Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) was an intellectual, ideologue, and anticolonial nationalist leader in India’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule, one whose anti-Muslim writings exploited India’s tensions in pursuit of Hindu majority rule. Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva is the first comprehensive intellectual history of one of the most contentious political thinkers of the twentieth century.

Janaki Bakhle is professor of Indian history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her previous book was Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the making of an Indian Classical Tradition (published by Oxford), and her most recent book is on the chief ideologue of right wing Hindu nationalism, V D Savarkar. She is also working on a book called Mavericks for the Nation: Hindu Nationalism without Hindutva, on Rajaram Shastri Bhagwat and T S Shejwalkar. She has also written on secularism, feminism, surveillance and the colonial police.