ABSTRACT
The Maharashtrian Abhinav Bharat, like many revolutionary societies such as Bengal’s more prominent Anushilan Samiti, was dedicated to violent and revolutionary insurrection against British colonial rule. Savarkar’s formative importance during his twenties was as an instigator and activist leader within one such revolutionary nationalist network, the Abhinav Bharat. Savarkar’s ideology of Hindutva was invented in the aftermath of the upheavals following the Partition of Bengal and during the political maelstrom of the 1920s. Savarkar, unlike Ranade, Tilak or Aurobindo before, and Golwalkar after him, stated his belief, at least in his Hindutva, of an Aryan migration into India, with its implication that the originators of Hindutva were not autochthonous to India. Savarkar’s Hindutva was to have considerable and definitive influence on the burgeoning Hindu nationalist movements of the mid-1920s. Hence, contemporary Hindu nationalism is aptly referred to as ‘the Hindutva movement’ working in the service of what is conceived to be the ‘Hindu nation’.
