Arun Shourie’s cut-and-paste iconoclasm

In The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts, Arun Shourie has made prodigious use of one specific keyboard feature: Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V. Let me explain. Large parts of this book are mere reproductions of Savarkar’s own writings from his collected volumes, which are available in the public domain.

Shourie’s primary objective seems to be using iconoclasm as a mode of writing to debunk myths about Savarkar with factual evidence. The problem is a very simple one. All these “facts” have already been discussed and debated by multiple academics and journalists before him. Moreover, Shourie’s reproduction of Savarkar’s writings is less of an invitation to reflect and more of a brash assertion.

Reproducing Savarkar’s writings is meant to act as a self-explanatory exercise. There is a larger problem with this framework. Is it possible to demystify myths with facts? Should this be done at all? If an ideology has intruded into the deeper sinews of everyday life, can facts alone challenge the miasma of the myth? There is a lot to unpack.

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Shourie’s obsession with facts is a retrograde style of writing that focusses on the when and the what instead of providing a critical rumination of the why and the how.

Documenting “truth” is important, but that has been done by umpteen scholars before him. In his introduction, Shourie acknowledges the works of scholars like R.C. Majumdar, U.R. Ananthamurthy, A.G. Noorani, and Vinayak Chaturvedi, “among others”. (Several scholars who have worked on sundry aspects of Savarkar’s writings are lumped into “among others”.) Shourie goes on to mention two biographies of Savarkar by Vaibhav Purandare and Vikram Sampath.

One name conspicuous by its absence is that of Janaki Bakhle, whose latest comprehensive book dovetails a biographical sketch and an intellectual history of Savarkar. As Bakhle’s book was published as recently as 2024, it is astonishing to see her name omitted from the list. In any case, Shourie never engages with these works, as in his own words: “I focussed on what Savarkar had written himself and tried not to read too carefully what others had written about him.” Shourie seems to be implying that by not reading these works carefully, he automatically avoids echoing their facts and analysis.

Why is Shourie writing a book on Savarkar? We are provided with a grossly unconvincing reasoning in the introduction. It deserves to be reproduced in Shourie’s own words: “Inexcusably—and incredibly, even to me—I do not recall the accusations and counter-accusations that must have flown around when a portrait of Savarkar was unveiled in the Central Hall of Parliament and a plaque installed in his honour in the Cellular Jail in the Andamans. These happened in 2003 when Atalji’s government was in office—and I was a part of it. It sounds incredible, as I said, but it is true—that is how far Savarkar had receded.” He goes on to say that he cannot excavate from his memory the opposition boycotting the event!

Does this mean that Shourie was completely oblivious of Savarkar’s myth and stature among all kinds of Hindu nationalist supporters when he was a Minister in Vajpayee’s government? Is he implying that Savarkar has become a “national icon” only in the recent past?

In fact, Shourie seems to suggest that even Hindutva is a “recent phenomenon” when he says: “It is now, in the recent past, with all this talk of Hindutva that I started looking for Savarkar’s writings.” Nowhere do we get any reflection on why Savarkar must be seen as a “new” icon. For whom is Savarkar “new”? Is he new for the Hindutva rank and file? Is he new for Hindutva leaders, both at the regional and the national level?

The chapters in the book seek to provide factual evidence to some of the popular questions posed to Savarkar and his admirers historically. Did Savarkar heroically escape from Marseilles? Was he Gandhi’s friend? Did he turn against the Muslims only after his Andaman incarceration episode? How do we understand his mercy petitions to the British government? What did he have to say about the “holy cow”?

Shourie’s primary objective seems to be using iconoclasm as a mode of writing to debunk myths about Savarkar with factual evidence.  | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

For anyone who has even been a cursory reader of some critical journals and magazines coming out from India, all these questions are intellectually vapid, to say the least. Shourie’s treatment of Savarkar’s writings is also limited and at times grossly misleading. For example, even when Shourie reproduces all the factually correct details documenting Savarkar’s animus towards Muslims, he seems to curate a redemptive arc whilst documenting his views on caste. There is no analysis on how Savarkar, by strategically ignoring the segmentations within Hindu society, used his rhetoric of unifying Hindus to confront what he saw as the rise of Muslim power. That Savarkar is using his anti-casteism to further bolster his Hindutva project is never even considered to be a possibility.

The same is the case with how Shourie seems too obsessed with how Savarkar saw the heroics of the Marathas, starting from Shivaji, only to turn a blind eye to the intensely Brahminical foundations of his idea of “Hindu consciousness”.

In any case, Savarkar’s banal copy-pasting comes across as an exercise of a diligent undergraduate student who is dazzled by the sheer contradictions in Savarkar’s own writings and his mythical persona. Two examples should suffice. While focussing on Savarkar’s mercy petitions, Shourie once again reproduces them verbatim. He then asks his readers to compare these mercy petitions with the bravery of people like Madan Lal Dhingra and Bhagat Singh. Shourie once again reproduces Dhingra and Singh verbatim, for another few pages.

A passive reproduction

Shourie merely plays the role of a passive editor, again, where he himself has nothing to say about how one ought to understand these mercy petitions, the writing style, or the rhetoric Savarkar used, not just here but in his other writings too. This passive reproduction continues throughout the book.

For example, when Shourie reproduces Savarkar’s writings on how he castigated Buddhists for failing to the stop the invaders, he merely cites scholars like D.D. Kosambi across multiple pages to show us how Savarkar made baseless assertions about Buddhism. If readers wanted to read Kosambi, they would do so. Why exhaustively reproduce Kosambi and barely have any authorial reflection? Shourie commits the same mistake with all his secondary sources.

Shourie’s biggest enemy is his own reluctance to edit. He copiously reproduces Savarkar’s own writings instead of providing a succinct summary. The citations are cumbersome. They intermix with the authorial voice to such an extent that you lose track of where Savarkar’s tripe writing ends and Shourie’s gimcrack editing begins. Moreover, all these “revelations” are supposed to be radical music to left-wing ears and intense trepidation for right-wing minds. My submission is that they will achieve neither.

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For left-liberal readers, this revelatory rhetoric, often written by Shourie with a tone of surprise and shock, will be received as the same old descriptive hash. For right-wing sympathisers, it will just be another occasion to indulge in their favorite pastime: snarling at anyone and everyone who is critical of their ideology. For any reflective and critical mind, the lack of information on Savarkar and his writings has seldom been the hurdle to understanding Hindu nationalism. Why this need for a fact check in 2025 when clearly the myth of Savarkar has transcended the realm of the facticity of facts? Surely disentangling the pervasive myth is more important than compiling a dizzying laundry listicle of “whether he did this or not”.

Shourie fails to realise that characteristics such as passion, emotion, and the legacy of Hindu nationalism transcend temporal scrutiny and manage to evade factual scrutiny, as the political project of Hindutva transmutes factual history into an aesthetic enterprise of memory-building.

Not for no reason do we have scholars across the globe hankering for new intellectual tools to decipher the intricate interconnections between the rise of right-wing populism and the “post-truth” world. Perhaps Shourie’s ultimate objective behind writing this book, as his last page reveals, is to parrot the trite liberal plea of saving Hinduism from Hindutva. A discerning mind deserves a much better critique of Savarkar. 

Surajkumar Thube recently completed his PhD in history from the University of Oxford. He is working on a book tentatively titled Towards a Non-Brahmin Hinduism: Caste, Dharma, and the Marathi Public Sphere, circa 1890–1930, to be published by Oxford University Press under the Oxford Historical Monograph Series.