The strange case of Savitri Devi
By
Koenraad Elst
Swami
Vivekananda once told Christian missionaries that their vilification of
Hinduism outweighed all the mud in the ocean. Since then, the stream of
defamatory mud thrown at Hinduism has only increased. A new line employed by
Evangelists, Communists and others is to associate Hinduism with Nazism.
Doesn't the swastika tell it all? And the Sanskrit term "Aryan"? Aha!
Contrived and malafide as this rhetoric may be, it can hold one or two
individuals up as examples of Hitlerian Hindus. In his new book, Hitler's
Priestess. Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (New York
University Press 1998), Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke tells the story of Savitri
Devi Mukherji, a French-Greek lady who made a synthesis of her admiration
for Hitler with her own rather personal version of Hinduism. She was born on
30 September 1905 in Lyon, France, as Maximiani Portas, daughter of a Greek
father and an English mother. Extremely gifted, she was to earn an MA in
Science and a Ph.D. in Liberal Arts. Early on, she developed strong
political sympathies and antipathies, and these would become the chief
determinants of her strange itinerary, which included India.
Ideological development
When
Maximiani came of age, she opted for the Greek nationality, and spent
several years in Greece. In 1929, she visited Palestine, where she witnessed
the budding conflict between Palestinians and Jewish settlers; her sympathy
was with the former. Anti-Semitism was a predominant attitude in pre-1940
France, both Left and Right, and she had imbibed it early on. Enamoured with
ancient Greek culture, Maximiani repudiated Christianity, though retaining
its anti-Semitic prejudice. Her main objection to Christianity was its
anthropocentrism, its doctrine that God had entrusted man with the rulership
over all other creatures. This critique of Biblical anthropocentrism has
recently been revived by the ecological movement, whose radical fringe
denies that mankind is worth more than other species. Maximiani rejected the
love of mankind in favour of an ethical vitalism which she found in
National-Socialism, with "its scale of values, centred not on 'man' but on
life".
From
her ideal of "Hellenism", she reoriented towards the "Aryan" doctrines
propagated by the Nazis. Ever since Charles Darwin, culture was seen by many
as but a side effect of a biological quality, and consequently, the
Indo-European language family was identified with a hypothetical Aryan race.
The linguistic "Aryanization" of India by white Aryan invaders from Europe
formed a complete case study of all that the upcoming racist worldview stood
for:
·
first, whites had
expressed their natural dynamism by trekking to distant horizons, unlike the
indolent dark-skinned people who never left their shores;
·
then, the whites had
proven their superiority by subduing the dark-skinned natives;
·
next, with their
healthy race consciousness, they had tried to preserve their racial purity
by imposing the caste system on themselves and the natives, preventing
intermarriage between white conquerors and dark natives as much as possible;
·
but unfortunately,
some racial mixing did nonetheless take place and turned the white invaders
into brown-skinned half-breeds, their intellectual and military qualities
deteriorated, and they became an easy and legitimate prey for European
colonizers who had preserved their racial purity.
This
way, the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) was a cornerstone of the modern racist
worldview. As Savitri Devi herself reported: "In the Third Reich, even
school-children knew from their textbooks that the Aryan race had spread
from the north to the south and east, and not the other way around." She
also believed in the AIT annexe that caste is a racial Apartheid system,
with the Aryan invaders as upper and the "aboriginals" as lower castes.
The
Hindu connection
Using
the money her deceded father left her, Maximiani went to India and, with two
brief interruptions, she was to stay there from 1932 until 1945, and again
in 1957-60 and 1971-81. She studied Hindi and Bengali at Rabindranath
Tagore's Shanti Niketan school and travelled around the country. Feeling
ready to face Indian audiences, she offered her services as an
anti-Christian preacher to Swami Satyananda's Hindu Mission in Calcutta. In
1937-39, under her given Hindu name Savitri Devi, she toured the tribal
villages and had the chiefs organize public debates between herself and the
local missionaries. Thoroughly familiar with the mentality and methods of
her adversary, she could destroy the credit of the imported religion in the
minds of the villagers, and prevent or undo many conversions. There was a
sharp contradiction between her own racist and anti-egalitarian convictions
and the reformist and egalitarian programme of the Hindu Mission. To the
Hindu Mission, Hinduism was a value in itself; to Savitri Devi, it was but
an instrument of her imagined Aryan race. In her years as a preacher, she
kept her non-Hindu preoccupations to herself, but in her memoirs (Souvenirs
et Réflexions d'une Aryenne, French: "Memories and Reflec-tions of an Aryan
Lady", Delhi 1976), she declared that she conceived of her reconversion
mission as an exercise in deception: "From the racist Aryan view-point, it
was necessary to give the most backward and degenerate aborigines a (false)
Hindu consciousness."
