A Warning to the Hindus

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A Warning to the Hindus is a 1939 booklet by Savitri Devi. It is a treatise written in an attempt to "...make both those Hindus who are not nationalists, and those Indian nationalists who do not care to call themselves Hindus, into Hindu nationalists." The authoress valued Hindu India as the last surviving remnant of ancient Aryan spirituality, and issued this as a warning that it faced the threat of submergence from alien influences.

After working at the Hindu Mission in Calcutta for eighteen months, and influenced by V.D. Savarkar's concept of Hindutva (of Hinduism as the national religion of India), she concluded that "...nothing is more necessary, to-day, than to revive, to exalt, to cultivate intelligent Hinduism through the length and breadth of India." The book attempts to alert Hindus to the threat of submergence and cultural alienation from ever more numerous Muslims. She thought the upper-caste Hindu response to decline complacent and feared Hindudom would suffer the same fate as pagan classical Greece.

The book expresses admiration of Hinduism for its cult of visible beauty, its broad artistic outlook on life and the universe, and its conception of God as creative and destructive: living expressions of Aryan Paganism lost in the West. She criticizes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as creedal religions and for being narrowly anthropocentric, in contrast with Hinduism, which is biocentric.

Seeing a major cause of Hindudom's numerical decline in the strictness of social rules (leading to outcasting, and refusing those who wished to return, or convert), she, echoing V. D. Savarkar, advised relaxing the caste system in order to develop Hindu solidarity and nationalism. She recommended that Indians "recover, along with their national consciousness, their military virtues of old: and to become a military race." [1]. She thought women should play an important role in fostering devotional nationalism in the home with shrines for Shivaji and other national heroes.

Contents 1 Publishing 2 Dedication 3 Contents 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Publishing

It was first published by Brahmachari Bijoy Krishna of the Hindu Mission in Calcutta in 1939 with a foreword by Sree G.D. Savarkar (brother of V.D. Savarkar). It was translated into six Indian languages, including Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi.

It was re-published in 1993 by Promilla Paperbacks (New Delhi, ISBN 81-85002-40-1).

[edit] Dedication

Dedicated to
Divine Julian
Emperor of the Greeks and Romans

May future India make his impossible
dream a living reality, from
one ocean to the other

[edit] Contents

• Foreword by Sree G.D. Savarkar
• Preface
• Introductory

1. Indian Nationalism and Hindu Consciousness
2. The Human Value of Hinduism: Free Scientific Thought Applied to Religious Matters
3. The Human Value of Hinduism: Indian Paganism, the Last Living Expression of Aryan Beauty
4. The Defence of Hindudom: A Danger Signal
5. Social Reforms
6. A Change of Mentality Among the Hindus: The Development of Nationalism
7. A Change of Mentality Among the Hindus: Preparation for Resistance.

[edit] References

• Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, pp. 52-58 (New York University Press, 1998, hardcover: ISBN 0-8147-3110-4, paperback: ISBN 978-0-8147-3111-6).
• The Saffron Swastika: The Notion of "Hindu Fascism" by Koenraad Elst, chapter V. "Savitri Devi and the "Hindu-Aryan Myth"", section vii. "A Warning to the Hindus". (New Delhi: Voice of India, 2001, 2 Vols., ISBN 978-81-85990-69-9).

[edit] External links

• Complete contents of A Warning to the Hindus
• Chapter three of A Warning to the Hindus