—S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View Of Life, 1926
In the shrill din of the mob that extols the virtues of Hindutva in India today, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s prescription for a Hindu way of life finds no takers. Remind the demagogues that syncretism is a natural, ancient impulse in Hinduism and they will scoff at you. They’ll also possibly ask you to look up a ‘defining’ 77-page pamphlet called We or Our Nationhood Defined, written in 1939 by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, who once headed the RSS, the 77-year-old ideological fountainhead of the Hindutva upsurge. "The non-Hindu people in Hindustan," wrote Golwalkar, "must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country,...

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