Description: Examines the place of history in the political thought of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the key architects of modern Hindu nationalism.
Brief description: Vinayak Chaturvedi is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India and the editor of Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial and The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia.
Review Quotes:
"This book offers a fresh perspective on V.D. Savarkar's ideology and political philosophy, a topic rarely debated in academic circles ... Chaturvedi's work is a significant contribution to understanding the rise of the 'Right in Southeast Asia' and offers valuable insights into historiography, particularly Savarkar's focus on the 'context' and the 'Spirit of History' over empirical data." - Religious Studies Review
"For those seeking to understand India's turn to authoritarian Hindu nationalism, and its concomitant violence, this book is essential-if challenging-reading." - International Affairs
"...a fascinatingly prescient examination of the literary works of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar ... Chaturvedi's analyses of the prolific and prolix juxtaposition of religion, philosophy, politics, and autobiography in Savarkar's work is meticulous and piercing." - H-Soz-Kult
"...[a] must-read intellectual biography." - The Print
"Chaturvedi takes a thoroughly critical position against Savarkar's variety of Hindu nationalism but, unlike a lot of dismissals from the left, employs the critical apparatus of historical scholarship to seriously examine the oeuvre of a major right‐wing thinker who had imbibed the modern ideas of nation, race, and revolution from nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Europe. The research that has gone into this book is impressive. I have no doubt at all that it will be a very significant contribution specifically to the literature on Hindu nationalism but more generally to modern South Asian history." - Partha Chatterjee, editor of The Truths and Lies of Nationalism as Narrated by Charvak