terrorist techniques before joining the Congress. Hedgewar left the Congress
convinced of the inefficacy of Gandhi’s peaceful “noncooperation” methods
against British rule, and in 1925 founded a nationalist organization called the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, the Association of National[ist] Volun-
teers). His organizational model was the militant and ascetic sects of medieval
and early modern India. But while borrowing elements from them such as
shared rituals, a paradoxically ascetic engagement with worldly affairs, and
tight-knit patterns of sacred leaders and dedicated initiates, Hedgewar also bor-
rowed Western principles of organization and representation. The RSS sought
to emulate what were perceived to be highly successful British (and European)
forms of discipline, drill, and corporate spirit. Hedgewar’s organizational skills
and contacts with like-minded men from his sort of background (Maharashtrian
brahmins) built up the RSS, but its ideological development came with
Hedgewar’s successor, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar.
Golwalkar provided a systematic articulation of the RSS’s ideological grounds
and aims in his work of 1939, We, or Our Nationhood Defined. Golwalkar both
captured Hedgewar’s working vision of the RSS and went beyond it to present a
distinctive ideology. He captured the most striking aspect of RSS ideology – its
concern for a nation rather than a state. Of course, this was still concern for the
culture of a Hindu nation. But where Savarkar had approached culture in rela-
tion to a Hindu polity, Golwalkar approached it in relation to Hindu society. The
RSS’s primary aim was to foster within society those aspects of thought and
conduct that would integrate and unite Hindus. Issues of state may follow, but
that was not the objective of the RSS.
Like Savarkar, Golwalkar did not articulate the idea of Hinduness in terms
either of territorially specific (as opposed to ancestral and sacred) geographic
boundaries or of racial purity. He too sought to present what was essentially
Hindu as an organic culture, which had become weak and divided. But where
Savarkar’s aim had been to make explicit the underlying unity of Hindus in order
to create a political entity, the Hindu state (raj), Golwalkar claimed that the RSS
would work to realise a society true to the Hindu nation (rashtra). In the narrow
sense of involvement in the public mobilization of opinion for the purposes of
affecting and attaining institutional power in a polity, the RSS was not conceived
as a “political” organization. It did not involve itself in electioneering and
running for office. It represented and still represents itself as a “cultural” organ-
ization, working to bring back into the functioning of society those principles
that, according to it, exemplify the attitudes and values of Hinduness. (But I am
not being evasive in not saying exactly what those attitudes and values are:
it precisely is the conceptual problem for Hindutva ideology that it cannot list
in any specific way what makes Hindus – and only they – essentially Hindus.
Instead, there is the circular appeal to the beliefs and practices of a preexisting,
albeit unreformed and disunited Hindu nation precisely in order to define that
very Hindu nation.)
Organizationally, the RSS was successful, although its success bred its own
limitations and problems. In drawing on traditional forms of organizations
contemporary political hinduism 529