engaging biography of Savitri Devi, nee Maximiani Portas, the author, an historian of Nazi Germany, cuts through the clutter to produce a biography that is as readable as a World War II thriller by Robert Ludlum. Trained as an
intellectual historian at Oxford University, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is well known for a previous volume on this theme entitled The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology.
While the occult roots of Nazism are interesting enough as an object of study from the point of view of the history of ideas, it is, I suspect, worth posing a more fundamental question. Given that no one really believes Hitler to be an avatar of Vishnu, what exactly is at stake in taking this question seriously? Why would Goodrick-Clarke write such an exhaustive biography of the not-so-well-known Savitri Devi? Why does he bother to follow her career in the Neo-Nazi movement on its trail across the globe-from the innocuous beginnings of her in the world of scholarship to her pilgrimage to the sites of Nazi history in Austria and Germany? What is the fantasy that she embodied? How does it serve as a point of entry into the mytho-organic regression that is reflected in the ideology of the Nazi party in Germany and its offspring throughout the world?
Most importantly, what are we to make of the interface between this fantasy and the Indians who partook of it? Were Subash Chandra Bose, and other Hindu nationalists merely politically naive about Germany's war aims in pre-independence India? Or was there something about Nazi ideology that cut to the core of Hindu beliefs about Aryan mythology? Is the author justified in invoking the notion of the Nazi Brahmin merely because of the aberrations that Savitri Devi's career in India embodied?
Savitri Devi was born Maximiani Portas in Lyons, France in 1905. Her father was of mixed Mediterranean extraction with an Italian mother and a Greek father. Her mother was Cornish. Maximiani's loyalties lay with Greece, an inclination reinforced by her name. The author argues that the sense of confusion induced by her mixed genetic and cultural heritage may have played a part in her quest for an idealised Aryan heritage. She seems to have developed misanthropic attitudes in school and was convinced that humankind had fallen away from Nature, to mistakenly seek salvation through various forms of humanism. She was unashamedly pagan and seems to have imbibed an attraction to the fatalistic world views of Hinduism by reading the works of a nineteenth century French poet, Charles Leconte de Lisle (1818-1894), whose Poemes barbares (1862) helped her to shake off her Christian heritage.
Maximiani moved to Greece after the World War I and began to develop the Aryan obsessions that would govern the rest of her life. She developed a fascination for Germany and a hatred for the Allies. She was disappointed with the terms of settlement enunciated in the Treaty of Versailles. During her years as a student in Greece, she discovered that anti-Semitism came quite naturally to her. She found her encounters with the Jewish people both overwhelming and repelling during a trip to Palestine in 1929. She refused to believe that these exotic looking people were indeed the chosen ones of the Lord. "Against the background of her fierce Hellenistic nationalism and budding paganism, Portas heartily resented the central importance of this Jewish history in European thought and belief."
It seemed to her then, that Hitler's virulent campaign to rid Germany of Jews was not a national but an international problem. The monotheism of Europe's Judeo-Christian heritage seemed a violation of the pagan way of life that she cherished. By the time she completed her studies, she had read Hitler's Mein Kampf was seduced by its appeal to an essential Manichean opposition between the Aryan and the Jew. Hitler's views had been preceded by "more than a century of racial speculation in Europe". Maximiani decided to dedicate herself to the revival of Aryan culture. But, first, she had to find out: "who were the Aryans and where were they to be found in the modern world?"
The first impetus to her project came from the implicit analogy that she detected in the work of Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of ancient Troy. Schliemann refused to believe that Troy was merely a myth and had sought to locate it in historical space. He found it during excavations in Hissarlik between 1871-75. Interestingly enough, it was Schliemann and his anti-Semitic collaborators who discovered the significance of the Swastika and made it the symbol of the supreme Aryan god. Maximiani, who would walk past Schliemann's Place of Illion in Athens, told herself that Aryan civilisation would also reveal itself in history.
