We or Our Nationhood Defined (1939): Contents and Controversy वी ऑर अवर नेशनहुड डिफ़ाइंड

Who was M. S. Golwalkar?

Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (19 February 1906 – 5 June 1973) was born at Ramtek, near Nagpur. He studied zoology at Banaras Hindu University and taught there for a time, which is how he came to be called "Guruji". He later spent time at the Ramakrishna Mission ashram at Sargachi in Bengal, took a law degree in Nagpur, and became close to Hedgewar. When Hedgewar died in June 1940, Golwalkar succeeded him as sarsanghchalak (chief) and led the organisation for 33 years, through its ban after Mahatma Gandhi's assassination in 1948, its expansion after Independence and the founding of many affiliated bodies. We or Our Nationhood Defined was published when he was 33 and had not yet held that post.

When and why it was written

The late 1930s were years of fierce argument about what Indian nationhood meant. The Congress held that India was a single nation made up of all its communities; the Muslim League was moving towards the claim that Muslims formed a separate nation; and Hindu nationalist writers, building on V. D. Savarkar's Hindutva (1923), argued that the nation was essentially Hindu. In Europe, the minority treaties of the League of Nations were collapsing, and Germany had just absorbed Austria and the Sudetenland.

Golwalkar's preface says the manuscript was ready in the first week of November 1938 and that the book was the first publication of Bharat Prakashan (Bharat Publications), Nagpur. The preface is dated Varsha Pratipada, 22 March 1939. In it he thanks G. D. (Babarao) Savarkar, V. D. Savarkar's elder brother, and names Savarkar's Marathi work Rashtra Mimansa (1934) as one of his chief sources of inspiration, pointing readers to a forthcoming English translation of it. He also says he has deliberately confined himself to the "nation" as a cultural unit and left the political question of the state for another occasion.

The book carries a foreword dated 4 March 1939 by the veteran nationalist leader M. S. Aney (known as Loknayak Aney) of Berar. Aney accepts the main thesis that India is a Hindu nation in the cultural sense, but he openly disagrees with the author on minorities: he argues that a cultural nationality is not the same thing as a sovereign state, that modern states give full citizenship to naturalised minorities, and that minorities can keep their religion and culture without threatening national unity. A Hindi edition followed in the 1940s, and according to the journalist Dhirendra K. Jha the book stopped being reprinted after 1948.

Chapter by chapter

• Preface and foreword: the author limits his subject to the cultural nation and acknowledges G. D. Savarkar's Rashtra Mimansa; Aney's foreword surveys Western theories of nationality, endorses the Hindu-nation thesis and records his disagreement on the treatment of minorities.
• Prologue: asks what Indians mean when they demand "swaraj" and independence, and argues that the country must first be clear about whose nation it is before it can know what freedom is for.
• Chapter I: presents Hindu civilisation as immeasurably old and continuous, rejects Western accounts of Aryan migration, describes Indian history as a long resistance to invaders, and argues that British-era politics, including the Congress, weakened national consciousness by treating everyone who lives in the land as part of the nation.
• Chapter II: surveys definitions of "nation" by Western political writers and concludes that a nation rests on five unities: geographical (country), racial, religious, cultural and linguistic. It uses the Jews and the Parsis as examples, and argues that Europe's decision to keep religion out of politics reflects Christian Europe's own history rather than a universal rule.
• Chapter III: tests the five-unity idea against post-First World War Europe: the new states, the League of Nations minority treaties, England's established church, Soviet Russia and Germany. It rejects attempts to define a nation by "common aspirations" alone. This chapter contains the much-quoted remarks on Germany's racial policy discussed below.
• Chapter IV: applies the five unities to India: one country bounded by the Himalayas and the sea, one Hindu race, one religion, one culture and, through Sanskrit, an essential unity of languages. It concludes that the nation of Hindusthan is the Hindu nation and that only movements aimed at its revival are truly national.
• Chapter V: the chapter on minorities. It argues that non-Hindus who keep their separate religion, culture and race stand outside the nation, and that they must either be fully assimilated into the Hindu nation or remain in the country wholly subordinate to it, without special rights. It contrasts this with the League's minority treaties and holds up the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1938 as a warning.
• Chapter VI: argues that ancient India already had a full concept of nationhood, citing Vedic and classical terms such as rashtra, desha and janapada, and the law books, to show that country, people, religion, culture and language were understood as one.
• Chapter VII: explains the loss of national feeling as the result of complacency after the Mahabharata war, the rise of rival kingdoms, foreign conquest and British policy, and presents the founding of the Congress in 1885 as a device to divert national energy. It insists that the loss of national consciousness, not caste or social custom, is the root problem.
• Epilogue: ends on a note of hope that the Hindu nation, whose mission it describes as eternal, will revive again as it has in the past.
• Appendices: Appendix A reproduces a letter attributed to Shivaji addressed to Raja Jai Singh; Appendix B reproduces an extract from William Wedderburn's biography of A. O. Hume describing the Congress as a "safety valve" against unrest.

