Vaibhav Purandare on book Hitler and India, myths around the Fuhrer, and the lasting romance for dictatorship in a democracy

It’s remarkable when you think about it: one of the perennial bestsellers at Indian train and bus stations is a memoir first published in 1925 by an Austrian-born German dictator who also happens to be one of the most despised men of all time. The enduring popularity of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf doesn’t necessarily translate into widespread support. But there are half-truths, distortions and outright lies associated with the man that somehow find favour with a wide cross-section of Indians, for various reasons. Journalist Vaibhav Purandare’s recently released Hitler and India (Westland Books) addresses not just the mythologies around Hitler, but also the grim reality of what the man himself truly thought of India and Indians — through archival material, speeches, interviews as well as the stories of many Indians who crossed paths with the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s. During a telephonic interview, Purandare spoke about the making of this book: the research, the discoveries that were surprising or fortuitous, as well as the shifting (but ultimately, cruel) attitudes of the Nazis towards India. Straight off the bat, I’d like to ask you: What, in your eyes, explains the enduring popularity of Mein Kampf among Indian readers? It has been a mainstay at small bookshops/stalls for decades now. Well, the answer is a combination of two or three things. One is plain ignorance; another is the romantic notions that Indians often have about dictatorship. In post-independence India, apart from the Emergency, which lasted less than two years, there never really has been any real dictatorial presence, let alone a man like Hitler. Then there’s the fact that Hitler fought against our colonial masters, the British, in WWII, so people get the wrong idea that he must have been in support of India’s independence. As you point out early on in the book, Hitler was definitely an unreliable narrator: historians now acknowledge the many falsifications about his past that are passed off as truth, not just in Mein Kampf but elsewhere, too. How much of a role does this play in the personality cult of Hitler? It plays a major role, no doubt. The Nazi propaganda machine, led by Goebbels, set the global benchmark for nefarious messaging. Image-building, the construction of popular mythologies, these guys were the ultimate practitioners of that kind of thing. If you see the case of India, a lot of people here have that picture of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose shaking hands with Hitler stuck in their head. Never mind the fact that Hitler avoided meeting Netaji for many years and their eventual meeting was also inconsequential, as it turned out. That picture is a literal Amar Chitra Katha panel, you know. It’s ‘popular history’. It must have been reproduced thousands of times in children’s magazines, textbooks. Exactly! So we have internalised this wrong idea that Hitler wanted to assist Netaji. As I have pointed out again and again in my book, Hitler had no desire whatsoever to meet any Indian leader, especially a leader who was pushing the case for Indian independence (like Netaji was). His idea of who was entitled to self-rule was rooted in racial superiority. And in the beginning of his regime, he was anxious not to displease the British Empire; he wanted them on his side, which also explains the few cases where Indian students being persecuted in Nazi Germany were released at the behest of the British. But let’s talk about the Bose-Hitler photograph for a minute, the actual meeting that is. It happened in 1942 and by then, Hitler must have needed new allies, desperately: why else would he suddenly agree to meet a man he had successfully dodged for many years? And how exactly did this photograph of a largely inconsequential meeting become such an iconic moment? To answer the second part of the question first, I think a big part of the romance around this picture has to do with the facts of Netaji’s life, especially his mysterious death a few years after that photograph was taken. People had this romantic notion that Netaji managed to secure Hitler’s help against the British. But Netaji was a pragmatist, a realist; he just wanted assistance against the British, he had absolutely no love for the Nazis. As for Hitler, after Operation Barbarossa went terribly wrong for him, he was in desperate need of new allies. He might have had his misgivings about Indians but he was ready to swallow his pride in order to avoid military defeat. But as to what transpired in the meeting between Hitler and Bose, we don’t know a whole lot. So that vacuum, that absence of information, also leads to people projecting their romantic notions onto that meeting. During the section about the Olympics in your book, you debunk an urban legend, or a pre-WhatsApp era WhatsApp rumour, if you will: the idea that Hitler offered the Indian hockey captain Dhyanchand citizenship after watching him play. When did you first come across this tidbit? I first found it in an online forum somewhere, but to my surprise when I was researching for Hitler and India, I found the same thing (Hitler offering Dhyanchand German citizenship) in a book about the Olympics, written by an Indian author. And there was no citation provided for the same — instead, the author added the all-important “allegedly”, as in Hitler allegedly offered Dhyanchand citizenship. I went back and looked very closely at Dhyanchand’s life, his letters, his autobiography, but there’s not a single reference, no evidence that this ever happened with him and Hitler. In fact, the autobiography clearly describes a meeting that the whole Indian team had with Hermann Göring; if Hitler had also met the team, would Dhyanchand leave him out and focus on Göring instead? Hitler would have surely merited a mention in passing, at least. Throughout the 1930s there were Indians, like the future anthropologist Irawati Karve, staunchly opposing Hitler’s ideas while in Nazi Germany as a student, and then there were situations like the one where a faction in Calcutta University offered to add Mein Kampf to the curriculum, provided the racist bits about Indians are removed. Given that the number of politically active universities in India was not huge back then, how do you explain these polar opposites arising from pretty much the same academic settings? So, for the early part of the 1930s there wasn’t a widespread awareness about Hitler’s ideas about India, or about his ‘superior race’ fixation in general. People wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, not least because he was seen as someone powerful enough to potentially help the Indian struggle for independence. Therefore, certain leaders and students at the Calcutta University (who were already looking for foreign assistance against the British) thought Hitler has some unfortunate misconceptions about India, but once we remove those he can be a friend to the Indians. Once Hitler made his racist views clear before the world, through his words as well his policies, people like Karve and many others were vocal in their opposition. The cases of many prominent Indians, like the screenwriter and journalist AG Tendulkar, and Saumyendranath Tagore (Rabindranath’s grand-nephew and a communist leader) are presented in your book as turning points of sorts — when even privileged, well-connected Indians were being persecuted in Hitler’s Germany, the average Indian immigrant didn’t stand a chance. That’s correct. It was a gradual process, Hitler realising his vision of racial hatred, racial discrimination and racial segregation. Indians were initially assured that they would be allowed to carry on skilled work, in factories, in shops and so on. But one by one all the avenues were cut off, and many Indians were randomly picked up off the streets or from their houses and detained without charges. AG Tendulkar even married Thea von Harbou, who wrote the famous movie Metropolis. But the Nazis eventually forced Tendulkar to leave Germany. So you can say that by the late 1930s, no Indian, privileged or not, was safe or welcome in Germany. Reading the last section of your book reminded me of something that happened in my home state of Jharkhand in 2004. The actor Dharmendra, then an MP candidate from the BJP, was campaigning somewhere in the state, and got flustered when some journalists kept asking him if he had converted in order to get married for a second time. Dharmendra lost his cool and said, “I wish I were dictator for five years, I would clean up all the rubbish in the country.” As a metaphor, wouldn’t you say this was almost too obvious — the ‘strongman’ actor wanting to become a dictator in real life? Why do you think Indians (and Dharmendra is as Indian as they come) retain this window of hope for dictatorship? I think that a lot of people, especially if they are frustrated or upset about something in their lives, project their need for structure onto the idea of ‘strong’ men and women as leaders. But the problem is, most of those people have never really met a strong man or woman up close, they don’t know what these strong men or women are actually like in real life. Add to that the fact that our democracy, like all democracies, is flawed. When people see institutions failing, or working against them for some reason, it leads to a certain resentment with the system. Lashing out and asking for dictatorship may not be a correct response, but it is a very human response.