Poonam Sharma
In Nagpur, while India was still fumbling to define itself after centuries of foreign domination, there began a quiet revolution. The movement wasn’t political in form but spiritual in intent. It was the year 1925, and at the helm of affairs was Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a physician, freedom fighter, and thinker who felt that true independence could not come merely by throwing off British rule; it had to be reborn within the Indian soul itself.
From this conviction came the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, an organization which, though it had modest beginnings — a few young men sitting under a tree — would grow into one of modern India’s most powerful social and cultural movements.
Seeds of a Silent Revolution
Beginning in the early 20th century, India lay between colonial suppression and fragmentation from within. The First World War had ended, the Non-Cooperation Movement had failed, and the Hindu-Muslim divide had only deepened under British “divide and rule” policies. Amid this uncertainty, Dr. Hedgewar, the young Congress worker then, began to grow increasingly disillusioned.
He felt that India lacked discipline, unity, and moral strength. Political movements were emotive but very often reactive. Hedgewar believed that before a nation could fight for freedom, it had to rebuild its cultural foundation.
Thus, on Vijayadashami day, 27 September 1925, he brought together a few boys and young men in Nagpur’s Sukrawari Tank area and founded what he called the “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh” — a national volunteer corps. There were no slogans, no flags, and no speeches. Only a vision: to awaken a self-confident Hindu society that could stand united, disciplined, and selfless in the service of the motherland.
The Vision Beyond Politics
Unlike the Congress or any other nationalist group, the RSS did not focus its energies on protests and petitions alone. It laid great store by character-building through daily shakhas — physical training sessions in which volunteers took part in exercises, patriotic songs, and discussions on history and culture.
Subtle and yet revolutionary was Dr. Hedgewar’s approach: build men before movements. He believed political freedom was inevitable, but unless Indians developed inner strength and unity, freedom would collapse into chaos.
He once said that one left selfless and disciplined youth was worth much more than thousands of slogan-raising agitators-a feeling that shaped the RSS ethos for years to come.
Unexplained Mysteries and Less Well-Known Influences
Years spent in Calcutta exposed Hedgewar to secret revolutionary groups and the writings of Aurobindo Ghosh and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. These influences merged in his ideology of “spiritual militarization”—that is, a disciplined revival of India’s dharmic and cultural confidence.
Choosing Vijayadashami, the day of triumph of good over evil, to found the RSS was deeply symbolic as well. It hinted at a revival of dharma during a time of darkness, a cultural reawakening disguised as a humble social movement.
Hedgewar to Golwalkar: Expansion of the Philosophy
When Dr. Hedgewar died in 1940, the mantle of leadership fell upon M.S. Golwalkar, who was fondly called Guruji. A philosopher-saint by temperament, under him, the RSS acquired an intellectual and organizational backbone.
One of Guruji’s books, Bunch of Thoughts, expressed the RSS conviction that India was not a piece of land but a living civilization bounded by shared dharma, culture, and destiny. He thus visualized a Bharat that was essentially civilizational in its continuity, rather than religious or political.
Already an imposing grassroots network by the time India won independence in 1947, the RSS came under immense scrutiny and even a temporary ban following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Although the government found no evidence linking the RSS to the crime, the stigma forced it to go slow in coming out into public life.
The Turning Point: Golwalkar and Syama Prasad Mookerjee
It was in this post-independence environment that the historic meeting, destined to shape Indian politics for decades to come, occurred. On July 2, 1956, close to three years after the death of Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, reports emerged of how RSS, under Guru Golwalkar, had played a pivotal role in mentoring Mookerjee at the nascent stages of founding Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951.
A onetime cabinet minister in the government of Jawaharlal Nehru, Mookerjee had resigned in protest over Article 370 and the special status accorded to J&K. Disillusioned by Nehru’s appeasement politics and what he saw as compromises on national integrity, Mookerjee sought the guidance of Golwalkar.
These quiet, purposeful meetings laid the foundation of a political expression of the RSS’s cultural vision. Thus, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh was born-not as a political wing of the RSS but as the ideological reflection of the latter in the democratic arena.
The untimely death of Mookerjee in 1953, under mysterious circumstances in Kashmir, thus remains one of the great unexplained political tragedies of India. Yet, his collaboration with Golwalkar marked that point when the RSS silent social movement began influencing the political consciousness of modern India.
From Shadows to Strength
Over the next decades, the RSS grew quietly through education, labor, rural development, and tribal outreach. The group’s discipline and grassroots model inspired hundreds of affiliated organizations-collectively known as the Sangh Parivar. Even while keeping itself out of electoral politics, its ideology found resonance among leaders who would later shape India’s democratic future. The metamorphosis of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh into the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1980 completed a journey that began in the narrow bylanes of Nagpur – from silent shakhas to the corridors of Parliament. Legacy of an idea that lives Close to a century after its inception, the RSS continues to evoke both admiration and debate. To its critics, it is conservative; to its supporters, it is the soul of India’s civilizational revival. Beyond opinion lies a fact of history: that the RSS began not as a political ambition but as a cultural resurrection, born out of one man’s conviction that the nation must rise from within. Dr. Hedgewar left behind no wealth, no autobiography, and no monument — only a legacy of disciplined service and a belief that a nation’s strength lies in the character of its citizens. From Hedgewar’s quiet gatherings in 1925 to Golwalkar’s philosophical guidance and Mookerjee’s political courage, the story of the RSS is less about power and more about the endurance of an idea — that India, at its heart, is not a colony or a constitution, but a civilization awakening to its own eternal rhythm.
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