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Why . . . mourn for the past? My power and intelligence would have been as nought, if I had feared and trembled in the hour of my trial, like Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurekshetra. I did not fail in my duty--in my Dharma.
V. D. Savarkar, My Transportation for Life (1927)
INTRODUCTION
On 7 July 1937, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar delivered a speech entitled "Ek hi dharm-pustak nahin, yeh achcha hai!" ("There Is No One Religious Book: This Is Good!").1 Savarkar's central argument was that the Bhagavad Gita should not be considered the singular or monolithic text for the creation of the Hindu nation. He explained that the Gita was a seminal work, but that it needed to be read alongside other books that constituted the diverse literary traditions within Hinduism. Savarkar's claim for textual pluralism was a direct response to contemporary arguments that Hindus needed to elevate the Gita to the status of the Bible in Christianity or the Koran in Islam as a way to strengthen the foundation of Hinduism in the making of modern India. In the short speech, Savarkar simply presents his argument about the Gita, rather than providing a commentary on the text. To what extent the speech had an influence on the interpretation of and debates around the Gita remains unclear. Nor is it known if the speech had an impact on the direction of Hindu nationalism, especially since Savarkar was elected president of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha on 30 December 1937. 2
Savarkar does not appear to have returned to the theme of the Gita in his later speeches.3 Nor did Savarkar produce a systematic critique of the Gita, like his contemporaries in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lajpat Rai, or Aurobindo Ghose. The historiography of the reception of the Gita in modern India has generally neglected to even consider Savarkar and his writings. In fact, it may appear that Savarkar really did not have much to contribute to scholarship and debates on the Gita. There are, of course, important factors that help to explain the nature of the scholarship. Perhaps the main reason Savarkar is overlooked in...