Since the Modi government came to power in 2014, a cult has quietly developed in India – the cult of Nathuram Godse, Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin. Thanks to the assertions by the BJP’s Members of Parliament that Godse was a patriot, in the past few years, a temple was consecrated in his name. Though the district administration refused to allow permission to build his temple, members of the Hindu Mahasabha laid the foundation for his temple and set up Godse’s statue.

On January 30, the Hindu Mahasabha recreated a grisly new ritual – ‘recreating’ Gandhi’s assassination. A woman wearing saffron clothes shot Gandhi’s effigy, filled with blood, in remembrance of Nathuram’s grotesque deed. Minions of the saffron IT mill disseminated a video of the event to acolytes across the nation who gleefully shared it on social media. From being a fringe movement, the Godse cult has come to occupy primetime.

Yet, much about Godse remains shrouded in mystery. The RSS, of which he was undoubtedly a member for much of his adult life, has disowned him whenever it was inconvenient for them to count him as one among its ranks. But it’s a claim that has then been hotly contested by Godse’s family members. The RSS has chosen not to propagate his life-story as it has in the case of its other ‘heroes’ such as V D Savarkar. Consequently, few, if any, know that Nathuram wasn’t even his given name.

Born in a Chitpavan Brahmin family in 1910, Godse had initially been named Ramachandra. He was his parents’ fifth child. But his three older brothers had predeceased him, with only a sister surviving infancy. This prompted his parents to bring him up as a girl for a few years which included wearing a nose-ring (‘nath’ in Marathi, his native tongue). Ramchandra thereby became Nathuram, and the name stuck. The birth, a few years later, of a younger brother, Gopal, a co-accused in the Gandhi assassination conspiracy, ended this strange practice, arguably leaving a permanent psychological imprint on Nathuram. Political psychologist Ashis Nandy in his book, At The Edge of Psychology, writes:

Perhaps it was given in the situation that Nathuram would try to regain the lost clarity of his sexual role by becoming a model of masculinity.

As a child, Godse’s family realised that he possessed the capacity for kapalik puja, a form of worship that required him to get into a trance. This led his family to surmise that a life of great achievement lay in front of him. But Godse faltered at the very first step, failing to clear his matriculation exams. A low-grade government job was, hence, out of reach.

Out of school, Godse drifted into a variety of odd jobs before a group of American missionaries taught him the basic nuances of tailoring, an admittedly ‘low-caste’ profession which nevertheless brought stability to Godse’s life and allowed him to pursue his real passion – politics.

Initially, he followed Gandhi. When Gandhi called for civil disobedience in 1931, Godse rose to bid for Gandhi and even went to prison for the cause. With time, his devotion to Gandhi and his brand of politics waned, and he warmed up to V.D. Savarkar, a fellow Chitpavan Brahmin, who had spent a few years imprisoned in the Andamans for participating in revolutionary activities in the first decade of the 1900s and had then turned rightwards post his conditional release.

The 1930s were a time of great political turmoil in India. The Congress, unable to meet the expectations of self-rule created by its relentless campaigns of the 1920s, struggled to hold its followers together and floundered in its attempts at shaping the political discourse. Some, like Periyar, quit the Congress altogether and chose to fashion their own political stance based on the great chasm that separated the North and South India. Others like Ambedkar, who was never in the Congress, baulked at the rampant casteism in Indian society as a whole and wondered what Indian self-rule when realised, would be like. Still others, like Jinnah and Savarkar, began to fashion a brand of communal politics that set the stage for an eventual collision between two of India’s most prominent religious communities: the Hindus and the Muslims.

Godse gravitated to the RSS during this time and worked as a boudhik karyawah (field worker). He was also parallelly involved in the Hindu Mahasabha, an organisation that seeks to further the Hindu cause by opposing the Congress and its inclusive politics, most notably in the Quit India Movement of 1942.

In 1944, in his pursuit of furthering the Hindu cause, Godse became the editor of the newspaper titled Hindu Rashtra. As independence seemed closer, communalism became the order of the day. Jinnah demanded the creation of Pakistan and the Congress failed to drive home its message of an inclusive India that had a place for all. Godse’s politics became increasingly shrill during this phase. He expended much ink over the injustice that the Congress and its leader, Gandhi, were wantonly inflicting on the Hindu community.

Yet, Godse, like his mentor Savarkar, was a strange Hindu in his daily life. His childhood oracular visitations notwithstanding, the adult Godse was not an observant Hindu by any stretch of the imagination. He rarely went to a temple, read Hindu scriptures, or performed a puja. Almost atheistic in his beliefs, he had, after taking the vow of brahmacharya or celibacy at the age of twenty-eight, led a monk-like existence, participating in right-wing political discourse even as his tailoring business gave him a steady income. He had few friends. Coffee and Perry Mason novels were his only indulgences.

While Godse did not participate in the post Partition violence that raged throughout northern India, he approved of violence as a means for Hindus to defend themselves. For years, he had held the view that Hinduism needed to organise itself in the fashion of Semitic religions, by doing away with caste distinctions and developing a broad-based unity. He was fascinated with the RSS and their attempts to fashion an Indian organisation on the lines of a fascist regime. He saw Gandhi’s chatter, about love and brotherhood, as of little use. And when Gandhi batted for the Indian government to fulfil its financial obligations to Pakistan, it was too much to bear.

The old man had to be done away with, Godse decided. The rest, as they say, is history.

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