not identical they’re linked but not identical about cast and untouchability in Maharashtra okay in a way in which he makes an argument that is neither
Ambedkar’s nor Gandhi’s it nor is it exactly the argument that um reformers in Maharashtra there’s a long tradition of of sort of anticas reform in Maharashtra and he goes straight after the sonates he goes after the sonates in their language was he instrumental you know I don’t know if any reform is
Non-instrumental I mean could you find one I mean I think you know when we um if I think about about any any reform it is to to sort of build a different Community to to move a community away from where it is to a different place so so the instrumentality was interesting
For me primarily because of its direction and because of where it went which was against um against the idea that Muslims would would take over but at the same time and and I’m saying this knowing that that it will come as a surprise to people who are used to
Seeing or thinking of savaker solely as a Ultra hyper right-wing Hindu fundamentalist that he was not a fundamentalist in the sense in which you know there is no text no text that he takes as um outside history they can all be historicized he historicizes the vdas he historicizes the manusi he
Historicizes the purans he tells you how you know there are contradictions in all of them why there are contradictions in all of them and he does this with cast and his most radical claim is to say and this is extraordinary to say that if you actually looked at The Vedas and you
Looked at the Mahabharat and you looked at the ramayan you have a kind of cast mixing what we might call misation from the very GetGo there is nothing like a pure cast and we are all and by we he means you know the community of Hindus right but he also includes the community
Of Muslims for the for the sort of basic reason that all Muslims are converts yeah and so in India everyone is by that definition for him either a Hindu or a potential Hindu but appropo of cast certainly the idea that there is nothing like pure cast and there is nothing like
A pure bramman and he uses in incredible ways um a kind of literary historicist reading okay of the Mahabharat it tells you that vas would be an Untouchable and so how is it that vas at Untouchable could write the Mahabharat the Mahabharat of all things yes he’ll tell you that he points
Out the number of of um hands from which Ram in the ramayan will take food okay and so in a sense he turns much as he does in Essentials of hinda he turns these characters from epics into um his sort of shall I say weapons of Reform weapons of cast
Reform and yes it is instrumental and yes it is instrumental but I would not go so far as to say therefore it was not principled in part because I think all reform is instrumental right I you know I you’ve alluded at various points uh to
His poetry and this is again a kind of revelatory aspect of your book um you devote an entire chapter as poetry but of course it it it comes into many different ways uh you write at one point that poetry was the social media of its time which I found a very interesting
Line right because today I think a lot of people think of poetry as kind of an esoteric Pursuit it’s read and consumed by a kind of thin Elite segment of society so I guess my question is who was saker’s audience for his poetry for his poems and and did it go beyond the
State of Maharashtra and and morati speakers the latter question I don’t have an answer for I think that poetry in translation is a great deal because it’s so whatever poetry that is yeah um it’s wedded to the language in which it is composed um and so I’m not entirely sure
That his poetry um went outside Maharashtra um certainly you know the the couplet that he composes for Essentials of hindutva goes outside Maharashtra because it’s composed and so some of his Sanskrit might have moved outside Maharashtra but I I doubt that his marati poetry went outside Maharashtra I doubt that his marati
Poetry is is sort of read by anybody other than then marati uh Jas and even there I do have to tell you one of the reasons that I I took a sampling of his poetry from his younger days is because it’s much easier than the Poetry that he
Composed afterwards but let me talk about his poetry that was one of those again those sort of framing questions right when people wrote about Essentials of hindutva for instance they they remark I mean vag chaturv remarks that poetry is a mold in which he writes and I I I agree with
That but by and large his poetry is not not read outside Maharashtra now Saar in Maharashtra the kind of long history of of composition of marati poetry 800 year history is sort of categorized in three Wonder iterative sounds right Sant it’s sort of um exegetical poetry and pundit
Poetry and uh uh other kinds of poetry in Savar what was extraordinary for me is that SAA writes across the gamut of that so he writes poas right and PO is a genre that I would say is not an elite chadra yeah it it’s dismissed for being a little what is
Called in marati over the word okay which is not the way I see it but that’s how sort of conventional marati literary critics would say it’s over but the PO genre is a relatively new genre and it’s a historical genre it’s a datic Shandra it is a bardic peretic Shandra uh The
Poets who composed and performed poas were called BS or Loca kabi um and they are the ones who actually I would say spread a kind of historical knowledge about major figures or major leaders rulers in in in Maharashtra who was the audience right I mean was this something that
