Karl Marx’s evolution can be seen as comprising two periods radically separated by what he termed an “epistemological break”. This occurred in 1845, and there was a fundamental break between the young pre-1845 Marx and the older post-1845 Marx. Reduced to its bare essentials, the argument is that Marxist philosophy with dialectical materialism at its core emerges only after 1845, and his work before had an entirely different character.
The questions of continuity between the younger and the older Marx, or the philosophical issues inherent in this concept, did not concern me unduly. With time, the global change heralded by the break-up of the Soviet Union and the general disillusionment with Marxism meant these questions were themselves dated. The idea that did, however, remain was the very simple one: no one is ever fully formed. Often, people can change radically, and the new is not just surprisingly different but could not have been anticipated or predicted by looking at the precedents or the existing trajectory of that person’s mental makeup.
In this context, four principal figures of the first half of the 20th century in India stand out for the dramatic change in their political life and thought. These four individuals are—in the order of birth—‘Lokmanya’ (Bal Gangadhar) Tilak (1856-1920); ‘Qaid–e-Azam’ (Muhammad Ali) Jinnah (1876-1948); and ‘Swatantryaveer’ (Vinayak Damodar) Savarkar (1883-1966).
Each of these honorifics and titles—Veer, Lokmanya and Qaid—has become synonymous with their names, which were originally bestowed largely spontaneously by an admiring public. These honorifics suggest the extent to which they were public personalities, and the transformations that took place in their political thought were public events and not quiet, personal changes. We could briefly look at each of these ruptures, beginning with the youngest.
Swatantryaveer Savarkar
When Savarkar died in 1966, few could have anticipated the trajectory of his afterlife. In every decade since, and especially from the 1990s, his profile has further consolidated and risen. But at the time of his death, the taint of being part of the conspiracy that led to the assassination of M K Gandhi two decades earlier was strong. Savarkar was jailed, and although finally exonerated, the reputational damage he suffered was immense, and he would live the rest of his life largely in seclusion, shunned by the mainstream politics of the country. The veteran Congressman Asaf Ali then wryly noted, “How the wheel of destiny has turned in the opposite direction today.” He was referring to the adulation that had surrounded Savarkar in the first decade of the century as the author of The Indian War of Independence: 1857, secretly published in 1909 in Europe and banned in India almost immediately as seditious. Asaf Ali knew Savarkar as a student in London and was one of those who was deeply impressed by the book. This book, along with Savarkar’s arrest in Britain, an attempted daring escape that ended in failure, conviction for two full life terms, transportation to the Andamans and a period of 12-13 years in prison, all contributed to Savarkar’s profile in the 1920s even when he was out of the public gaze and in prison.
His books Hindutva or Who is a Hindu (1923) and Hindu Pad-Padshahi (1925) quickly became standard texts for many and have remained so. In these, the fundamental premise of his critique was that Muslims (and Christians) had no fundamental loyalty to India because their faiths did not originate here. Muslims are depicted as untrustworthy, intrinsically cruel, greedy, and prone to violence. Through his journalistic writings, as well as a host of other genres, including poetry, plays, and essays, this basic mould was developed.
Released from prison conditionally in 1924 and permitted to live in Ratnagiri, Savarkar became, from the mid-1920s, a powerful and inspiring voice urging Hindu consolidation and Muslim exclusion. His books Hindutva or Who is a Hindu (1923) and Hindu Pad-Padshahi (1925) quickly became standard texts for many and have remained so. In these, the fundamental premise of his critique was that Muslims (and Christians) had no fundamental loyalty to India because their faiths did not originate here.
In this context, Savarkar’s first book on the events of 1857, which did so much to cement his early reputation as a freedom fighter, stands out in contrast.
The most striking feature of this book is that Muslims are not depicted as enemies nor possessing the negative attributes that made his later writings distinctive. The title indicates that the author saw it as an Indian rather than a Hindu or a Muslim war of independence, and this feature is maintained consistently throughout. Also, the war was meant to protect religion as much as to gain independence. Interestingly, Savarkar does not regard these two aims as either contradictory or exclusive. Savarkar also projected swadharma and swaraj as important to both Hindus and Muslims. ”The sepoys would take the water of the Ganges or would swear by the Koran that they would live only to achieve the destruction of the English rule.” Savarkar was not suggesting a picture of a pre-British golden age. He saw both conflict and insecurity in the past, yet to him, it was still swaraj. Later, he would characterise the pre-British age as one of Muslim tyranny and Hindu resistance.
How do we integrate the body of this work with the later Savarkar? In some accounts, this book is an exception, and Savarkar’s anti-Muslim prejudices had been with him from childhood. The evidence for this, including from Savarkar himself, is, however, from a much later period when the effort may well have been to show a basic continuity and consistency in his thinking. There is, however, also the view that Savarkar suffered a great deal in jail at the hands of Muslim jailers, and this experience permanently embittered him. Whatever the reason, it does appear that Savarkar’s thought underwent a fundamental realignment in the second decade of the 20th century.
Ambassador of unity to Quaid-E-Azam
A transformation from composite to Muslim nationalism is better known—that of the case of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, but here, the change was not so much in the realm of poetic fancy or imagination but in that of real-life politics. As is well known, in the first two decades of the 20th century, Jinnah stood out as a protagonist of Indian nationalism. We get a sense of his stature towards the end of the 1920s from a brief essay by Sarojini Naidu in which she quoted Gokhale that Jinnah would be the “best ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity”. His marriage to a Parsi (in April 1918), his lifestyle, and a personality refreshingly free from any sectarian impulse made him appear to Naidu as someone who “stood approved and confirmed by his countrymen not merely as an ambassador, but as an embodied symbol of the Hindu Muslim Unity”. However, Naidu’s ambitions for Jinnah were higher: that he “may in some glorious and terrible crisis of our national struggle pass into immortality as the Mazzini of the Indian Liberation”.
