Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
Bengal Renaissance played out throughout 19th century in which various religious movements flourished. This was triggered by European influence but in Europe itself thinkers like Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud created an atmosphere of suspicion for religion.
https://x.com/i/status/2002363588560798170
This is a fascinating historical paradox you've identified. The contrast reveals something important about how modernity operated differently across colonial and metropolitan contexts.
In Bengal, European influence - particularly through English education, Christian missionary activity, and activity, and exposure to Enlightenment ideas - actually energized religious reform rather than undermining faith itself. Figures like Ram Mohan Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Keshub Chandra Sen, and Ramakrishna didn't abandon Hinduism but sought to purify, rationalize, and revitalize it. They borrowed European concepts like rationalism, universalism, and social reform to argue that Hinduism, properly understood, was already consistent with these modern values. Similar dynamics occurred in Islamic reform movements.
Meanwhile in Europe, those same Enlightenment premises led thinkers in an opposite direction. Schopenhauer saw religion as consoling illusion, Feuerbach as psychological projection, Marx as ideological material exploitation, Nietzsche proclaimed God's death, and Freud diagnosed religion as neurosis. They were dismantling, not reforming. - AI
https://x.com/i/status/2002366044892189142
1/2 Completely untrue claims by @grok .
My book (in image) did not begin as a defence of anyone. Rather it began with enquiry of PoV that Grok claims.
For years, I repeatedly encountered the allegation that Indian nationalist thinkers; especially K. B. Hedgewar and M. S. Golwalkar were “inspired by”, or worse, “admired” Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
As student of history, I took these accusations at face value & academically.
If such claims were true, they had to be anchored in primary sources: letters, speeches, books, diaries, contemporaneous records.
That inquiry became the seed of this book.
But as I began digging into archives; Indian, German, British, and Middle Eastern; the story collapsed in one direction and exploded in another.
What collapsed was the allegation against Hindu nationalists.
What emerged, unmistakably, was something far more disturbing: Islamist leadership in the Arab world not only admired Hitler but elevated him to a near-prophetic, godly figure; long after the world knew what Nazism meant.
Let me shed light on Hedgewar and the myth of fascist admiration to begin with.
There exists no writing, speech, diary, letter, or recorded statement of K. B. Hedgewar in which he expresses admiration for Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini.
What does exist are Hedgewar’s own ideological commitments, which are explicitly anti-fascist in substance, rooted in:
a) anti-colonial nationalism
b) decentralised social organisation
c) cultural regeneration rather than state absolutism
In Hedgewar’s collected writings and speeches (Dr. Hedgewar: The Epoch Maker, Suruchi Prakashan, Vol. 1), his repeated emphasis is on society (samaj), not the state (rajya)( the exact opposite of fascist doctrine, which subordinates society to the total state (Gentile, La Dottrina del Fascismo, 1932).
“The nation is not built by power of the State but by the character of society.”
— Hedgewar, speech at RSS Officers’ Camp, Nagpur, 1939
(Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 41)
Fascism demands statolatry. Hedgewar rejected it outright.
On the so-called “organizational inspiration from Mussolini”
The claim that Hedgewar “drew organizational inspiration” from Mussolini’s Blackshirts collapses under chronology and evidence:
a) RSS daily shakhas began in 1925
b) Mussolini’s mass paramilitary structuring crystallised post-1926
c) No RSS document references Italian fascist manuals, symbols, or ideology
Uniforms, drills, or discipline do not equal ideological borrowing. By that logic, the Boy Scouts, YMCA, or Congress Seva Dal would all be “fascist organizations”.
There is zero primary evidence; letters, meeting notes, travel records; showing Hedgewar studied, cited, or praised Mussolini.
Let me talk about next claim of @grok where he points: “Golwalkar praised Nazi racial purity methods in his 1939 book ‘We’”
This is the most abused quotation in Indian political discourse, usually cited without context, without the full paragraph, and without acknowledging later corrections.
In We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939, p. 43), M. S. Golwalkar makes a descriptive observation, not a policy endorsement:
“To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races… a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”
Two facts are deliberately omitted by critics:
a) “Purging” ≠ genocide in 1939 usage
In pre-Holocaust political vocabulary, “purging” was widely used to denote exclusion, expulsion, or assimilation, not industrial extermination.
The Holocaust machinery (Wannsee Conference, death camps) post-dates this text (1942).
No historian acting in good faith can retroactively load 1945 knowledge into a 1939 sentence.
b) In the same book (p. 12), Golwalkar states:
“Race pride has now become a thing of the past. Nations are formed by culture, not race.”
This alone demolishes the charge of Nazi racialism.
2/2 Here rebuttal continues @grok
More decisively, Golwalkar explicitly condemned Nazism after the war:
“Nazism and Fascism were doctrines born of violence and ended in destruction. Bharatiya thought does not accept them.”
— Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts (1966 ed.), p. 177
If “admiration” were real, why the categorical post-war rejection?
Next claim of @grok is: “RSS later disowned the book”
This is factually false.
The book was not “disowned”; it was withdrawn by Golwalkar himself because he felt its language was inadequate and vulnerable to misinterpretation, not because it promoted Nazism.
Golwalkar clarified this in correspondence with RSS pracharaks (1940s), later reflected in Shri Guruji Samagra Darshan, Vol. 4.
He replaced it with Bunch of Thoughts, where race theory is explicitly rejected and cultural nationalism clarified.
While the Indian allegations dissolved under scrutiny, another trail became impossible to ignore.
In German archives, Nuremberg Trial records, and wartime Arabic broadcasts, I encountered something far more explicit and far more chilling:
Islamist leadership in Palestine and the Arab world openly revered Hitler.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, did not merely “sympathise” with Nazism. He:
A) Met Hitler in Berlin (1941)
B) Actively lobbied for the extermination of Jews
C) Recruited Muslims into Waffen-SS divisions
D) Broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Islamic world
It was operational alliance.
In Arab Islamist discourse of the 1930s–40s, Hitler was not described as a political leader alone but as a divinely aided figure, a man chosen to cleanse the world of Jews. These descriptions; documented in Arabic writings and radio transcripts; border on theological veneration.
This is where my book took its definitive turn.
So we arrive at a historical irony bordering on absurdity:
a) Those without evidence are accused endlessly.
b) Those with documented Nazi collaboration are quietly erased from discourse.
Speculative guilt is assigned to Indian nationalists, while primary-source-proven Islamist Nazism is treated as an inconvenience.
That inversion is precisely what my book corrects.
At last I can say that my book began by interrogating an accusation.
It ended by uncovering a suppressed alliance.
History is not built on slogans, Wikipedia paragraphs, or ideological convenience. It is built on documents, dates, and uncomfortable truths.
And sometimes, when you start digging to test a lie, you end up unearthing something far darker than you ever expected.
PS: Savarkar; the fountainhead of modern Hindu nationalism was first Indian politician to give full support to Jewish Homeland.
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