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A monumental intellectual history of the pivotal figure of Hindu nationalismVinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966) was an intellectual, ideologue, and anticolonial nationalist leader in India s struggle for independence from British colonial rule, one whose anti-Muslim writings exploited India s tensions in pursuit of Hindu majority rule. Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva is the first comprehensive intellectual history of one of the most contentious political thinkers of the twentieth century.Janaki Bakhle examines the full range of Savarkar s voluminous writings in his native language of Marathi, from political and historical works to poetry, essays, and speeches. She reveals the complexities in the various positions he took as a champion of the beleaguered Hindu community, an anticaste progressive, an erudite if polemical historian, a pioneering advocate for women s dignity, and a patriotic poet. This critical examination of Savarkar s thought shows that Hindutva is as much about the aesthetic experiences that have been attached to the idea of India itself as it is a militant political program that has targeted the Muslim community in pursuit of power in postcolonial India.By bringing to light the many legends surrounding Savarkar, Bakhle shows how this figure from a provincial locality in colonial India rose to world-historical importance. Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva also uncovers the vast hagiographic literature that has kept alive the myth of Savarkar as a uniquely brave, brilliant, and learned revolutionary leader of the Hindu nation

This essay analyzes and historically contextualizes the timing and the rhetorical style of V. D. Savarkar's infamous extended essay Essentials of Hindutva, originally written in English. The author argues that the text was written as a response to both the Khilafat movement (1920–24) and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's support of it. She shows how Savarkar addressed this text, written behind prison walls, to a Hindu community to claim that Savarkar's territorial nationalism was more authentically Hindu than Gandhi's.

Few debates have maintained as persistent and passionate a level of interest and international scope—whether in the United States, France, or Turkey—as that around secularism. A cursory glance at the titles alone of books and articles on the subject tells us that this is a debate in which serious personal and political stakes are invested. At the very least the debate has been generated by the recognition that a new language of politics is needed to understand the role of religious self-expression in the public sphere. The received wisdom about distinctions between the putatively mutually exclusive domains of public and private, or sacred and secular, simply does not hold water any more. The secularism debate also raises issues of fundamental significance to the very "personality of the state," as Talal Asad has characterized it. In France, the laicite debate has highlighted how the claim of a minority population to don items of clothing (a right denied by the secular government in Turkey with a majority Muslim population), which it sees as fundamental to its religious self-expression, has challenged the state's own image as a secular republic. In the United States, controversy has been ignited by challenges to the boundary line between private religious practice and the public domain of the state, whether it relates to school prayer or the ongoing battles between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists.