"Essentials of Hindutva" (1923) — Summary and Debate हिन्दुत्व

Who was V. D. Savarkar?

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (28 May 1883 – 26 February 1966) was born at Bhagur near Nashik. As a young man he founded the revolutionary society Abhinav Bharat, and while studying law in London (1906–1910) he wrote The Indian War of Independence of 1857, a nationalist history that was banned in India. Arrested in 1910, he made a famous escape attempt at Marseilles, and in 1911 was sentenced to two terms of transportation for life. He spent about a decade in the Cellular Jail in the Andamans before being moved to mainland jails in 1921.

Released in 1924 on condition that he stay in Ratnagiri district and keep out of politics, he wrote and campaigned against untouchability. From 1937 to 1943 he was president of the Hindu Mahasabha. In 1948 he was tried in the Gandhi murder case and acquitted. His reputation remains intensely contested: for admirers he is "Veer" Savarkar, revolutionary, poet and reformer; for critics, the ideologue of an exclusive nationalism. Essentials of Hindutva is where his political ideas first took systematic form.

When and why it was written

According to the publisher's preface to the second edition (reprinted in 1969), Savarkar had been troubled since his London years by confusion over who counted as a Hindu — a question made political by debates on communal electorates, in which Arya Samajists, Sikhs, Jains and others were sometimes counted as Hindus and sometimes not. The preface says he first sketched the argument in his Andaman cell and wrote out the full text in mainland jails, from where it was smuggled out in parts. Most accounts place the writing in Ratnagiri jail.

The early 1920s were years of mass politics and communal tension. The Non-Cooperation and Khilafat movements had briefly united Hindu and Muslim leaders under Gandhi, but the Malabar (Moplah) rebellion of 1921 and riots elsewhere hardened opinion, and Hindu leaders were calling for organisation (sangathan) and reconversion (shuddhi). Savarkar offered a theory for this mood: the Hindu people defined as a nation, not merely a set of sects.

The book was first published in 1923 by V. V. Kelkar, an advocate of Nagpur, with the author given only as "A Maratha". Later editions carried Savarkar's name, often under the title Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?; the 1969 fifth edition (Veer Savarkar Prakashan, Bombay) lists earlier editions in 1923, 1942, 1950 and 1965, and other sources mention editions in the late 1920s and 1938. The Hindu Mahasabha later adopted its definition.

Section by section

• What is in a name? · Hindutva is different from Hinduism — Savarkar opens by arguing that some names carry the history of a whole people. Hindutva, he says, is not a religious creed but the total history and identity of the Hindu people; Hinduism — the religious system — is only one part of it. He states plainly that he is not trying to define Hinduism, which he calls the narrower term, but Hindutva.
• What is a Hindu? · Name older still · Hindus, a nation · Other names · How Names Are Given — A historical survey of names. The Vedic people who settled along the Indus and its tributaries called their land Sapta Sindhu; the same name appears in Iranian sources as Hapta Hindu. Savarkar traces how scattered settlements grew into a single nation under great kings, and why the later names Aryavarta, Brahmavarta and Bharatavarsha never wholly displaced the older name derived from the Sindhu (Indus).
• International Life · Fall of Buddhism · Buddhism — a universal religion · Then came reaction! · Institutions in favour of Nationality · Commingling of Races · Back to the Vedas — The most controversial historical chapter. Savarkar argues that Buddhism's universal, non-national outlook weakened India against invaders such as the Huns, and that a national reaction revived Vedic institutions, re-made the Indus the national frontier and fused many peoples into one society. He concedes that the caste system both bound and divided that society.
• Sindhusthan · What is Aryavarta? · Hindu & Hindusthan · Reverence to Buddha — Savarkar defends Sindhusthan (Hindusthan) as the oldest and most fitting name for the country, noting that Sindhu in Sanskrit means the sea as well as the Indus, so that the name covers the land from the river to the seas. He pauses to apologise for his harsh words about Buddhism and declares his reverence for the Buddha and the Buddhist Sangha.
• Hindus: all one and a nation · Hindusthani Language · Foreign Invaders · Hindutva at work — From Mahmud of Ghazni onward, he argues, centuries of conflict with invaders made people of every sect and region conscious of themselves as Hindus. He cites poets, saints and rulers — Chand Bardai, Ramdas, Shivaji, Chhatrasal — to show that Hindu and Hindusthan had become the common self-description by the fall of the Maratha power in 1818, with Hindi/Hindusthani as a shared language.
• Stupid notions must go — A rebuttal of the claim that "Hindu" was a term of contempt given by Persians or Muslims; Savarkar argues that the name descends from the Vedic Sindhu and was proudly used by Hindus themselves.
• Essential implications of Hindutva · Bond of common blood · Common culture · What is civilization? · Common laws and rites — The analytical core. The first requirement is the land — yet an American who became an Indian citizen, he says, would be an Indian but not thereby a Hindu. The second is descent: the Hindus as a jati sharing common blood. The third is sanskriti, a shared civilisation of language, literature, law, rites and festivals. Many Indian Muslims and Christians, he grants, share Hindu ancestry and much of this culture; even so, in present usage, he holds, they are not Hindus.
• Who is a Hindu? — Savarkar rejects definitions that start from doctrine as circular, and argues that "Hinduism" should mean all the religions native to the land — Vedic and non-Vedic alike — so that Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Lingayats, Arya Samajists and others are all Hindus. The decisive test is the land as punyabhu, holy land. Muslims and Christians, he writes, lack only this, since their holy lands lie in Arabia or Palestine; he invites them to "return" by adopting India as their holy land. He then gives his summary definition — a common nation (rashtra), race (jati) and civilisation (sanskriti) — compressed into a Sanskrit couplet beginning "Asindhu Sindhu paryanta".
• Hindus in Sindh — The definition is tested on hard cases: tribal communities such as the Santals and Kolis, whom he counts as Hindus; Sikhs, whom he calls Sikhs by religion but Hindus by race and culture, and urges not to separate themselves politically; Jains, Lingayats and Arya Samajists; and converts of non-Hindu birth such as Sister Nivedita, whom he treats as exceptions rather than the rule.
• Unique Natural Blessings to Hindusthan — The Hindus, he argues, are unusually fortunate because their ancestral land is also the land of their gods and history, unlike communities whose holy land lies abroad. He urges Hindus to break down caste and sectarian barriers and encourage intermarriage, while still pursuing a wider Indian nationalism, and ends on a universal note: any terms Hindus set the world could not differ from those of the Gita or the Buddha.

