Godse's ideas of India

The biography of a potently totemic figure for Hindutva busts several long-standing myths

For many people, whatever politics they profess, the name Nathuram Godse may evoke an unsettling sense of strenuously unacknowledged commonalities. Godse nursed an ill-conceived yearning for a Hindu rashtra; also the misconception about Brahmins being intellectual superiors in Indian society; and a feeling of loss and injured pride at the fact of his caste no longer being considered pre-eminent. That might be the common cultural substrate.

At a personal level, however, Godse stands ap­art. He was massively insecure about his masculinity, having been raised as a girl because of his parents’ superstitions. Further, Godse treads the trail of the murderer, and thankfully it is a deserted trail. Even so, by squeezing the most infamous trigger in Indian history, Godse’s act may have caused mental turbulence in many people. 

There was the def­ensiveness in pro-Sangh people at the fact they support the killer of a nonviolent statesman, secretly or publicly. Many others, who knows how many, may be discomfited at th­e­ir religi­on being contor­ted into vio­lent shapes by an ideology that worships repression, dictatorship, and xen­ophobia. 

All this infla­m­ing material was in Godse’s marrow; this book all but hands us an X-ray into the inner workings of the tormented mind of one who sought to become a Chit­pavan hero, but sw­u­ng on the gallows as a disappointed, depressed man, ign­o­red and neglected by those whose approval he sought, and with his ultimate aims perhaps farther away than when he began his mission of murder.

Gandhi’s Assassin is a book of those proverbial “interesting times”. The largest stakeholder in the Bharatiya Janata Party, which heads the Indian government, is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

 The author’s research says that although RSS denied having Godse as a member when he killed Gandhi, Godse was, in fact, in the RSS at the time. The link emerges clearly, the author says, through docum­ents that he accessed and were overlooked by journalists and historians, some of them pro-RSS. So Godse’s membership of the organisation at the time of Gandhi’s murder is perhaps the biggest revelation in the book. But it wouldn’t do to reduce the book to a simplified newsbyte.

A thorough biography, the book exhumes the milieu in which Godse moved. Among the most engrossing parts is an acc­ount of how RSS shakhas were places where impressionistic, confused youth acquired or honed aggressive masculinity and hatred of Muslims. We get an incisive look at the mindset of RSS and Hindu Mahasabha cadres, and gain an understanding of their fears and obsessions, manifesting themselves in the frau­ght political and social climate when popular Gandhian movements from most of which the RSS as an organisation advoca­ted abstention. Then came Independence and Partition. We are shown how, in this sort of climate, the RSS and Mahasabha grew and Godse established himself there. We are given portraits of the network of functionaries that supported Godse.

Among these was Godse’s mentor, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, and we are gi­v­en a nuanced and richly detailed, if forthright and unflattering, profile of the man. So, for example, Savarkar deployed his hat­red for Muslims to “ingratiate himself with the British government” in richly painted passages. In another example we see how Savarkar “[tended] to dodge personal risk”, instead preferring to be “a behind-the-scenes operator, issuing directives from a safe distance and grooming proteges to carry out the actual acts of militancy”. Case studies from Savarkar’s life help to establish his pattern.

We are shown the trial into the murder of Gandhi in which Savarkar was an accused, and he was acqu­i­tted. To put it by way of me­taphor: however much smoke there may or may not have been, the smoking gun wasn’t found. Only the real one that Godse used was. We get the sense Savarkar may have been a father figure for Godse, who sought his approval and attention. We are able to imagine that in Godse’s mind, Savarkar’s opposite was Gandhi.

Gandhi as a political entity is painted in depth. We are told that Gandhi’s “neither conservative nor progressive” image notwit­hstanding, his attitude was “highly subversive of orth­odox Hinduism”. His “fra­m­ing the low-status and non-Brahminic and peasant cultures as genuine Hinduism” and “fighting patriarchy and trying to bring women on an equal footing with men” would have upset the “hegemony of the traditional social elite”, chiefly the Brahmins — especially Chit­pa­van Brahmins, a section of whom yearned for Peshwa rule. 

We are shown how, in the fraught times leading to and after Partition, the idea someone should “do away with Gandhi” was voiced by many people, among them RSS members, and this idea took root in Godse.

The author also documents how God­se’s act led to violence and vandalism dire­cted at Brahmins, for Godse was a Brahmin himself. More fallout, we are told, included stabbing members of RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, given the popular disgust and outrage at these organisations after Gan­dhi’s murder. The book makes us wonder whether the RSS, which was surging on the back of inflamed sentiments following Partition, was actually set back politically by Gandhi’s murder.

Jha’s biography of a potently totemic figure for Hindutva is also a scan of the ideology. It, moreover, busts several myths floated by Godse himself and others in service of Hindutva propaganda, by way of a few resounding “sco­ops”, for want of a better word. 

To this end, the aut­hor consulted Godse’s pretrial statement, documents at several archives, including intelligence reports based on documents seized from RSS’s Nagpur headquarters, as well as “autobiographies, private papers and reminiscences of some of the Hindu Mah­asabha and RSS members”. He also in­­ter­viewed people who’d been close to people involved with Godse. He brings to the table his extensive experi­­­ences of enq­uiries into the heart of Hin­d­u­tva.

Chock-full of evocative information crisply writt­en, Gandhi’s Assassin is an irresistible por­trait of a dark idea of India, its proliferation, and one of its most tragic consequences.