When the death of her father brought her a legacy, it was thus to Vedic India that she turned in pursuit of her project. Although it no longer existed anymore, she was persuaded by the idea that this ancient pagan culture would reveal itself in its modern equivalent. After all, in India, Christianity had not done away with the pagan values of the past as was the case with the Roman Empire in Europe. Maximiani "hoped to find in the religious rites, customs, and beliefs of India something of a living equivalent to the old Aryan cults of Europe...Her subsequent experience of Brahminical India during the 1930s laid the basis of her Aryan racial philosophy".
Maximiani arrived in India in 1932 at the age of twenty-seven to explore "a civilisation founded upon the idea of natural racial hierarchy"-and expecting India to give her a glimpse of what a Nazi regime might look like in the future when the racial question had been settled in favour of Aryan supremacy. On arrival at the southern port of Rameswaram she was fortunate enough to encounter the spring festival-where the dark people of the South seemed to venerate the fair gods of the North, like "an allegory of Nazi dreams of Aryan world dominion".
Maximiani's fantastic quest was not as idiosyncratic as it now appears. She was only retracing a pattern that had fairly respectable antecedents in European scholarship both during the Enlightenment and in the great tradition of Indology in the 19th century. The discovery of the Vedas by German philosophers and the quest for the philological roots of Indo-European had generated much excitement in Europe, especially amongst German romantic writers.
Friedrich and August Schlegel-the founders of German romanticism-were extremely interested in classical Indian civilisation. Friedrich Schlegel "was convinced that all culture and religion possessed an Indian origin and even declared that Egyptian civilisation was the work of Indian missionaries". After paying obeisance to the "philosophical clarity" of Sanskrit-a refrain that we hear even now in the idea that it has application in the software industry-Schlegel moved from philology to anthropology in one of the costliest turns of argument in the humanities.
Schlegel argued that all the great cultural achievements of Europe arose out of the migrations of the Aryans, people who embodied this culture and "as yet anonymous Indie-Nordic master race". Schlegel did not stop there. His usage of the term Aryan "caught on as he linked the root Ari with Ehre, the German word for honour". Although Schlegel had nothing of the nationalist or the anti-Semite in him-he was married to the daughter of the Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn-his readers couldn't help but be infected with the fantasies that congealed around this signifier. The Manichean allegories began when "the outlines of the Aryan-Semitic dualism first became apparent in 1845, when Christian Lassen (1800-1876), the pupil and protege of the Schlegel brothers, contrasted the Semites unfavorably with the Indo-Germans as unharmonious, egotistical, and exclusive".
By 1860 the Aryan myth became dogma in Europe. Philologists of the calibre of Max Muller and Ernest Renan had played their part in its consolidation. Three disciplines- anthropology, biology and philology-were ready to assure the learned European of his special place in history and to distance his culture from the Semitic peoples. The Aryans were finally ready to resume their place as "world leaders".
An interesting development at this time in the symbolism of Aryan superiority was the role of the Swastika in the cultural memory of Europe. Emile Burnof, who ran the French archaeology programme in Athens "claimed that the old Aryan symbol depicted the laying of sacred fires in Vedic India and was later adapted into the cross by Christianity...By noting that the Swastika had always been rejected by the Jews, Burnouf also recruited the Aryan symbol for anti-Semitism". The Swastika entered the occultist tradition and returned to India, as it were, through the work of Madame Helena Blavatsky, a Russian who was the founder of Theosophical Society in New York in 1879. Blavatsky's movement was to play a role in the development of a mystical racism in Europe.
But where exactly was the home of the Aryans? They are thought to be a people who moved around a great deal in Northern Europe and Asia in order to escape the ravages of the Ice Age in the Arctic. Maximiani drew her impressions on Aryan origins from the work of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Indian nationalist, although she remained conventionally European in the traditional belief that the Aryans drove South the dark-haired people they found in northern India.