Key arguments

Hindutva is wider than Hinduism. Savarkar's central move is to separate a religious system (Hinduism) from a national and civilisational identity (Hindutva). This lets him include atheists, reformers and non-Vedic traditions in the Hindu people while leaving theology aside.

History, not doctrine, defines a people. The essay is mostly history: a shared past — names, wars, saints, languages — rather than shared belief makes the Hindus one, a method summed up in its best-known line.

Three bonds: land, blood and culture. A Hindu, on this account, is attached to the territory from the Indus to the seas, descends from the people who have lived there, and inherits their civilisation. Savarkar treats these as facts to be described, not as values to be argued for.

The holy-land test. Because he accepts that many Muslims and Christians share Hindu ancestry and much common culture, the decisive dividing line in his definition becomes religious geography: whether one's sacred land lies within India. This is the most consequential and most criticised part of the book.

Unity across sects and castes. Savarkar insists that Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists and others belong to the Hindu nation, and calls for an end to caste divisions and for intermarriage — themes he pursued in his later social-reform work in Ratnagiri.

In the author's words

Hindutva is not a word but a history.

Reception and criticism

Admirers. The publisher's preface records praise from Lala Lajpat Rai, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Swami Shraddhananda, and the Hindu Mahasabha adopted the pitribhu–punyabhu definition. Supporters value the essay for treating Hindu identity as civilisational rather than narrowly religious, for including Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists in one heritage, and for its call to abolish caste barriers. The word Hindutva, which the book established in modern political use, became the central term of Hindu nationalism.

Exclusion of minorities. The most common criticism is that the holy-land test makes full membership of the nation depend on religion: Muslims and Christians fall outside the definition unless they adopt India as their holy land, which critics argue is incompatible with the equal citizenship later guaranteed by the Constitution. Savarkar wrote that a non-Hindu could be a fellow citizen without being a Hindu; critics reply that his claim that those whose holy land lies abroad must love it above their fatherland casts doubt on their patriotism.

Race and European models. Scholars have pointed to the essay's language of common blood and race and to its debt to European ethnic nationalism. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has called the pamphlet a "European product", and others, including Chetan Bhatt, have examined how its idea of race relates to caste.

History and violence. The historian Vinayak Chaturvedi, in Hindutva and Violence: V. D. Savarkar and the Politics of History (SUNY Press, 2022), takes seriously Savarkar's claim that Hindutva is a history, and argues that for Savarkar the study of history was the method of interpreting Hindutva — a history he read as a long series of conflicts in which violence played a founding part.

Biography and sources. Janaki Bakhle, in a 2010 essay on the writing of Essentials of Hindutva and in Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva (Princeton University Press, 2024), argues that Savarkar cannot be understood without his Marathi poetry and prose, long neglected in English-language scholarship. Jyotirmaya Sharma, in Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (2003; revised 2015), places Savarkar at the end of a line of thinkers — Dayananda Saraswati, Vivekananda and Aurobindo — whose ideas of Hindu identity form the intellectual background of political Hindutva.

In the courts. In its December 1995 judgments in the Hindutva election cases, including Ramesh Yeshwant Prabhoo v. Prabhakar Kashinath Kunte, the Supreme Court observed that the word Hindutva could describe the way of life of the people of India and need not mean religious bigotry. Critics noted that the court did not discuss Savarkar's own definition. In 2017 a larger bench declined to revisit that observation.

Where to read it

The book is in copyright in India until the end of 2026. Printed editions have been published by Veer Savarkar Prakashan, Bombay (the 1969 fifth edition, among others), and by several Indian publishers in English, with Marathi and Hindi translations; the text is also included in collected editions of Savarkar's works (Samagra Savarkar Vangmaya). From 1 January 2027 the text enters the public domain in India and free editions may legitimately appear. For critical context, see the works by Chaturvedi, Bakhle and Sharma listed below.

Read more on this site

• V. D. SavarkarThinkers
• Veer Savarkar — lifeGreat Lives
• Glossary: HindutvaShabdakosh
• Glossary: Pitribhumi and PunyabhumiShabdakosh
• We or Our Nationhood Defined (1939)Books & Ideas

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