Rambhakts: Defining "Us" and Depicting "Our Story" 33than in British India."^73 Thus the colonial divide-and-rule theory has been
effectively appropriated by the Hindutva forces to further their political
agenda.HINDUTVA'S COMMUNAL NATIONALISM
The concept of Hindutva, promulgated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar,
assumes that everyone who has ancestral roots in India is a Hindu and
that they collectively constitute a nation. As the ideology of Hindu com-
munal nationalism, it is defined as a "highly structured belief system
involving the interpretation of the past, an analysis of the present, and
a set of precepts and imperatives for future conduct." Incorporating the
Indian tradition in a truncated manner, Hindutva ideologues stress the
inimical traits of Hindu religious myth and imagery and ignore the Indian
philosophical heritage and other religious streams.^74 The Hindutva forces'
vision of the future lies in the past, and they invoke history to justify all
kinds of destructive demands. They present the past to the Indian public
in attractive but false colors. Thus Indian national identity has come to be
defined in terms of the Hindu value system and imageries, and the Hin-
dutva forces have appropriated the wholesale rights of setting the require-
ments and standards of this neo-Indian identity. To decode the logic and
program of this ideology, one could read the Hindutva's Old, New, and
Future Testament, We or Our Nationhood Defined (first edition, 1939; sec-
ond, 1944; third, 1945), written by M.S. Golwalkar, who later became the
chief of the RSS, the flagship of the Hindutva flotilla, and reiterated his
stand even more vociferously in his subsequent speeches and booklets.
Such a discursive analysis of Hindutva's communal nationalism would
show several key ideological and political components. Appealing to the
religiosity of the people, and appropriating the various religious symbol-
isms, the nation is elevated to the position of a goddess. This nation wor-
ship has had a long tradition among the Hindu enthusiasts all along. In
Aurobindo Ghose's pamphlet Bhavani-mandir (1905), for example, God-
dess Bhavani exhorted Indians to build a temple for her that was to be a
secret center for training for armed struggle "to create a nation, to consoli-
date an age, to Aryanise a world." In early 1908 he spoke in Bombay: "If
you are going to be a nationalist, if you are going to assent to this religion
of nationalism you must do it in the religious spirit. You must remember
that you are instruments of God."^75 Similarly, Bipin Chandra Pal argued,
"Patriotism is not mere love of the Fatherland but an organized cult,
through which this love develops and seeks to fulfil itself. It is the religion
of those that love their country To cultivate the love of the Fatherland,
as a religion, we must, therefore, have patriotic rites and sacraments."^76
Following the nation-worship tradition, Golwalkar sees his book We
or Our Nationhood Defined as "an [sic] humble offering at the holy feet of