Events or, rather, history took a different trajectory, and the path for Jinnah would become that of being the most prominent face of Muslim separatism. When and how this break took place has long enthralled historians. There are many different explanations. Some trace this new trajectory to the Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress, which was in many ways also the point when a seismic shift took place in Indian political culture with the Gandhian tactics of non-cooperation and mass civil disobedience and the launch of the non-cooperation and Khilafat movements. Jinnah’s moderation and preference for gradual change found itself out of sync with this new spirit.
In Nagpur, Jinnah was isolated, and he was to be shouted down and booed by the audience. The December 1920 Congress session may well be the point when Jinnah started moving in the opposite direction—for both political as well as ideological reasons. This was the Congress session after the death of Lokmanya Tilak in August 1920. Tactically outmanoeuvred in Congress, he also saw no grounds for being in the same camp as the mainstream Khilafat supporters—in the main, the traditionalist Islamic clergy and the conservative sections of the community.
There were subsequent points of divergence—too many to go into—here. The point is that the break-in Jinnah’s political and intellectual trajectory is evident, and this divergence would continue to gather traction, ending finally in a bloody and violent Partition at the same time as the subcontinent moved to sovereignty. Jinnah’s responsibility for this cannot be minimised, and, in fact, it symbolises the extent of the break between the young and the older Jinnah. He would never be the Indian Mazzini that Sarojini Naidu had predicted, but Jinnah was perhaps also the closest the Muslims of South Asia ever got to having a Kemal Atatürk, but that also was not to be.
Towering Lokmanya
The trajectories of Savarkar and Jinnah are all in one direction. Each went from invoking and imagining a composite Indian nation of multiple faiths to a platform of religious exclusivism and even supremacy of their particular faith. But history is rarely a linear process, and the case of ‘Lokmanya’ Bal Gangadhar Tilak encapsulates an opposite vector.
Tilak stands out in the early phase of Indian nationalism for three main reasons. First, at a time when most nationalists trod carefully when critiquing the colonial state and making demands for change, Tilak’s stridency and candour gave his politics a different optical quality. In the standard trope of the Indian freedom struggle, he is categorised, therefore, as the leader amongst the ‘Extremists’ at a time when moderation was the default mode of most nationalists. Secondly, when social reform of Indian society, especially issues of status of women and caste, were a kind of clarion call for most public figures, Tilak was decidedly a conservative. In many celebrated reform cases of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Tilak ranged himself against the reformists and on the side of the orthodoxy. To him, the reform project was a colonial trap to erode Indigenous self-esteem, and reform—admittedly often necessarily—had to come from within and from below rather than be enforced as a fiat of the colonial state.
Finally, the Lokmanya was not a debating-room politician but one who believed in bringing people out on the streets. By improvising on an existing Ganapati festival and creating a Shivaji festival, he created two platforms for mobilising Hindus. These were not anti-colonial in their thrust per se, but Tilak nevertheless was a source of deep anxiety to the colonial state—he was continuously in its crosshairs. This mobilisation was, moreover, not tactical or an act of political expediency. In the words of a recent biographer, “it was an article of faith”. Thus, Vaibhav Purandare, in his book, points out: “Tilak saw in Hinduism and the idea of Hinduising politics the moorings for a growing Indian nationalist consciousness”.
All this put together is a trajectory that would have well and truly established Tilak as the original Hindutva icon and template. However, we encountered an uncharacteristic break in 1916. He had been released in mid-1914 after a long spell in jail and transportation to Mandalay in Burma. Healing the Congress rift between moderates and extremists was now one of his priorities. Even more uncharacteristic was the priority he accorded to a joint Hindu-Muslim platform. The Congress session of 1916 in Lucknow achieved these goals. Congress came together, but even more significantly, the Muslim League and the unified Congress reached an agreement on separate electorates for Muslims and that in provinces where Muslims were in a minority, the seats reserved for them would be in excess of their proportion of the population. To his supporters, this may well have appeared as heresy, but it was Tilak’s stature and the force of his personality that he convinced all to rally behind this agreement. His main ally in this incident was Jinnah, and the title of ’Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity’ was bestowed by Sarojini Naidu on the future Quaid–e–Azam of Pakistan after this landmark event.
Congress agreeing to separate electorates for Muslims at Tilak’s behest is one of those enigmatic and intriguing moments in modern Indian history whose possibilities were endless but never realised. However, Lokmanya’s leadership in this initiative is a prime example of how even well-established political trajectories can change.
IT IS PART OF THE TRAVESTIES of our times that current polarities mean that we view past figures monochromatically. Their intellectual evolution gets simplified to the extent that uncharacteristic changes and positions are ironed out. In the process, agency, the capacity by which they made choices, gets eroded and diluted in the historical record.
Tilak, Savarkar, and Jinnah all made a sea departure from their previously stated positions. Do these qualify as ‘epistemological’ breaks? I am not sure anybody today would agree with such a classification. However, the concept is useful even if it is used in a minimal and very general sense—it is useful to reflect that even a single life can take massive shifts and turns. For better or for worse, all three of these individuals made choices and changed the existing trajectory of their lives. The legacy of that change extends well into ours.
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