The Perfect Antithesis

Gandhi and Savarkar will continue to remain the two irreconcilable poles of Indian history

- Vikram Sampath

October 1906 saw an interesting encounter between two individuals, who were to be political rivals for decades thereafter and whose ideologies were to divide the Indian polity irrevocably. This was when M.K. Gandhi came calling to London’s India House and met Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Sponsored by a proponent of Indian freedom, Shyamji Krishna Varma, the India House was ostensibly fashioned as a hostel for Indian students studying in London. But under Savarkar’s leadership, it had transformed into a veritable hotbed of “sedition and dangerous revolutionary activities” spanning across Europe.

Savarkar was busy cooking when Gandhi tried to engage with him in a political discussion. Cutting him short, Savarkar asked him to first have a meal with them. Gandhi was horrified to see the Chitpavan Brahmin, Savarkar, cooking prawns. Being a staunch vegetarian, Gandhi refused to partake. Savarkar apparently mocked him: “If you cannot eat with us, how on earth are you going to work with us? Moreover, this is just boiled fish; while we want people who are ready to eat the British alive!” This was obviously not a great first meeting and their differences only increased with time.

The contrasts and similarities between the two men are fascinatingly striking. Both spent significant times outside mainland India—Gandhi in South Africa, Savarkar in London first and then over a decade in the dreaded Cellular Jail of the Andamans. They were both interestingly self-conscious Hindus, though their approach differed. Both advocated Hindi as a lingua franca of a linguistically divided India. Both wrote books in the same year, 1909, that were banned by the British—Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and Savarkar’s First War of Indian Independence on the 1857 uprising. They were not only political rivals, but intellectual opponents, too.