On arrival at Rameswaram Maximiani journeyed northward, learning Hindi and Bengali. She taught at several places in India and took the name Savitri Devi. Her impressions of India were recorded in L'Etang aux lotus (1940). After making a pilgrimage to several temples in India, she settled down in Calcutta and married Asit Krishna Mukherji in June 1940. Her journeys convinced her that India would be receptive to the pagan culture of the Nazi regime which she believed was embodied in the person of Hitler, the latest avatar of Vishnu. How different after all was Brahminical culture-with its endless fears of contamination from those lower down in the racial hierarchy-from Nazism? Was there not, Savitri Devi wondered, a persuasive analogy to be made between the Aryan fear of the Jew and the Hindu fear of the Muslim? Was there not a parallel between German nationalism and Hindu nationalism?
Savitri Devi entered nationalist politics by offering her services to the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937. Swami Satyananada, the President of the Mahasabha, seemed to share the enthusiasm that many Hindus felt in the use of the Swastika by Hitler. It appears that it was he who communicated to Savitri Devi the idea that Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu. Her services to the Hindu Mission brought her into contact with several prominent workers like B.S. Moonje and V.D. Savarkar. Savitri Devi, in other words, was a prominent supporter of Hindutva from the very inception of this movements.
The fact that Hitler and his colleagues were not willing to recognise contemporary Hindus as representative of the ancient Aryans seems to have passed her by. Hitler himself thought that the Hindus were being downright presumptuous in claiming ownership of a title that conjured up images of blond, blue eyed wonders with perfect physiques-the types who staffed the Waffen SS. The emaciated, dark skinned, impoverished Hindu with his pot belly and effeminate ways was hardly a candidate for the designation of 'Aryan'. As Goodrick-Clark explains:
"In Mein Kampf (1925) Hitler made no secret of his contempt for anticolonial movements. He characterized Indian freedom fighters as 'Asiatic jugglers' and denied any parallel between Germany's desire to shake off the postwar Versailles system of reparations and anticolonial rebellion in India or Arab nationalist movements. For him, the oppressed nations were simply racially inferior."
While Hitler did recognise that the racial stocks of ancient India may have had a Nordic element in the remote past, he believed that they were genetically impoverished due to intermarriages with the native populations and not 'Aryan' in any meaningful Nazi sense of the term.
Despite the ill founded admiration of Subash Chandra Bose and the Hindu nationalists for the Nazis, Hitler had no real interest in India and was not willing to sacrifice any of his war aims to liberate British India if the Germans won the war. On the contrary, he believed that India was extremely well administered by the British and was not hesitant to give the devil its due. Hitler actually wanted to replicate the British model of administration in his occupied territories. He "believed that India must stay under the white man's dominion; considered British rule to be exemplary; and feared only its possible replacement by Soviet Russia. In his many later wartime references to India, he frequently cited British rule in India as the model for Germany's future domination of eastern Lebensraum in Russia."
It is obvious that both Savitri Devi and her compatriots in the Hindu Mahasabha were living in cloud cuckoo land. Subash Chandra Bose was unable to face up to this simple truth and had to make several visits abroad particularly to the Axis powers before it dawned on him that Hitler was absolutely indifferent to the freedom struggle in India.
These political realities never affected the fantasy structure that animated Savitri Devi. The primary reason appears to be her fixation with Paganism-a mythical possibility that was precluded by the rationalist character of Judeo-Christian thought.
"Her quest for the lost Aryan world, once wistfully admired in the dead culture of classical Greece, had at last found an object in a living culture. A golden age had become the present for her in exotic India and she could exclaim with delight: "we like this word 'Paganism' applied to the Hindu cults. It is sweet to the ears of more than one of the fallen Aryans of Europe, accustomed to refer to 'Pagan Greece'...as the most perfect expression of their own genius in the past".
She shared the irrational anxiety of the Hindu Mahasabha, which felt that Muslims would inundate the nation. To Savitri Devi, this scenario was analagous to the claustrophobia the pagans felt when surrounded by Christians during the reign of the apostate Roman emperor, Julian (circa 331-363 A.D.).
In her later years, Savitri Devi made a pilgrimage to the holy sites of the Nazi regime in Europe, including Hitler's birthplace in an Austrian village. She also contributed to the Odessa connection, the network of Nazis who were protected by Juan Peron in post War Argentina, and to neo-Nazi movements throughout the world. She died in 1982 in Essex.
