RSS at 100: 'Hindu Mahasabha emerged because Congress avoided religious issues'

As part of The Federal's RSS at 100 series, marking the centenary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, we spoke to historian Salil Misra.

Misra explained the social and political backdrop from the late 19th to early 20th century that shaped the Hindu identity, communal mobilisation, and the circumstances in which the RSS was founded, in 1925.

How did the 19th century reshape religious community identities in India?

The 19th century transformed India’s community profile. Local, ritual-based religious communities gradually gave way to pan-Indian identities of Hindus and Muslims. By the century’s end, many people began to view themselves as part of larger religious communities. This shift in identity formation coincided with a broader search for identities—religious and national. The Census played a significant role by classifying populations and quantifying communities, which fed into later developments.

What changed within Hindu religious practice during this period?

Traditional Hinduism was non-congregational, internally plural, and lacked doctrinal centralisation. From the mid-19th century, elements of congregational practice emerged, partly through imitation and confrontation with Islam and Christianity. Public rituals and collective displays became more prominent, reflecting a semi-conscious effort to reshape Hinduism’s public presence.

Do the public forms of Ganesh Chaturthi in Maharashtra and Durga Puja in Bengal illustrate this congregational turn?

Yes. The public Ganesh festival and Durga Puja exemplify Hinduism’s move toward congregational practice. These festivals brought ritual into shared civic spaces, paralleling congregational features seen in other religions, though emerging in distinctively Indian ways.

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Why did music and processions become flashpoints in communal conflicts, including in Nagpur, before 1925?

This period saw a pattern of mutual provocations. Music before mosques became a recurring trigger in communal tensions, not because music is uniformly forbidden in Islam—South Asian Islam, especially Sufi traditions, integrates music—but because public symbols were used competitively. From the late 19th century, such symbolic confrontations intensified.

How did the colonial census shape communal consciousness and rivalry?

From the 1870s, census operations generated a new consciousness about numbers—how many Hindus and Muslims, where each was a majority or minority, and whether numbers were rising or falling.

Gandhi’s embrace of Khilafat was context-driven: Islam in India had moved into an anti-imperialist alignment; the Jallianwala Bagh massacre catalysed nationwide mobilisation; and the alliance created a powerful opening for mass politics.

This created anxieties over conversion and demographic change. Communities that had long coexisted began to see each other as rivals, and mutual provocations found a fertile political ground.

What parallel processes were underway—religious community formation and Indian nationalism—and how did they relate?

Two parallel trajectories unfolded: religious communities became pan-Indian, and an Indian national community began to form, symbolised by the Indian National Congress (founded 1885). These processes sometimes converged and sometimes diverged, but they never fully merged. Understanding their interaction is crucial to interpreting early 20th-century politics.

Why did Maharashtra, and Nagpur in particular, become pivotal to the emergence of Hindu nationalism?

Alongside Punjab, Bengal and the United Provinces (UP), Maharashtra was decisive. Possible reasons include historical memory—such as Mughal-Maratha conflicts—and regional political currents.

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Leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak popularised a Hindu-nationalist idiom that was anti-imperialist yet carried a distinct Hindu dimension, especially visible during communal disputes over ritual and language, and in minority-status contexts like Punjab and Bengal.

What was the significance of VD Savarkar’s ‘Hindutva’ in this context?

Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (Savarkar's book) addressed a pressing question of the time: who counted as Hindu? Savarkar offered a definition based on pitribhumi and punyabhumi—the fatherland and holy land—an approach that was inclusive of Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, yet exclusive of Muslims and Christians. This was innovative because it tried to create coherence in a tradition without a single doctrine or book, at a moment when census categories demanded sharper boundaries.

How did the memorialisation of Shivaji intersect with this evolving Hindu public identity?

Shivaji’s memory was reframed in the 19th century. A complex medieval conflict—regional assertion against imperial authority—came to be remembered increasingly through a religious lens as a Hindu king confronting a Muslim emperor (Aurangzeb). This memory dovetailed with the rise of public Hindu rituals in Maharashtra, reinforcing a congregational and identity-assertive politics.

Before the RSS, what role did the Hindu Mahasabha play, and why was it formed?

Regional Hindu Sabhas arose first (notably in Punjab and UP), later coalescing into the all-India Hindu Mahasabha in 1915–16. In Punjab, opposition to the Punjab Land Alienation Act (1900) was articulated through Hindu–Muslim lines as agrarian and trading interests clashed. In UP, the Hindi–Urdu language contest over state patronage fuelled mobilisation. The Mahasabha emerged because the Congress, as a national body, avoided religious issues. It provided a platform to press distinctly Hindu political demands.

How did the functions of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS differ?

They were inspired by similar currents, including the Arya Samaj, but envisaged different roles. The Mahasabha operated as a political organisation taking up issues like representation and provincial questions.

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The RSS oriented itself toward cultural work and social organisation. Individuals sometimes engaged with both, but their functional spheres remained distinct.

Why did many leaders straddle the Congress and communal organisations in the early decades?

There was greater fluidity then. Figures such as Madan Mohan Malaviya participated in both Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha; Muslim leaders like Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman and Hafiz Muhammad Ibrahim navigated both the Muslim League (or Muslim public life) and Congress spaces. The Congress formally tightened its rules only in 1938, defining the Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha as communal organisations and disallowing dual memberships for elected Congressmen. Until then, overlaps reflected a liberal political culture and shared anti-imperialist strands across formations.

Did the Khilafat–Non-Cooperation alliance communalise politics? And why did Gandhi embrace it?

The Khilafat episode did change the flavour of communal politics, making it more intense. Yet Gandhi’s embrace of Khilafat was context-driven: pan-Islam in India had moved into an anti-imperialist alignment; the Jallianwala Bagh massacre catalysed nationwide mobilisation; and the alliance created a powerful opening for mass politics. For a time, it appeared to ease communal tensions—public provocations declined, and interfaith gestures multiplied, exemplified by Swami Shraddhanand’s address at Jama Masjid. The alliance ended painfully: Gandhi withdrew Non-Cooperation after Chauri Chaura (1922); Khilafat persisted until about 1924 before collapsing with the end of the Ottoman Caliphate under Mustafa Kemal Pasha. In retrospect, it both energised mass mobilisation and intensified communal polarisation.

How do Nagpur’s 1924 tensions and contemporaneous texts like ‘Hindutva’ connect to the RSS’s founding in 1925?

Nagpur saw disputes around processional routes and public ritual that mirrored all-India patterns of symbolic contestation. At the same time, the circulation of definitional texts like Savarkar’s Hindutva highlighted the drive to consolidate Hindu identity. Leaders such as KB Hedgewar and BS Moonje, active in debates of the time and attentive to conflicts like the Mappila (Malabar) rebellion, were part of a milieu seeking organisational answers. The RSS’s founding in 1925 must be seen against this backdrop of pan-Indian identity formation, public ritualisation, and the search for disciplined social organisation.

Why is this period best understood as the ‘pre-history’ of the RSS?

The late-19th and early-20th centuries laid the social, cultural and political ground for organisations like the RSS. Pan-Indian religious identities, public ritual, demographic enumeration, language politics, and shifting alliances produced a new political vocabulary. The RSS emerged from these currents, which predated it but decisively shaped its founding moment and early trajectory.

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