When Savarkar, not a professional historian, demonstrated greater probity than the ‘eminent’ historians of independent India.
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 the actors themselves whose deed he aims to relate. This he cannot do faithfully and well, unless he, for the time being, rids himself not only of all prejudices and prepossessions, but even of the fears of the consequences the story of the past might be calculated to have on the interests of the present. That latter end he should try to serve by any other means than the falsification or exaggeration or underestimation of the intentions and actions of the past. A writer on the life of (Prophet) Muhammad, for example, would be wanting in his duty; if he tries to smoothen down the fierce attacks on ‘Idolatry’ and the dreadful threats held before the unbelievers by that heroic Arab, only to ingratiate himself with the sentiments of those of his fellow country-men or readers who do not belong to the Muslim persuasion. He should try to do that by being himself more tolerant, or even by drawing a moral more in consonance with reason and freedom of thought and worship, if he can honestly do so, after he has faithfully recounted the story of that life with all its uncompromising episodes.
If he cannot do that, he had better give up the thought of writing the life of Muhammad altogether. Just as this responsibility lies on the shoulder of an honest biographer of Muhammad, there is a corresponding obligation on the part of those of his readers who do not fully, or at all, contribute to the teaching of Muhammad, which they owe to the writer. The too ought to know that an author, who in the discharge of his duties as a historian of yesterday, of Muhammad or Babar or Aurangzeb, depicts their aspirations and deeds in all their moods, fierce or otherwise, faithfully, and even gloriously or appreciatingly (sic), need not necessarily be wanting in the discharge of his duties as a citizen of today, may even be most kindly disposed to his fellow-countrymen or fellowmen of other religious persuasions or racial lineage. In dealing with that period of Hindu History when the Hindus were engaged in a struggle of life and death with the Muhammadan power, I have never played false to my duty of depicting the great actions and their causes in relation to their environments and expressing the sentiments of the actors almost in their own words, trying thus to discharge the duty of an author as faithfully as I could. Especially our Muhammadan countrymen, against the deeds of whose ancestors the history under review was a giant and mighty protest, which I hold justifiable, will try to read it without attributing, solely on that ground, any ill feeling to us towards our Muhammadan countrymen of this generation or towards the community itself as such. It would be as suicidal and as ridiculous to borrow the hostilities and combats of the past only to fight them into the present, as it would be for a Hindu and a Muhammadan to lock each other suddenly in a death-grip while embracing, only because Shivaji and Afzulkhan had done so hundreds of years ago.
We ought to read history, not with a view to find out the best excuse to perpetuate the old strife and stress, bickering and bloodsheds whether in the name of our blessed motherland, ‘of our Lord God’, that divided man from man and race from race, but precisely for the contrary reason of finding out the root causes that contributed to, and the best means to the removal of that stress and strife, of those bickerings and bloodsheds, so that man may be drawn towards man because he is man, the child of that our common father God — and nursed at the breast of this our common mother — Earth — and wield humanity in a World-Commonwealth.
But, on the other hand, the brilliance of this ultimate hope ought not to dazzle our eyes into blindness towards the solid and imminent fact that men and groups, and races in the process to consolidation into larger social units have, under the stern law of nature, to get forged into that larger existence on the anvil of war through struggle and sacrifice. Therefore, before you make out a case for unity, you must make out a case for survival as a national or a social human unit. It was this fierce test that the Hindus were called upon to pass in their deadly struggle with the Muhammadan power. There could not be an honourable unity between a slave and his master. Had the Hindus failed to rise and prove their strength to seek retribution for the wrongs done to them as a nation and a race, even if the Muhammadans stretched out a hand of peace, it would have been an act of condescension and not of friendship, and the Hindus could not have honourably grasped it with that fervour and sincerity and confidence which a sense of equality alone breeds. But the colossal struggle which the Hindus waged with those who were then their foemen in the name of their Dev and Desh really paved the way to an honourable unity between the two combating giants.
Source: Dr. Vikram Sampath: Savarkar, A Contested Legacy (1924–1966)
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In one of my earlier short essays, I had stated that Arun Shourie, in his book ‘Eminent Historians: Their Line, Their Technology, Their Fraud’ adduces evidence to prove that there was on part of historians a diligent endeavour to present the Islamist period of history in a much more diluted form, in the ostensible pursuit of preserving Hindu-Muslim unity, but that the self-same historians had no reticence in even concocting conflicts between Hindus and Buddhists, inexplicably not deeming such groundless claims as equally phlogistonic in their potential. Savarkar, however, conforms to no such unreason. Veracity, to him, is imprescriptible.
But he also maintains that a faithful narration by a historian, of events as they happen, need not, indeed must not, bar his observance of good conduct towards those of his coeval countrymen whose ancestors in his narration may have been partisans of villainy. As Savarkar himself wrote, it would be but suicidal for a Hindu and a Muslim to embrace with an intent of one to hold the other in a death-grip, merely because Shivaji and Afzal Khan had of old done so. As evidence may be adduced Ambedkar’s trenchant views on the doctrines of Islam in Pakistan or the Partition of India, notwithstanding which his conduct towards Muslims could be deemed prejudiced by no reasonable mind.
The purpose of objective narration is to facilitate an appreciation of social progress; of how the refusal of man to see a human in fellow man had historically led to strife, and to rather cease than perpetuate such strife in the present. In such an assertion, Savarkar’s eventually universalist worldview is reflected as he regards men as being in fellowship of the children of God. His use of the term ‘World-Commonwealth’ is quite redolent of the idea of a ‘human state’ which he expressed in one of his letters to British anarchist Guy Aldred, a fervent supporter of India’s independence, in which he wrote, “The ideal of all political science and art must be a Human State. The earth is our Motherland, mankind our Nation and a Human Government based on equality of rights and duties is or ought to be our ultimate political goal.”
His insistence that an honourable unity between the Hindus and Muslims could be arrived at, reflected in his last paragraph, may perhaps have formed the ground of his assertion that the two perennially warring religious communities could in fact live together in a single nation, and his corollaric opposition to the Partition.