Penetrated to the to the masses did it somehow was it did we we would use it the phrase uh in our current context you know did they go viral yeah yeah yeah it was the kind of social media of its time yeah yeah that’s right that’s right
Because contrasting it with how we think about it today which was you know this is sort of this thing that you know this kind of uh literary Elite you know gush over but otherwise it you know is is is not something that is kind of has Mass
Appeal yeah Mass Appeal I’m not sure all right but I I will say that for marati speakers for instance what was a game to be played I think this is probably common across other regions of India as well but you did something called ukar
All right or in or in Hindi you call it antaki so if you you you sing two lines of or or a couplet of a of a song and then you know you you you sort of pose it as a challenge and then your Challenger has to pick up the last word
Or the last phrase or the last sound of what you sang and then sing something back to you yeah and I I’m smiling right now because as a second generation Indian American this was the thing that your parents and their friends would do and into all odd hours at night and you
Wanted to just go home and sleep so some things never changed but you see some things never change but this is what I meant by social media of its time right that that is the way in which a poetry poetry sort of moved around and
So Saar you know at least from from the various biographies I’ve read um was gifted at this and he would play these games with other with other children in the village in which he grew up right and and and and that occurred enough times in the literature about not just
Saer but but um a kind of history of of those of of rural parts of Maharashtra which led me to say you know poetry was the kind of social media of its time in the sense in which you played around with it um now when you say did poetry reach to everyone that’s
A really good question and I can I cannot answer it in terms of telling you the numbers of people what I can do is is say to you that given the genres across which he wrote right and they range from the highly sanskritic cavia okay um in a sanskritic meter that
Meter scans correctly um to to all of the other kinds of slightly more popular forms like the PO okay but he writes Aras he writes FAS he writes lav he writes stti he writes stra he writes kavya that I guess my answer to you about about its reach would be an answer
Um in terms of the range of genres that he composed in and so wherever it reached it reached more than if he had composed only in one particular genra I I want to sort of zoom out now uh and and try to to put your book in some
Historical context and there seems to be a tension or a contradiction in saker’s writings uh as a historian that relate to attention in the sar’s messaging even today so on the one hand you knowe that savaker believed that Hindus were the authentic inhabitants of India because
For them India was both their pitra Bui and their punabi right that is their Fatherland as well as their holy land and that is a a concept or a line that is often quoted from saer on the other hand though saer held that look if you love India irrespective of your religion
You can be part of the fold and I’m wondering as you reflect on him and his life in his writings how do you reconcile these two seemingly contradictory beliefs I don’t know that I can reconcile them okay I think I can I can hierarch them so I can say
That if you looked at Essentials of hindutva you looked at 1857 okay two works of his which which spread um you have um have sort of Muslims that he writes about with enormous admiration in the 1857 book likening some of the kinds of likening some the Warriors in 1857 to aini that
Would have been extraordinarily High Praise for him you can see what he does in Essentials of hindutva right you have this clear separation between the good Muslim and the bad Muslim the obvious one Akbar orim but but there is a kind of subjunctive strain in Essentials of
Hindu if you love India okay to the exclusion of all else that’s why in Essentials of hindutva I called it a kind of monogamous nationalism a subjunctive nationalism yeah so it’s almost like a marriage right if you marry India forsaking all others forsaking all others then we can consider you Hindu
Right some of this is qualified by him anyway Saar will write even after writing Essentials of Hindu he actually clarified what he meant and he was alert to the idea I would imagine that that when and he put forth this idea of punu you know you
Could say well you know my parents have been my father’s family has lived in this country for 800 years and so you know I should be authentic here or you could say you know here is a shrine of Buddhist Shrine not Buddhism was not the issue here is a Christian the mount Mary
Shrine or you know the JAMA Masjid has been around for four 400 years 500 years so the is both my P he clarifies that he says no it has to be the land in which your pag your Prophet was born preached and died so now we’ve automatically got
Muslims and Christians and Jews okay outside what I found were two things one is that I I found that I could not agree with the argument that there was this radical shift in saar’s thinking because of the animent I couldn’t find that I found instead a kind of
Cian at some level unsurprising kind of perception of Muslims foreigners foreign rulers okay that narrative was being put in place in so many registers it was being put in place by historical novels which in fact you know in Maharashtra G alap simila and various other moan various other marati novels