Savitri Devi's written work on the primacy of Nature over man seemed to echo the concern of more respectable movements associated with the primitivist strains of New Age thought like Deep Ecology and the Greens. While these movements originated with strains of leftist thought, "their increasing tendency toward myth and despair indicate their susceptibility to millenarian and mystical ideas of the far right. Neo-Nazi and fascist activists now actively seek to infiltrate the ecological and esoteric scene. The cybernetic encirclement of man and his complete divorce from nature could well foster a more fundamental alienation."
The author concludes by arguing that "the pessimism of the Kali Yuga and her vision of a pristine new Aryan order possess a perennial appeal in times of uncertainty and change".
Wherein lies this perennial appeal? And how do we contest it? What exactly is the lure of this mytho-organic fantasy that must make a detour through Neo-Nazism in order to celebrate Paganism, and, by extension, homo natura? Are these merely uneconomic historical digressions or is there something essentially fascistic in such appeals? Why must a celebration of paganism yoke the ancient Hindu god Vishnu with Hitler? Given that this claim is neither historically verifiable nor falsifiable, in what ways does this invocation act as a metaphorical vehicle for the pagan fantasy?
Metaphorical vehicles are rarely innocent and the identification of a modern tyrant with an ancient Hindu deity is no doubt an aberration. According to the legends, Hitler is precisely the sort of person that Vishnu would like to put out of business. Why then did Hindu organisations sanctify such a mythical identification? Is it merely because they believed that a strategic wartime alliance with the devil-in this case Hitler-would have to be sanitised in the form of an incarnation? Given that the Hindus had no truck with the Jews -after all, anti-Semitism is unheard of in India-what other purpose will such an incarnation serve but to mask the Hindu hatred for the local scapegoat- the Muslims?
The satisfactions of paganism are generally offered as a regressive form of romanticism to contest the excesses of industrial capitalism in the West. At times of economic uncertainty, there appears to be a strong need for the consolations of recollection of a time when humankind lived in harmony with Nature and life was much simpler.
But this Golden Age of intimacy takes a surprising turn. Nature and Nation join hands to essentialise the subject-a project that is endangered by the foreigner in whose presence there is a supposed loss of intimacy. This foreign Other-be he an immigrant or a member of the minority community-is always thought to be endowed with an alien jouissance. He is thought to enjoy his body in ways that are unfamiliar. He is thought to be either extremely lazy or extremely hard working. In the former case, he is wasting the taxpayer's money, in the latter case he is a threat to our jobs. In either case the Other is difficult to domesticate.
He is like a piece of the real that cannot be subsumed adequately in the symbolic. He is what Jacques Lacan terms an extimate object. The extimate object is that which resists intimacy: it embodies a jouissance that is difficult to calibrate in the ways of life identified with the majority. In the Manichean historiography of the Harvard historian Samuel Huntington, the extimate object of the New World Order has already been identified as the Muslim and has taken the place occupied by the Russians during the Cold War. This process of scape-goating is as ancient as the Old Testament. But it was in modernity that it took on the industrial modes of expression that are specific to the extermination of the Jews in the concentration camps of the Shoah.
The Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques Alain Miller points out that the Jew is the exemplary instantiation of the extimate object in the West, Racism is always exacerbated by proximity to the extimate object. But as Miller teaches us, is it not absurd to seek a historical space that is devoid of the extimate object whether we term it Jew or Muslim? For the structural underpinnings of the extimate object can be understood as the presence of the Real in the Symbolic. The Real, which cannot be sufficiently symbolised, is that which always returns to the same place. So the destruction of a community that is identified as extimate will merely result in the displacement of another community in its locus. Hindus will murder Hindus of other denominations and Muslims will split along the lines of Shia and Sunni. For extimacy represents nothing less than the radical alterity of the unconscious itself.
Since the alterity of the unconscious is identified in relation to the jouissance of the Other, we will have to learn to live without seeking a space that is completely devoid of the extimate. And the identification of an ancient deity as the mask of Hitler will not make the locus of the extimate object disappear whether we seek its Western expression in the Shoah or in the local celebration of Aryavartha.
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