Like sunbeams piercing through the saturnine stretch of clouds, a glimmer of glee pierced through my gloom, as the bus crossed into the state of Maharashtra from the state of Karnataka in India. I felt a sense of nearing home even as I was scores of miles away.

Laborious had been the preceding two years of my life, half a nation away from home. For the institution in which I was but a student, I had the greatest respect, for I perceived in it a potential to bloom into eminence. But that which I pursued had no resonance with me…

PROLOGUE

The self-professed custodians of the ‘idea of India’ are doomed to bear a burden which is ceaseless in its purveying to them of utter disquiet. This burden is not the custodianship itself but an appurtenance of that hallowed duty, which mandates being peeved at the very mention of the name, ‘Savarkar’. For the man, to revile whom it is imperative for the custodians, is an unyielding enemy of that which they so zealously guard.

Why? This ‘idea of India’ is identified chiefly by two values: ‘democracy’, which is often precise in its implications and thus commendable; and ‘secularism’, which…

The following is an excerpt from the prologue of Savarkar’s Hindu Pad Padshahi, a work of historical non-fiction, in which he addresses the potential of an objective narration of history to envenom the contemporary relationship between Hindus and Muslims, given that such a project would invariably yet apodictically regard the epigones of Islamism as villains. He was categorically against the perpetuation of such enmity. I produce it here verbatim.

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To our Muhammadan readers, however, a word of explanation is needed. The duty of a historian is to depict so far as possible the feelings, motives, emotions and actions of…

PROLOGUE

Maulana Shaukat Ali was a leading figure in the infamous Khilafat movement which was launched in the aftermath of Allied victory in World War 1. The said conversation happened in Bombay, where Savarkar had taken a stop in his return journey to Ratnagiri. He had been at Nashik courtesy of a government permission to leave Ratnagiri in view of a plague epidemic, and he was returning after the permitted number of months had passed. This meeting was reported in detail in special issues of Lokamanya and the Maharatta dated 25 February 1925. …

PROLOGUE

On 04 January 1924, Savarkar was released from internment. That in the course of his transportation he penned petitions to the Government of British India is known, the close scrutiny of which yields no evidence of his having consented to treason against the cause of India’s freedom.

Savarkar was released subject to the following conditions to be observed for five years; a period later extended for eight more years to a total of thirteen (he was therefore a free man in the true sense of the word only in 1937):

1. The said Vinayak Damodar Savarkar will reside within…

Those burlesques that owe much to Member of Parliament Dr. Shashi Tharoor’s eloquence have grown rather trite. They now epitomize a lack of creativity.

I recall two particularly terrible parodies.

“His loquacious perfunctories of sesquipedalian declamations commingled with his perspicacity of circumlocutory diatribes is bodacious to say the least.”

I came across this on a Quora answer, which evinced a rather archetypal fanboy sentiment with regard to Dr. Tharoor. I seek to proceed here with the deconstruction of this sentence, so to say.

I find no sanction for ‘perfunctories’ in any dictionary. But then, there is no sanction for two…

There exist aplenty such things as may cause one to wonder, “how and why is it so?”, and my mind indeed does revel transiently in that spell of curiosity on a few occasions. However, there is something which with its esotericism mystifies me far more often than do such wonders as the expanse of the universe or the human brain. That which I refer to is optimism, and their partisans called optimists, by extension.

I have great respect for the longanimity that optimists have in face of adversity. I cannot, however, bring myself to think along their lines. The world…

Should true Hindus support Hindutva?

I do not purport to have been endowed with the wisdom to determine what others ‘should’ do, and I do not propose to dwell on who a ‘true’ Hindu is, but I have what I think a reasonable take.

Should Hindutva be regarded as synonymous, as I do, with a cultural groundswell intent on revivifying the presently insipid subject of history (especially in schools); improving Indian anthropology and archaeology; ceasing the perennial infantilization of ‘minorities’ on grounds of the incessantly warped term ‘secularism’; renunciation of government control over temples; greater proactivity in the preservation of…