Janaki bakhle biography

KARACHI: The controversial figure of Indian activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar came into light as academic Janaki Bakhle, a history professor at University of California, Berkeley, spoke about the writing of her second book, Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva, at the Institute of Business Administration’s (IBA) City Campus here on Tuesday.

“Savarkar (1883 to 1966) was the author of what is mistakenly called ‘Hindu fundamentalism’.

An ideology like this just does not spring out of nowhere.

Janaki bakhle biography

It has a long gestation period,” Prof Bakhle said.

“To understand it you need to go back 100 years or so. So for my next book I intended to write a quick biography of Savarkar. She added that Savarkar grew up in Maharashtra.

For most of his life he lived in Nashik, Pune, Mumbai and Ratnagiri. Muslims were not absent but they were in the distant minority compared to what he might have encountered had he lived in Punjab, Bengal or in South India, near Hyderabad.

UC Berkeley professor Janaki Bakhl