In
contrast with the Hindu nationalists, but in tune with Indian Marxists and
casteists, she believed that the concept "nation" and a programme of
"nationalism" could not apply to India. In 1938, she used the slogan: "Make
every Hindu an Indian nationalist, and every Indian nationalist a Hindu". In
her autobiography, however, she rejected this slogan on the plea that a
"nation" could only consist of racially similar individuals, not of racially
distinct communities, as she thought the castes to be. To genuine Hindu
activists, this position is scandalous. It expresses exactly the motives
which anti-Hindu authors falsely attribute to Hindu nationalism, because
these motives logically follow from the racist theory of caste which Indian
casteists and Marxists share with Savitri Devi, but which is rejected by the
Hindu vanguard. At any rate, she gave her assent to claims routinely made in
anti-Hindu literature, e.g.:
·
Islam and
Christianity are religions of equality;
·
converts from
Hinduism to Islam or Christianity were attracted by these religions'
caste-free egalitarianism;
·
India is not and never has
been a nation.
These
are exactly the ideas propagated by Indian Communists and Christian
missionaries. With friends like Savitri Devi, Hinduism didn't need enemies.
However, the positions quoted were uttered only in Savitri Devi's later
writings, not in the pre-War period when she was in touch with Hindu leaders
including Subhash Bose and G.D. Savarkar, brother of V.D. Savarkar and
writer of a foreword to her booklet A Warning to the Hindus (Calcutta
1939). Her most consequential acquaintance was with Dr. Asit Krishna
Mukherji, the only Indian who could honestly be described as a Nazi.
Numerous Indians were enthusiastic about Hitler's challenge to Britain's
world domination, but Mukherji was the only one with a comprehensive
knowledge of Nazi doctrine. He had studied history in London and travelled
in the Soviet Union, but his interest was drawn by the rising discourse of
race, enthroned as state doctrine in Germany in 1933. In 1935-37, he
published a pro-Nazi bimonthly, the New Mercury. Savitri Devi met him on 9
January 1938, and their conversation immediately turned to Nazi doctrine,
especially its alleged esoteric roots. According to Goodrick-Clarke,
Mukherji was an early believer in the popular claim that the Thule Society,
one of many reactionary political clubs in Munich ca. 1920, was a "secret
initiatory society behind the open political movement of National
Socialism". In an earlier publication, The Occult Roots of Nazism (London
1992), Goodrick-Clarke himself has cut such myths to size and debunked the
"wholly spurious 'facts' concerning the powerful Thule Society, the Nazi
links with the East, and Hitler's occult initiation".
After
the outbreak of the war, Savitri Devi risked being expelled from India, so
Mukherji offered to marry her. She described it as a chaste marriage,
concluded purely for passport reasons. Chastity in marriage may have suited
Mukherji as a believer in the yogic powers conferred by sexual abstinence.
His bride, by contrast, was very open-minded and easy-going about sexuality
and had had affairs with men as well as women.
Mukherji played a key role in the contacts between Subhash Bose and Axis
representatives. He also spied for the Japanese during the war, but there
are indications that he was a double agent, which would explain why he was
left untouched eventhough Calcutta was the nerve centre of the
Anglo-American operations against Japan. Savitri spent the War years writing
books on Pharaoh Akhenaton (r. 1383-66 BC), the first known prophet of
monotheism. She chose him as her preferred deity in her Bhakti practice,
after a jewel she bought in Delhi displayed a solar symbol known from
Akhenaton's inscriptions; she took this as a divine hint. She had taken up
devotional yoga when a yoga master judged that her nerves could not stand
the discipline of more straightforward forms of meditation.
The
Nazi connection
After
the war, Mukherji made a living as an astrologer, until he took ill and
fasted unto death in March 1977. His wife returned to Europe for a
"pilgrimage" in devastated Germany. She started distributing pro-Nazi
handbills and was arrested for this by British soldiers. Sentenced to three
years in prison, she became friends with her fellow inmates: former guards
of the women's sections of the concentration camps. The suffering of old
Nazis under the Allied repression formed the material for her first openly
Nazi book, Gold in the Furnace (1949): she saw the 1945 defeat as but a test
for the true Hitlerians, who would come out of it strengthened and
ultimately victorious.