Which put forth this idea so that was a you know that was something you couldn’t say Gandhi was not prejudiced against Muslims either right you you you you really can’t say anything like that um so I found two things one is that I could not go along with that argument
That there was this radical shift but I could say that the kind of subjunctives that he had introduced in Essentials of Hindu in the 87 1857 book had disappeared by the time he wrote sah and uh and and that was something to contend with that um you know that
Subjunctives at least had a kind of uh sense that you know there was there was a path forward shall we say for or there was a path for Muslims to to feel like they could be in saker’s view legitimate inhabitants of this country but once he puts that kind of territorial
Fundamentalism over India and once that subjunctivisor saer I think and this is for somebody else to work on on the post 37 material um I think you see certainly the removal of that subjunctivisor at uh Muslims that was not present so I’m trying to make this a complicated argument right which is
Which is not as black and white as many of the ones that I’ve read so let me uh bring this conversation to a close jiki by asking you about uh this this age old question of of the idea of India right uh it is somewhat ironic that saker’s
Idea of India was in a way so heavily influenced by 19th century European thinking on the nation State because he believed that National sovereignty was inextricably linked to a certain territoriality right what’s been called by others India’s sacred geography but he also subscribed to the sort of
European view that there should be a congruence between the territoriality of the of the state and the boundaries of the imagined Nation right so in in saker’s view it was loyalty to the Hindu nation that was Paramount um did did Saker sort of Rec recognize this this Paradox of you know
On the one hand being a revolutionary nationalist pushing for decolonization but yet in fact em bibing or in some way embracing very European ideas about what the nation should be so one of the things that you don’t find in savaker is any reference to anyone who had any
Intellectual influence on him that’s the first thing I mean you really have to pull it out yeah yeah you pull it out of all kinds of different places um you know I just recently taught to my graduate students um a a really um extraordinary piece for me written by my
Former advisor Bara chat and um it was the preface to his to the book called the land question B and what and I think what I the way I would answer that question is is using um paro’s sort of dialectical frame which is um which is yes of course the idea of a
Nation for a revolutionary nationalist like saakar like ambedkar like J like okay cannot ever be absent of um the way in which European categories influenced it cannot it can not you know sh kavaj once said the ghost of Europe hovers over us all okay but nor can it be
Reduced to a simple mimicry okay this was paro’s contribution and nationalist thought in the colonial world that that it was always in this kind of tense dialectical relationship between the idea of a Nation what part called the Thematic which comes from Europe but then the programmatic development which
Is is which is a departure from that conception without completely stepping outside it yeah forar the only one who completely steps outside that frame was Gandhi and so it’s unsurprising that when the state or the nation is formed it’s not quite gandhian because Gandhi doesn’t have those kinds of conceptions
Saar did was saer aware that he was getting some of these ideas from European thinkers well he’s a you know Mats he he translates marsini’s biography he writes a a preface to marsini so so yes in that sense without a doubt he he did but I think it’s it’s
It’s much like Paro theorized right which is that the idea could have come from from Europe um the idea of territorial nationalism but you couldn’t impose linguistic nationalism quite the same way that had to be a differently worked out uh concept A regionally worked out concept
Um and yet the idea of India saar’s idea of India and Paro would argue all of Indian nationalism’s idea of India up until Neu um worked with with that kind of tension between the concept that comes from Europe and then its elaboration I have no doubt that he was
Aware he was extraordinarily well read if you look at the list of books that um and here I would draw from other Scholars who’ve done something similar where they’ve sort of peaked into his Library as it were right and you get a sense of his library from his poetry you
Get a sense of his library from stray references here and there um so it’s there’s no doubt that he would have read that he would have read Spencer Mill n mazini garivaldi but also the bhavisha puran and the brah puran and and and so it’s it’s so it’s a sort of combination of
Those two things um is what I would say can it be reconciled I think I’ve put that out as a question uh to be contended with my guest on the show this week is the Berkeley historian janaki bleay she is the author of saakar and the making of
Hindutva if you think you know saer uh you should read this book because it will challenge if not upend much of what you think that you know uh doni I am willing to wager that this is a book that’s going to be read and cited and
Argued over as all good books should be for a very long time um congratulations to you and thanks again for taking the time thank you so much it’s been my pleasure Grant the Masha is a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the husan times this podcast is an HD smartcast
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