Hindutva

Hindutva is a 100-year-old political idea and the most consequential one in India right now. If you're reading about it for the first time because of a headline, the worst thing you can do is read more headlines. Here's what to read instead.

Start with Savarkar

You can't have an opinion about Hindutva without reading the man who coined the term. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's 1923 pamphlet "Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?" is short and available cheaply in print. The paperback edition is around $10. Read it before reading anyone's interpretation of it. The text is shorter than most magazine features.

Then read Vinayak Chaturvedi's Hindutva and Violence: V.D. Savarkar and the Politics of History. It's the most thorough academic treatment in print, around $30, and it doesn't load the dice in either direction.

The argument against

For the critical side of the debate, the standard text is The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India by Christophe Jaffrelot. Jaffrelot has been writing about the RSS and BJP for thirty years and he's the closest thing the field has to a neutral expert.

For something shorter and more polemical, Arundhati Roy's Azadi covers the Kashmir angle of contemporary Hindutva politics. You don't have to agree with every page to learn from it.

The argument in favour

Read the source. The RSS publishes Bhagwat's speeches and the BJP publishes its election manifestos for free online. If you only consume Western coverage of Hindutva, you're reading translation of translation. Integral Humanism by Deendayal Upadhyaya is the BJP's foundational political-philosophy text. It's short, it's $15, and it's the document the party itself cites.

The court rulings

The 1995 Indian Supreme Court "Hindutva" judgments are the legal backbone of how the ideology is regulated in elections. They're public domain — every legal database in India hosts them — and worth skimming if you want to understand the actual constitutional argument.

Films

Two documentaries do the work most articles can't. "India: The Modi Question" (BBC, 2023) is the critical one and is hard to find because the Indian government tried to block it; it's circulating on YouTube. "Ram ke Naam" (Anand Patwardhan, 1992) is the older essential one about the Ayodhya movement that birthed the contemporary BJP. A Patwardhan collection is the easiest legitimate way to watch his work.

Setup for actually reading this stuff

Most of these books are heavy reading. A Kindle Paperwhite is the right device — many of these older texts are available cheap or free in ebook form, and the highlighting matters for keeping track of who said what. About $150.

For Hindi-language primary sources, a decent Hindi-English dictionary is around $20 and saves you a lot of Google Translate trips.

What not to do

Don't form your opinion from social media. Don't form it from the first ten Google results either — half of them are advocacy pieces from one side or the other. Read Savarkar in his own words. Read his critics in their own words. Make up your own mind. Most people who shout loudest about Hindutva on either side have read neither.