Radical Visions of India’s Past: Poetics of Maratha National History

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966) has been written about by Indian historians, but in general without much attention to the vast archive of both primary and secondary sources in Marathi.  In the most intellectually demanding of his works, namely, his poetry, one can locate a theory of history that is itself influenced by the works of late 19th century Marathi intellectuals such as V.K. Rajwade, Shivram Mahadev Paranjpe, and Sahastrabuddhe. These intellectuals wrote of the 18th century not as a century of decline or decentralization, as mainstream Indian history is wont to do, but as the century of Maratha ascendance, in which the Maratha confederacy was the rightful heir to the Mughal empire.  The failure of national self--realization, by this logic, makes its presence known only in the 19th century, when the Maratha confederacy could not rise above pettiness and fell prey to the EIC.  This failure was repeated, yet again, in 1857.  How might this understanding of Indian history have informed the work of the putative author of Hindu fundamentalism?   Savarkar's understanding of Maratha-national history is an important, under studied, and baleful alternative to the dominant Gandhian and Nehruvian view of Indian nationalism.