Indian history is fraught with ruling-class intrigues, which tend to keep the lower classes in a perennial state of confusion. The fact that this history comes to us in a mythologised form is itself the biggest intrigue, obscuring as it does information about how the vast, diverse masses of the Subcontinent lived through the millennia. Reading Indian history, thus, becomes an exercise in speculation. If it provides one kind of insight for one group, it is capable of being interpreted equally plausibly in the opposite way by another. What eventually reaches the people is a partisan viewpoint at best and bewilderment at worst – a condition under which the ruling classes thrive.
In this context, two books by Subhash Gatade, a committed intellectual and Left activist, are significant additions to the works of the fast-diminishing community of scholars who continue their work with unstinting commitment in these confusing times.
The rise and rise of the RSS
The first book, Godse's Children: Hindutva Terror in India, deals with the intrigues of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the right-wing, militant Hindu nationalist organisation, which, as Shamsul Islam writes in his foreword to the book, is "the flag-bearer of Hindu nationalism, believing in the superiority of the Aryan race, like Hitler and the Nazis". The RSS believes that the Hindus belong to the Aryan race and that India belongs to them, while others – like the Muslims and Christians – are 'foreigners' because they followed religions which originated in non-Aryan lands. Consequently, they RSS (mis)appropriated Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and other religions born in the Subcontinent, which represented historical protests against the hegemonic precepts of Brahmanism, the source creed of Hinduism.
The RSS camouflaged its vision with Hindutva, or the ideology of Hindu superiority, constructed by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of its more sophisticated proponents, who, because of his tryst with patriotism, was not ordinarily associated with the organisation. The RSS raised its clandestine network and infiltrated all possible segments of society, spreading its ideological venom during the pre-Independence days. While noticed by the colonial rulers for its nefarious activities, it only entered the limelight with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by one of its former members Nathuram Godse, a Brahmin youth from Pune whom Gatade calls "the first terrorist of independent India". The RSS tried – unsuccessfully – to dissociate itself from this act, but was so baldly exposed that Brahmins, who were generally identified with it, faced mass anger in many parts of Maharashtra.