Savitri
Devi exalted Hitler as a "man against time" who tried to uphold "Aryan"
virtues against the degeneracy of modern times. In her most important book,
The Lightning and the Sun (1958), she saw him as the third member of
a historic trinity: Akhenaton, the first monotheist, the "sun"; Chengiz
Khan, the greatest conqueror, the "lightning"; and Hitler, who combined the
Pharaoh's philosophical depth with the Khan's martial prowess... In 1960,
after a decade of wandering, often using her maiden name to enter countries
where "Savitri Devi" was blacklisted, she settled down in France, where she
eked out a living as a schoolteacher, occasionally causing trouble for
herself by voicing denials of the Holocaust in class. After 1969, she was
entitled to a small pension, just enough for her to live in India. In 1982,
already unable to read or to walk unaided, she prepared for a lecture tour
as an invitee of the American Nazi Party. On her way to the US, she stayed
in a friend's house outside London, where she took ill and died from heart
failure during her sleep. Her ashes were transferred to Arlington, Virginia,
where the Nazi Party gave them a place of honour in its shrine.
Views on religion
One
observation which emerges from Savitri Devi's ideological writings, is that
she had a rather confused view of religion. If she opposed the Christian
destruction of Pagan temples, why did she venerate Akhenaton, the first
known temple-destroyer, the first known believer in a single god intolerant
of others? Why did she extol Chengiz Khan? Why did she persist in the
Christian hatred of the Jews, when the last Pagan Emperor of Rome, Julian
the Apostate (to whom she dedicated her A Warning to the Hindus), preferred
the Jews to the Christians and planned to rebuild the Jewish Temple in
Jerusalem?
Savitri
Devi's view of the religious dimension of Hitlerism was equally fanciful.
She wrote that Nazism had the "capability of becoming very fast, once
associated with rituals, a real religion." But Hitler himself opposed those
among his fans who dreamed of a new religion. In
Mein Kampf,
he affirmed that the Nazi movement "is not a religious reform but a
political reorganization of the German people", and that "it is criminal to
try and destroy the accepted faith of the people as long as there is nothing
to replace it". Hitler took a purely instrumental view of religion. He
appreciated Christianity for inculcating family values (good for the birth
rate), anti- Semitism and obedience to authority; for its historical role in
uniting the Germanic tribes under Charlemagne; and for having extended
Germany eastward under the Teutonic Knights. On the other hand, he was
irritated by Christian opposition to his eugenic policies, e.g. forced
euthanasia of the handicapped. For such reasons, and because of the
destructive role which religion had played in German history (the religious
Thirty Years' War in 1618-48 killed one third of the German population),
Hitler followed the policy of German rulers like Frederick II and Otto von
Bismarck who had wisely kept religion separate from politics. His commitment
was not to any one religion, but to the German people. Early on in his
reign, Hitler appeased but sidelined the Christian Churches with a
Concordat, and dissolved all neo-Pagan associations. After the bizarre
flight of his deputy Rudolf Hess, a vegetarian dabbling in Buddhism, he had
all unconventional religionists arrested, because the event confirmed his
suspicion that spiritual seeker types were unreliable. Though nominally a
Roman Catholic till the end of his life, one thing to remember about him is:
Hitler was a secularist.
The
Aryan theory
Considering the tainted connotations of the Aryan Invasion Theory and its
caste-racist annexe, it is remarkable that Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke entirely
shares with Savitri Devi the belief in the Aryan invasion and the racial
theory of caste. The AIT has been the dominant paradigm for over a century
and still is, so a non-specialist can be forgiven for uncritically accepting
it. By contrast, the racial theory of caste is now a marginalized doctrine,
championed only by people with a political agenda. It is espoused by white
racists in the West and by ethnic separatists in India, strongly patronized
and tutored by Christian missionaries. Goodrick-Clarke never questions
Savitri Devi's view of caste as a racial apartheid system resulting from the
"Aryan invasion", actually a 19th-century projection of the colonial
situation onto the past. But in 1948 already, the Marxist scholar O.C. Cox
rejected the projection of modern race prejudice onto ancient cultures: "The
early Indo-Aryans could no more have thought in modern terms of the race
prejudice than they could have invented the airplane". In the same year,
Dalit leader Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar recapitulated the findings of physical
anthropology to conclude that "the Brahmins and the Untouchables belong to
the same race". It seems Goodrick-Clarke isn't aware of this debunking job.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke doesn't see anything historically wrong in the
romantic eulogy to the ancient Hindu hero Rama by the orientomanic French
poet Charles Leconte de Lisle (1818-94): "Thou whose blood is pure, thou
whose skin is white, (...) resplendent subduer of the profane races". He
quotes it from Savitri Devi's own frequent references to this sheet-anchor
of her Aryan convictions, and seems to be sharing her belief that Rama was a
white Aryan racist whose campaign against Ravana typifies the Aryan conquest
of Dravidian South India. But in the Ramayana, Ravana's ancestry is traced
to the Vedic sage Pulastya, Rama's to the pre-Vedic Aryan patriarch Ikshvaku.
