Why should we know 'The Savarkar'?

“Savarkar”, the name is enough to grab your attention. Now some people might be filled with respect, some with hatred and some with doubts. Isn’t it rare to find such extreme emotions about a freedom fighter and a politician?

But the word “Savarkar” brings such emotions with him. In the history of Indian politics, he is probably the only one with such ambiguous controversies. Oh! He is labeled as a controversial personality by Indian media without even wanting to scrutinize him and understand him. In these articles, We will cover the topics “Who is Savarkar?” , “What Savarkar did?”, and most importantly ‘When did he change from “Just a Person” to “An Ideology” and how?

        Twelve thousand (12,000) pages of literature written by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the exact number written by others on him cannot be stated, but several thousand pages of literature have been written on his philosophy. There are also famous poems like ‘Ne majsine parat matrubhumila ’, ‘Anadi mi anant mi ’, ‘Kamala’. Not only that, but he also created an alternative word for almost every word in English for Marathi and Hindi and enhanced the glory of the vernacular languages and enriched it. Today we can give more than one example of it like Budget, Report, Number, Director.

        The name V.D. Savarkar is remembered by most people because of his imprisonment for the 'Kala Pani' of the Andamans. This is the only case in the world where the same person got two life sentences at the same time. Even during his imprisonment in the Andamans, he wrote the famous poem called 'Kamala' comprising ten thousand verses on the walls of the prison. He went through a very hard and emotional time on the boat 'Maharaja' on his way to the Andamans.

         What is the motivation behind this Vinayaka becoming a 'Swatanryaveer’? What is the triggering point for this? And what was the revolution, he inspired in London in his student days? Who is the revolutionary hero that was the offspring of the revolution? What was the significance of his book 'War of Independence of 1857' on Indian politics? What exactly was Savarkar's apology to the British that was so inflammatory? And most importantly what was Savarkar's 'Hindutva'?

         Let's have a brief view of this in further a series of 10 articles.

- Apoorv Kulkarni