Hindutva: The Essence of Sanatana Dharma

At dawn of the Bengal Renaissance, Chandranath Basu wrote the first full-length work titled Hindutva. Published in 1892—three decades before Savarkar’s eponymous political manifesto—this forgotten masterpiece offers a profoundly distinct vision of a rooted civilization. Here, Hindutva is neither a political creed nor a form of territorial nationalism. It is the living soul-force of an ancient, boundless civilization: the radiant essence of Sanatana Dharma itself. Basu presents Hindutva as the natural, indigenous term for the eternal way of the Hindus, boldly discarding the colonial label ‘Hinduism’. Far from being exclusionary and reactive, Basu’s Hindutva celebrates the unparalleled spiritual depth, aesthetic splendour, and inclusive genius of Hindu civilization—its unique power to harmonize opposites, embrace unity in diversity, and touch the infinite. It is a triumphant song of cultural self-assertion written amid colonial denigration to re-root and re-Hinduize a society drifting away under the onslaught of anti-Hindu theologies and ideologies. This first complete English translation restores Chandranath Basu’s original, deeply religious, and non-political Hindutva to the world, reclaiming the term from later appropriations and returning it to its pristine truth: Hindutva is Sanatana Dharma. Nothing less, nothing else.