Book Review: Savarkar (Part 1): Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924
For me, as part of a generation which had its education in the last quarter of the 20th century, Savarkar was not mentioned in any of the official study materials except for the insinuation that he was involved in the murder of Mohandas Gandhi. In the absence of viable alternatives to arrive at one’s own conclusion, the official position on Savarkar was the only one. Now with the arrival of social media and history in India being liberated from the clutch of vested interests in central institutions, new light is being shed on the contributions of individuals other than Nehru and Gandhi to the freedom struggle. Volume 1 of Vikram Sampath’s epic biography deals with the upbringing of Vinayak Savarkar, the political environment in India and how it shaped him, his journey to England for his legal studies and his evolution as a political revolutionary plotting to overthrow the colonial British empire in India. It ends with his receiving conditional release from his sentence of life impr