68 THE WEEK • JUNE 30, 2019
maintenance of the defeated Turkey sultan’s
sovereignty, since they saw him as a symbol
of their holy Prophet. Th e British were least
obliged to meet such demands from subjects
of a colony and more so when the rest of the
Muslim world, including Turkey itself was
happy to dispense with the monarch.
Evidently, the movement was bound to
fail. Yet, Gandhi assumed the leadership
of the movement, with “such tenacity and
faith”, as B.R. Ambedkar put it, “which
must have surprised many Muhammadans
themselves.” While Gandhi, who was a
master of symbolic politics, had hoped that
this would herald Hindu-Muslim unity and
also help recruit Muslims into the national-
istic struggle that they had consciously kept
away from, his promises of delivery within a
year heightened the hopes of communally
surcharged mobs.
With the inevitable failure of Khilafat, the
anger of the mobs resulted in huge com-
munal clashes across India all through the
1920s—the Moplah massacre in Malabar,
Gulbarga, Kohat, Delhi, Panipat, Calcutta,
East Bengal and Sindh to name a few. Each
time, Gandhi’s lukewarm response angered
Savarkar. For instance, Gandhi described the
blood curdling genocide of Nairs in Malabar
as the act of “brave, God-fearing Moplahs”
and called them as patriots “fi ghting for
what they consider as religion.”
It is in this backdrop that from the Rat-
nagiri prison Savarkar wrote his treatise
on hindutva in 1923, as a direct response
to Gandhism and Khilafat that he often
called an ‘aafat’ or a catastrophe. He called
for unifying Hindu society and challenged
the transnational loyalties of Khilafat by his
defi nition of India’s sacred geography and
territorial integrity. Anyone who consid-
ered this land as the land of his ancestors
and their holy land (including Muslims
and Christians) was a ‘Hindu’—not by its
religious term, but as a cultural marker of
shared common history and bloodline.
From then on, Savarkar fashioned himself
as the champion for the cause of the Hindu
community, though he did not care much
for the ritualistic aspects of the religion itself,
oscillating as he did between agnosticismand atheism.
From 1924 to 1937, Savarkar engaged himself in
massive social reforms in Ratnagiri, where he was kept
in conditional confi nement after being released from
prison. He strove hard for unity in the Hindu society
advocating a complete eradication of the caste system,
varna tradition and untouchability, and championed
inter-caste dining, inter-caste and inter-regional
marriages, widow remarriage, female education and
temple entry for all castes.
His views were more in sync with those of Ambedkar
than with Gandhi’s whose views on caste were pecu-
liar. Hence, Gandhi’s views that he did not “believe the
caste system... to be a odious and vicious dogma” and
that “it has its limitations and its defects, but there is
nothing sinful about it, as there is about untouchabili-
ty” riled both Savarkar and Ambedkar equally.
When a deputation of untouchables came to meet
him on December 15, 1932, Gandhi candidly said: “ICLEANSING
RITUAL
Gandhi taking a bath
at Kanyakumari,
Tamil Nadu, in 1934