Key arguments

A nation is defined by five unities. The book's whole structure rests on the claim that a true nation needs a common country, race, religion, culture and language, and that losing any one of them destroys it. Critics note that this is a far more restrictive test than the civic definitions used by most political theorists the book cites.

India is a Hindu nation. Applying that test, the book concludes that the nation of India is, and can only be, the Hindu nation, and that the Congress idea of a nation made up of all communities is a modern error.

Minorities must assimilate or accept subordination. The most controversial argument is in Chapter V: those outside the five unities are described as foreigners who must either merge completely into the Hindu nation or live in the country without claims, privileges or even citizens' rights. Aney's own foreword rejected this position, and it is the main reason the book is criticised today.

Europe as a model. The book repeatedly draws lessons from contemporary Europe, from Czechoslovakia's minority crisis to Germany's expansion and racial policy, which it presents as evidence for its theory. Writing in early 1939, before the Second World War and the Holocaust, it treats Germany's expulsion of Jews as an example of national "race pride".

Culture before politics. Consistent with the later practice of the organisation Golwalkar led, the book says national regeneration is first a matter of awakening cultural and national consciousness, not of winning political power.

The passage most often quoted

The book's references to Nazi Germany come in Chapter III, in a discussion of race as a component of nationhood. The sentence quoted below is the one critics most often cite; it begins by saying that this was done to keep up the purity of the race and its culture, and in the original it is followed by the claim that Germany had shown how hard it is to assimilate races and cultures with fundamental differences, which the book calls a lesson for Hindusthan.

Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races—the Jews.

Authorship and the organisation's later position

For two decades the book was treated inside and outside the movement as Golwalkar's own work. The American scholars Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle regard it as a systematic treatment of the organisation's ideology. In 1962 the writer P. Kodanda Rao drew public attention to it, and in May 1963, at a function in Bombay for V. D. Savarkar's 80th birthday, Golwalkar said that the book was his abridgement of G. D. Savarkar's Rashtra Mimansa. The remark was reported by Savarkar's biographer Dhananjay Keer.

That explanation became the organisation's standard position. In March 2006, during Golwalkar's birth centenary, the Times of India (report by Akshaya Mukul) said the organisation had formally disowned the book; the former spokesman M. G. Vaidya was reported as saying that it represented neither the views of the mature Golwalkar nor those of the organisation, and that it had never been its "Bible". Supporters add that Golwalkar did not have the book reprinted after the 1940s and that his later speeches, collected in Bunch of Thoughts (1966), are the better guide to his thinking.

Several researchers dispute the translation account. Golwalkar's own preface presents him as the author and calls Rashtra Mimansa a source of inspiration rather than the original. In a 2021 article in The Caravan and his 2024 biography of Golwalkar, Dhirendra K. Jha reports comparing the two texts and finding that Rashtra Mimansa, published in 1934, says nothing about Nazi Germany, so the passages on Germany and on minorities could not have come from it. Neha Chaudhary and Saarang Narayan, writing in Modern Asian Studies (2024), likewise read the 1963 disclaimer as part of an effort to give the movement a more acceptable post-colonial image.

Reception and criticism

Critics regard the book as the clearest early statement of an exclusive, majoritarian idea of the nation. The political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot and the lawyer and writer A. G. Noorani discuss it as a founding text of the movement's ideology; the historian Ramachandra Guha has written that Golwalkar saw Muslims, Christians and communists as the main obstacles to a Hindu state and notes that his ideas have been criticised for their similarity to Nazi thinking; Jyotirmaya Sharma's Terrifying Vision (2007) is a book-length critical study of Golwalkar's thought.

In 2006 the political scientist Shamsul Islam published Golwalkar's We or Our Nationhood Defined: A Critique (Pharos Media, New Delhi), which reprints the full text of the book with a detailed commentary arguing that its ideas continued to shape the movement.

Defenders of Golwalkar make three main points: that the book reflects the world of 1938 rather than his mature views; that the organisation has distanced itself from it; and that he should be judged by his decades of later work on social service, character-building and Hindu unity. Historians generally agree, whatever their view of the authorship, that the book matters because it was read for years as an exposition of the movement's idea of nationhood.

Where to read it

The book has not been reissued by its original publisher or by the organisation for decades. Its full text is reproduced, with commentary, in Shamsul Islam's Golwalkar's We or Our Nationhood Defined: A Critique (Pharos Media, New Delhi, 2006). Copies of the 1939 edition are held in major libraries. Because the work is in copyright until the end of 2033, we do not link to the unauthorised copies that circulate online.

Read more on this site

• Bunch of Thoughts (1966)Golwalkar's later collection of speeches
• M. S. GolwalkarThinkers
• Hindutva (1923)V. D. Savarkar's earlier statement of Hindu nationhood
• V. D. SavarkarThinkers
• K. B. HedgewarThinkers

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