Godse’s first name – ‘Nathuram’ was not a common one. “Nath” (pronounced as N-uh-th) is an ornate semicircular nosepiece – an important component of traditional Indian female jewelry. Epidemics, Droughts, and Manmade Famines prevailed in the Indian subcontinent in the early 20th century. Along with the uncontrolled population expansion caused by the desire for a male kid. Even just simple, open ignorance, the utter British disregard for the food security and health of Indians was also present. When the impoverished got poorer, they became more offspring as they held the misconceived notion. Besides, more hands made light work and would alleviate their poverty. Mismanagement, tariffs and prohibitions, and resource diversions as mercantile and wartime measures have led to widespread malnutrition and starvation. Even among the middle-class, stillbirth, miscarriage, and maternal, infant, and neonate mortality rates were very high. Worse than they were two centuries prior.
Nathuram Godse’s Struggle
Vinayak Vamanrao Godse and Lakshmi, the orthodox Chitpavan Brahmin parents of Nathuram. They had already lost three male children, and a girl child was the sole survivor till that point. Their fifth child was born a few years later. Their parents, fearing a supernatural curse or jinx that selectively targeted their male children. It made a desperate bid to disguise and conceal their male child from the God of Death, Yama. In order to trick Yama’s dispatches, his parents raised him as a traditionally bejeweled girl. Dressing and treating him such, and altered his birthname ‘Ramachandra’ to ‘Nathuram’.
Godse’s parents quickly stopped giving him traditionally feminine treatment after they realised he had successfully avoided the pain of death for good. When they had another kid called Gopal, they reared him normally in accordance with conventional gender conventions. This left him in a very confused, shocked, and perturbed state. He was struggling with a perplexing gender identification and found himself in a precarious position. He now desperately sought a way to assert his masculinity and longed to prove himself – more to himself than to anyone else.
Nathuram Godse’s Masculinity Crisis
Delving deep in the psychoanalysis of Godse, esteemed political psychologist Ashis Nandy penned in his book, At The Edge of Psychology, “Perhaps it was given in the situation that Nathuram would try to regain the lost clarity of his sexual role by becoming a model of masculinity.” Conventionally, masculinity has been near-invariably associated and typecast with belligerence and aggression. His yearning for masculine expression led his former idol Gandhi to dwindle in his eyes. Pacifist influences and humanist ideals waned, and he became firmly convicted that Gandhi’s core virtues of pacifism and nonviolence – principles which he staunchly adhered to even in adverse, dire, and desperate times, posed a threat to the nation’s vigor and robustness.
He believed that aversion to aggression emasculated a nation, and this led him to transgress towards bellicose Hindutva ideology. He believed that Gandhi was making Hindus effeminate by selectively preaching inaction, subversion, and complaisance. This drove him to abandon his pen, and pick up the pistol, attacking the very ideologue he believed was rendering Indians, and Hindus in particular, effeminate. This assassination act, he believed would be a lasting and memorable expression and a public proclamation of his masculinity – an announcement and testament of his vigor to the world that would bring him acknowledgment and perhaps closure.
Hence, it was not merely religious and caste hegemony that shaped, impelled, and drove Godse – superstition, patriarchy, gender assertion, and fragile masculinity. Godse was quintessentially and holistically a chauvinist – in all senses of the word.
Leave feedback about this