‘KALA PANI SHOULD BE A PILGRIMAGE’
Historian Vikram Sampath’s biography on Veer Savarkar explores the human side of the revolutionary
Navneet Vyasan
When historian Vikram Sampath sat down to pen his ambitious biography on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the Indian freedom fighter, the biggest challenge for the Sahitya Akademi Award winner was to make the read engaging. According to him, history in India, more often than not, ‘has been written in an insipid manner’ failing to get attention of the young bibliophiles. Sampath, in his new release, Savarkar: Echoes of the Forgotten Past, is trying to draw the younger lot of readers into picking up researched non-fiction.
HUMANISING SAVARKAR
Sampath says while reading the historical annals of Savarkar, he realised the way to humanise the independence activist. “I followed his advice in his memoirs where he was open about sharing details of his life. A person’s biography, needs to be presented “as-is” and not “as-should-be” — from head to toe, nothing more, nothing less, as transparent and true as one can be’,” says the author. Savarkar enjoys a God-like status among those who revere him. Does that bother Sampath? “The hypersensitivity doesn’t bother me. As long as I’ve done justice to the character, my conscience is clear,” says the author.
A MISREAD RATIONALIST?
The debate on Savarkar’s religious beliefs is never ending. “He was pragmatic, rational, and stood against all antiquated practices that held us back as a community. In his 1923 treatise, Essentials of Hindutva, that he penned from the confines of the Ratnagiri prison, he makes it clear that Hindutva had nothing to do with the theological constructs of the Hindu religion or its practices and that the latter was a subset of the larger rubric of a nationalistic marker,” he says.
FROM KALA PANI
During Indian independence movement, the cellular jail in Andaman was the place where Indian revolutionaries were held and subjected to barbaric brutality. After being arrested in Bombay, Savarkar was moved to Kala Pani. “The Cellular Jail should be a place of pilgrimage for students in schools and colleges so that they are sensitised to the realities of how our ancestors suffered to get us the free air that we breathe today,” says the historical.