Note: This is the English translation of a tribute originally written in Marathi. मराठीत मूळ लेख येथे वाचा — स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर यांना जयंतीनिमित्त विनम्र अभिवादन. The Sanskrit shloka and Marathi quotations have been kept in their original form, with English translations shown directly beneath each.
Swatantryaveer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (28 May 1883, Bhagur – 26 February 1966) was an Indian freedom fighter, and a poet and author in the Marathi language. Blessed with a fierce intellect, a bold and adventurous spirit, a deeply humane heart, and a creative poetic gift, this child began reading weighty volumes of history and theology at the age of ten. The poems Vinayak composed at ten were printed in the leading Marathi newspapers of the day — though readers simply could not believe such verse came from one so young. The Savarkar household was financially comfortable. Subjugation, slavery, and British rule had brought him not the slightest hardship. And yet, as he turned the pages of history, nationalism began to take shape in his mind. The blood spilled by revolutionaries struggling against an arrogant British power began to unsettle him.
Savarkar’s personality had many facets: a leader of a revolutionary current within the Indian freedom struggle; an important figure in both pre- and post-independence Indian politics; a Hindu organizer and a philosopher who articulated a distinct philosophy of Hindutva; a social reformer who championed science and despised caste discrimination; a pioneer of the movements for the purification of language and script; and a gifted writer and propagator. It was the celebrated Marathi writer, journalist, teacher, and film director-producer Pralhad Keshav Atre who gave him the title “Swatantryaveer” — the brave one of freedom.
Childhood and Formation
Savarkar was born in the village of Bhagur in the Nashik district. He was the second of his father Damodarpant Savarkar’s three children. He had an elder brother, Babarao, and a younger brother, Narayanrao. Savarkar’s mother died when he was nine. Yesuvahini, the wife of his eldest brother, raised him. His father fell victim to the plague of 1899.
Savarkar’s primary education took place at the Shivaji Vidyalaya in Nashik. He was extraordinarily intelligent from childhood. He had a command over oratory and over poetic composition alike; he wielded the tongue and the pen with equal force. The verses he wrote at thirteen — Swadeshicha Fatka and Swatantratece Stotra (Hymn to Freedom) — bear witness to his genius. On hearing the news that the Chapekar brothers had been hanged, the young Savarkar took an oath before his family deity, Bhagwati:
देशाच्या स्वातंत्र्यासाठी सशस्त्र क्रांतीचा केतू उभारून मारिता मारिता मरेतो झुंजेन
“For the freedom of my country, I shall raise the banner of armed revolution and fight on — slaying and being slain — until death.”
The Spark of Revolution: From Mitra Mela to Abhinav Bharat
In March 1901, Vinayakrao was married to Yamunabai. After his marriage, he enrolled at Fergusson College in 1902, and in 1906 he left for London for higher studies. Savarkar founded the secret society Rashtrabhakta Samuh with the help of his comrades Page and Mhaskar. Mitra Mela was the public-facing branch of this secret organization. This same society was later transformed into Abhinav Bharat, a name given after the Italian revolutionary and thinker Joseph Mazzini’s society Young Italy.
In 1905, Savarkar made a bonfire of foreign cloth in Pune. Winning the Shivaji Scholarship instituted by Shyamji Krishna Varma, he went to London to study law — a scholarship recommended for him by Lokmanya Tilak himself. While living at India House in London, Savarkar translated Joseph Mazzini’s autobiography into Marathi. In the preface he attached to that translation, Savarkar laid out the philosophy of armed revolution. Many young men of that era knew that preface by heart.
In London’s India House, the revolutionary chapter of Abhinav Bharat began. Madanlal Dhingra was Savarkar’s first martyr-disciple! Madanlal assassinated the British official Curzon Wyllie and accepted the gallows with a smile. In that same period, Savarkar made contact with revolutionary groups in other countries and mastered from them the technology of making bombs. He sent that technology, along with twenty-two Browning pistols, to India. With one of those very pistols, sixteen-year-old Anant Kanhere assassinated Jackson, the Collector of Nashik. In this case, three members of Abhinav Bharat — Anant Kanhere, Krishnaji Karve, and Vinayak Deshpande — were hanged. Collector Jackson’s injustices upon the people were mounting, and he had also been the cause of Babarao Savarkar’s (Swatantryaveer’s brother’s) imprisonment; this is why the revolutionaries sent Jackson to his death.
