M. S. Golwalkar

M. S. Golwalkar

Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar was the second Sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He has been widely noted to be the most prominent ideologue of Hindutva. One of the early leaders for the RSS group. authored the books Bunch of Thoughts and We, or Our Nationhood Defined.

About M. S. Golwalkar in brief

Summary M. S. GolwalkarMadhav Sadashiv Golwalkar was the second Sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He has been widely noted to be the most prominent ideologue of Hindutva. One of the early leaders for the RSS group. authored the books Bunch of Thoughts and We, or Our Nationhood Defined. He died on 21 June 1940, a day before Hedgewar announced that Gol walkar would be the next general secretary of the RSS. He was the only surviving son of nine children from a Marathi Karhade Brahmin family at Ramtek, near Nagpur in Maharashtra. His father was a former clerk in the Posts and Telegraphs Department, and ended his career as headmaster of a high school. He studied at Benaras Hindu University in Varanasi, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in 1927 and a master’s degree in biology in 1929. He went to Madras to pursue a doctorate in marine biology, but could not complete it because of his father’s retirement. He later taught zoology for three years at BHU. His students called him ‘Guruji’ because of his beard, long hair and simple robe, a practice later continued in a reverential manner by his RSS followers.

In 1938, he was asked to translate Savarkar’s 1934 Marathi language Rashtra Mimansa into English. His resulting book, The Nationhooddefined, was published in 1939. It was regarded as an abridged treatment of RSS ideology; the fact that it was not translated did not come to light until 1963. In 1939, at a Gurudshina festival, he gave a sheet of paper to RSS volunteers asking him to be leader of the organisation. A day before he died in 1940, he died of a heart attack at the age of 48. He is buried at the Rajpath in Nagpur, Maharashtra, with his wife and three children. He leaves behind a wife and two daughters. He also leaves a son and a son-in-law, both of whom are active in the Indian National Congress party and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a political party in Uttar Pradesh. He had a daughter and two step-daughters, who are now members of the Bharat Ratna and the Bahujan Samaj. He never married and never had any children of his own.