Though Vinayak Damodar Savarkar has been a figure to reckon with through much of independent India’s history, his ideas have mostly been treated as being part of a fringe. A radical change in India’s political discourse has occurred with the rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s through the Ayodhya movement that led to the demolition of the fifteenth century Babri Mosque and more recently through Narendra Modi’s election as India’s Prime Minister. It is no longer feasible to ignore Savarkar’s ideas. As the father of Hindutva, he represents an idea of India radically different from and in direct contrast with the pluralistic Nehruvian idea that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of independence. In retrospect, Savarkar’s conceptualization of Hindutva as a history of violence deserves critical attention.