Nearly a decade ago, Bhikhu Parekh, a British political theorist, lamented that there was “no sign of development of Indian tradition of political theory". He went on to argue that whatever little work was done was isolated and patchy, perhaps due to the reluctance of Indian theorists to comment on or develop each other’s ideas. Parekh was fairly right in his judgment, but not so much about its diagnosis. Much of this poverty, I will argue, is an offshoot of historicist endeavours that dominated modern Indian thought. Let me marshal two comparative theoretical snippets from Vinayak Savarkar’s political thoughtscape, which will illustrate the implications of historicism on the Indian tradition of political theory.

Let us begin our inquiry with a very simple question: Which scholarly strands have been primarily involved in studying and interpreting Savarkar’s writings over the past five decades? It is hard to mince the answer: historicists. Scholars from both history and political science have used historicist approaches to study his political ideas. The dominant scholarship on Savarkar has tended to reduce his writings into a historical discussion, his life, struggles, social and political activities, and other contextual material that serves to truncate the identity of Savarkar as a theorist and relegates him to a subject of political mockery. This historicist scholarship may have placated the relative inattention given to Savarkar as a historical figure par excellence, but it has contributed little in drawing attention to Savarkar’s highly original thinking, which is arguably worthy of serious consideration in the tradition of political theory.

In this essay, I argue that to be able to look at Savarkar as a more serious theorist, it is crucial to rescue him from historicists and explore his texts on their own merits. Indeed, this audacious attempt requires a methodological rigour that can enable a trans-historical study of Savarkar’s ideas. Towards that end, Leo Strauss’ corpus offers one such hermeneutic frame that can render it possible. In his magnum opus ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing’ (1952), Strauss favours a kind of interpretation of texts that is predicated on “the reading between the lines from an exact consideration of the explicit statements of an author." This fashion of interpretation does not militate against the context of........

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