Conceptualising The Hindudom And The Threatening ‘Other`: Savitri Devi Mukherjee As A Hindu Nationalist In Late Colonial Bengal

Abstract

Savitri Devi Mukherjee’s ‘A Warning to the Hindus` (1939) was published as a part of her Hindu nationalist project in India under the patronage of the Hindu Mission at Calcutta. This less highlighted and unexplored work could be used to understand an obscure variety of Hindu nationalism which proposed to create one Hindudom on the basis of an Aryan- Hindu connection in the past. The entire argument was placed on an enigma of ‘danger` and ‘threat` from the ‘other` religions and opened up a unique space of community-consciousness in a communally charged situation. The myth of an Aryan-Hindu race might have its own connotations in the ideological terrain, Savitri Devi’s notion of Hindu nationalism and her own convictions on Hindu sangathan had developed severe contradictions in the realm of Hindu politics which she had not realised properly in a given context. Her own ideological obsession with a Nazi-Aryan dominance didn’t fit well with the idea of Hindudom, what she believed, would have arrived from the Savarkarian notion of Hindutva.