The Indian War of Independence, 1857
Savarkar wrote a well-documented history of the uprising against the English in India in 1857. That work is The Indian War of Independence, 1857 (अठराशे सत्तावन्नचे स्वातंत्र्यसमर). With evidence, Savarkar demolished the conclusion of British historians that this uprising was merely a “mutiny.” The British government confiscated the book even before its publication. But Savarkar’s comrades succeeded in publishing it from outside England — this was the English edition. The manuscript of the original Marathi work had been carefully preserved by Savarkar’s friend Cutinho; it was published after India won her freedom.
The Historic Marseilles Leap and the Hague Case
On the charge of publishing seditious writing, the British government sentenced Savarkar’s elder brother Babarao Savarkar to life imprisonment and dispatched him to the Kala Pani (the “black waters” of the Andaman penal colony). In retaliation for this, Madanlal Dhingra shot Curzon Wyllie in London, and Anant Kanhere shot dead Jackson, the District Collector of Nashik. The Browning pistols used in the Nashik case had been sent by Savarkar through Chaturbhuj Amin. The moment the British government got wind of this, they arrested Savarkar at once.
While he was being brought to India by sea, Savarkar leapt into the ocean from the ship Morea near the port of Marseilles, France (1910). Escaping British custody, he swam to the French coast. But because of the language barrier, the French guards on the shore could not understand what Savarkar was saying, and the British soldiers arrested him and brought him back to India. Savarkar had thought deeply before making that leap at Marseilles. The matter of prisoner-extradition treaties between two nations, and other such agreements, was on his mind. He had calculated that British police could not seize him from French soil (without that government’s permission). But that is not how it turned out.
This leap, however, raised an international storm. Both Britain and France took the matter before the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague (the international arbitral tribunal of that era). It was an unprecedented event for the question of an Indian revolutionary’s arrest to be debated before an international court. On 14 February 1911, the court ruled in Britain’s favour — but under the name L’affaire Savarkar, Savarkar’s name was etched onto the map of the world that very day. He was put on trial and sentenced to two life terms — the Kala Pani — amounting to roughly fifty years in the Andaman prison (1911).
The Cellular Jail of Andaman
To break Savarkar’s radiant spirit, the British government confined him in the cellular jail of Andaman. They tormented him in every conceivable way. He was hung in standing fetters. He was yoked to the oil-mill like an ox. He was given the back-breaking labour of pounding coconut coir. Even while enduring these death-like agonies, a single goal stood before his eyes — the freedom of the motherland! Through eleven full years of this torment, Savarkar’s creative poetic genius and his rebellious revolutionary fire did not diminish by even a hair’s breadth. With the thorns of the babul tree, he wrote epics upon the prison walls.
In the cellular jail of Andaman, Savarkar could see the changing politics of Hindustan. The British change of policy and the rising arrogance of the Muslim League troubled him. The British were no longer the principal enemy; they would leave this country someday regardless — but the organization of the Hindus, going forward, was essential. This Savarkar recognized. Through the efforts of leaders like Vitthalbhai Patel and Rangaswami Iyengar, and because Savarkar himself diplomatically accepted certain conditions of the British government, he was released from Andaman.
Confinement in Ratnagiri and Social Reform
Truly, after Dnyaneshwar, the wall had walked once more! In 1921, Savarkar was released from Andaman; he was then held in prisons within India for three more years. At last, on 6 June 1924, the English government set him free — but with an order not to leave Ratnagiri. Savarkar remained confined in Ratnagiri for nearly thirteen years. Even there, he made great efforts toward the abolition of untouchability. In Ratnagiri, he built the Patitpavan Mandir for the so-called “untouchables.”
The great social reformer Vitthal Ramji Shinde, seeing Savarkar’s work of social reform, praised it greatly; he said:
देवाने माझे उरलेले आयुष्य त्यांना द्यावे.
“May God grant him the years that remain of my own life.”
Savarkar lived an exceedingly arduous and severe life. An ailment like asthma; the accusations and counter-accusations of the post-independence period; the deaths of his own loved ones — though he had to bear many such things, he was granted a long life of eighty-three years. That surely must be regarded as the fruit of the blessings of many souls like Vitthalji Shinde.