Their struggle was one between two Aryans, both of them dark-skinned.
Hitler vs. Hindu nationalism
In his
description of the Hindu nationalist movement in the 1930s and 40s, Goodrick-Clarke
depends on secondary and hostile sources. That may well be why he fails to
notice the profound estrangement between Savitri Devi and the Hindu
nationalists after 1940. Though he admits that "the subsequent success of
Hindu nationalism after the Second World War does not form part of Savitri
Devi's story", he does generally pretend that Hindu nationalism is the
present incarnation of Savitri Devi's ideology, "upper-caste racism" which
seeks to "restore upper-caste authority".
Given
Hindutva's reformism, Savitri Devi's love affair with the movement was
understandably short-lived. In her memoirs, she laments that the reformist
Arya Samaj doesn't share her enthusiasm for caste inequality: "The Arya
Samaj is Aryan only in name, for it rejects the natural hierarchy of the
races". What is at stake here is the arrogant policy of Westerners, first to
steal the cultural term Arya and distort its meaning in a racist sense, then
to protest when Hindus fail to respect this new and distorted usage. Another
telling lament: "How many Hindus were there among the Aryan castes who, like
Sri A.K. Mukherji, fully understood the profound significance of Hitlerism,
and supported it because of it? Very few, certainly!"
That
many ordinary Hindus admired Hitler deserves an explanation. It is a serious
defect in the Hindu character that all kinds of shady individuals are easily
embraced in the bosom of Hindu pluralism. The mere sight of someone, anyone,
worshipping an idol, any idol, is enough for them to also pay their respects
to the same idol. When Hindus glorify Jesus or Mohammed, all Indian
secularists and Western India-watchers applaud this exercise in mindless
sentimentalism as "secular", as a "defeat of the communal forces". It is
exactly the same psychology, eager to please non-Hindus and exult along with
them in their adoration of non-Hindu idols, which tricked some gullible
Hindus into glorifying Hitler.
At the
same time, many Hindu nationalists opposed Hitler. Savitri Devi noted with
indignation that Sri Aurobindo supported the British war effort against the
Nazis on ideological grounds, as when he declared: "Hitlerism is the
greatest menace the world has ever met -- if Hitler wins, do they think
India has any chance of being free? It is for two reasons I support the
British in this war: first in India's own interest and secondly for
humanity's sake. Hitler stands for diabolical values". V.D. Savarkar, far
from supporting the German war effort (as Goodrick-Clarke falsely alleges),
called on Hindu young men to join the British Army and gain combat
experience in the struggle against the Axis powers. In 1948, he was the only
leader of India's freedom struggle to give a passionate welcome to the new
state of Israel, which has since then always enjoyed the sympathy of the
Hindutva movement, but which was evil incarnate to Savitri Devi. No wonder
that in her 338-page memoirs, Savitri Devi refuses to mention the Hindutva
leaders and organizations even once.
Savitri Devi's usefulness
Goodrick-Clarke's book Hitler's Priestess will be used as a stick with which
to beat Hindu nationalism. With him, many "secularists" will
enthusiastically sustain the confusion embodied in his notion of a
"Hindu-Aryan myth", viz. that the European racist notion "Aryan" was
borrowed as such from Hinduism. Now that all the hysterical predictions of
how a BJP government would enact Nazi policies have proven completely
far-fetched and slanderous, this book will be employed in an effort to trump
reality with a tragic woman's private Hitlerian fantasies.
Hindus
ought to set up their own anti-defamation league. Such a body could sue
neo-Nazi groups for misusing Hindu symbols like the swastika and the term
Arya. It could also issue rebuttals to the misleading and defamatory message
in publications like Goodrick-Clarke's latest.
Dr.
Koenraad Elst is a Belgian Indologist. In his forthcoming book The
Saffron Swastika (Voice of India, Delhi 2001) he provides a detailed
discussion of the notion "Hindu fascism", including the case of Savitri Devi.
