Hindutva and Violence tells the story of the place of history in Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s political thought. It examines Savarkar’s central claim that “Hindutva is not a word but a history.” For Savarkar, this history was not a total history, a complete history, or a narrative history. Its purpose was to trace key historical events to a powerful source – the font of motivation for “chief actors” of the past who had turned to violence in a permanent war for “Hindutva” as the founding principle of a Hindu nation. At the centre of Savarkar’s writings are historical characters who not only participated in ethical warfare against invaders, imperialists, and conquerors in India, but also became Hindus in acts of violence. He argues that the discipline of history provides the only method for interpreting Hindutva.