Language Purification and the Philosophy of Hindutva
Among Savarkar’s countless endeavours, the movement for the purification of language must be considered exceptionally important. Savarkar is the father of many words now current in the Marathi language — arthasankalp (budget), chitrapat (film), bolpat (talkie), digdarshak (director), doordhwani (telephone), nabhovani (radio), doordarshan (television), mahapaur (mayor), dinank (date), kramank (number), hutatma (martyr), sevanivrutt (retired), shirganana (census), and more. After his release from confinement, he served as president of the Hindu Mahasabha for six consecutive years, from 1937 to 1943. Savarkar set out his conception of a Hindu Rashtra. He gave the lion’s roar that “Hindutva is itself nationhood.” The definition Savarkar gave of the word “Hindu” was this:
आसिंधू सिंधू पर्यन्ता यस्य भारत भूमिका । पितृभूः पुण्यभूश्चैव स वै हिंदुरिती स्मृतः ॥
“He for whom this land of Bharat — stretching from the Sindhu (Indus) river to the Sindhu (the seas) — is both his fatherland (pitribhu) and his holy land (punyabhu): he alone is remembered as a Hindu.”
The Post-Independence Years
Hindustan won her freedom on 15 August 1947. Savarkar’s post-independence period, too, is filled with many events both good and ill. He was honoured in many places; the University of Pune conferred upon him the honorary degree of D.Litt. Public felicitations were held in many places. But the deaths of his elder brother Babarao Savarkar in 1945, his younger brother Bal Savarkar in 1949, and his wife Yamunabai in 1963 left him in deep grief. There is no other example in history of an entire family dedicating itself, at the feet of the motherland, to the service of the nation.
Tatyarao, the Radiant Flame
Do you know what Swatantryaveer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar truly was? Savarkar was a blazing sacrificial fire made manifest. The warm intensity of the sun, the speed of the wind, a hardness that the very rock might envy, and a depth of intellect such that Brihaspati himself might accept discipleship — that was Swatantryaveer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. The moment this name is uttered, a blazing fire-pit rises before the eyes; his compositions come to mind, and every word in them keeps burning in the heart like a flame lit in that sacrificial fire.
Upon the hood of the serpent of Time that wished to flee in fear of him, the deathless one named Tatyarao Savarkar is forever seen dancing his tandava. Calling Death a coward, this rare soul threw a challenge back at Death itself:
हे मृत्यू, ज्याप्रमाणे शंकराने हलाहल विष प्राशन केले, तद्वत तुला तुझ्या सैन्यासकट गिळून, जिरवून दाखवेन!
“O Death — just as Shankara drank the halahala poison, so too shall I swallow you, army and all, and digest you whole!”
Every word of Savarkar’s is a Veda. In every line he wrote, Saraswati and Ranachandika both dwell at once. The eight-armed goddess (Ashtabhuja Devi) in his home knows this well. When the boy Vinayak sat before her and took his vow —
हे माते, या माझ्या परमपूज्य मातृभूमीला परदास्याच्या शृंखलेतून मुक्त करण्यासाठी सशस्त्र क्रांतीचा केतू उभारून, शत्रूला मारिता मारिता मरेतो झुंजेन!
“O Mother, to free this most sacred motherland of mine from the chains of foreign bondage, I shall raise the banner of armed revolution and fight the enemy on — slaying and being slain — until death!”
— then perhaps her fists, too, clenched tight. Not only Tatyarao’s oratory but his deeds as well were laid at the feet of the motherland in the service of the nation. In 1905, in Pune, he performed a feat of valour — he led a procession of foreign cloth through all of Pune with fanfare and, finally, on the banks of the Mutha river, set that cloth ablaze. The audacity to oppose the British government openly and radically was shown for the first time. (At the time, the moderates and the self-proclaimed apostles of non-violence scorned this bonfire of foreign cloth; yet they themselves adopted this very policy around 1920, and in 1920 this so-called violent act of 1905 came to be regarded as non-violent.)
The Final Sacrifice (Atmarpan)
Resolving to surrender his own self, Savarkar gave up taking food. In the final twenty days, he took nothing at all, not even water. At last, on 26 February 1966, at thirty minutes past eleven in the morning, he laid down his body. If one were to speak of him in a single sentence, one would have to describe him in the mighty words:
झाले बहु, होतीलही बहु, परि यासम हा!
“Many such have been, and many more will be — but none quite like him.”
॥ A humble tribute to Swatantryaveer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar on his birth anniversary ॥