Hitler ‘worship’ in some ‘elite’ Kolkata homes?
If Britain-based historian Nicholas Goodricke-Clarke is to be believed, German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler was “compared to Kalki, the last avatar of Vishnu” by an Indian spiritualist, practitioner of occult and Nazi sympathiser from Kolkata, Savitri Devi.
Hitler was even worshipped in elite Bengali homes in Kolkata, says the writer at a time when Bollywood actor Anupam Kher will be essaying the role of the Nazi dictator in a new biopic to be directed by Rakesh Ranjan.
In 1982, Ernst Zundel, the founder-proprietor of the Neo-Nazi Samisdat Publishers in Toronto, brought out in a card-flyer announcing the availability of two five-hour recorded cassettes of live interviews with a spiritualist and the out-of-print edition of Savitri Devi’s book, The Lightning and the Sun. Card-flyers were sent across the world announcing the publishing “milestone”.
It said: “Hitler cult revealed! Discovered alive in India: Hitler’s guru. You can now purchase the complete set of tape cassette recorded, live interviews with Hitler’s guru Savitri Devi at her home in India.”
It was also the year Savitri Devi died. When historian-writer Clarke, a professor of western esotericism at the University of Exeter in southern Britain and the author of several books on occultism, esotericism and the history of their intersection with Nazi politics, came across the flyer, he was intrigued by the idea of a Hindu occultist espousing the Furher’s Nazi religious ideology in pre-Independence India.
Clarke decided to follow up the card-flyer. The consequence was a stunning revelation of Hitler’s ideological roots in Hindu philosophy and the Indian spiritualist’s “interpretation of Nazi philosophy” in a book, Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism published by the New York University Press. Savitri Devi, born Maximiani Portas in Lyons in 1930, married a Kolkata-based Bengali Brahmin intellectual Asit Krishna Mukherji, and wrote several books on Hitler and Aryan-Nazism. “From 1937 until to the early 1940s, her work on behalf of Hindu Mission involved her lecturing widely on popular Hinduism in Bengali and Hindi in Bengal, Bihar and Assam. At this time, she was already developing her own Aryan-Nazi religion, sprinkling her lectures with references to Mein Kampf and seeking correspondence between Hitlerism and Hinduism as supposed joint heirs of ancient Aryan wisdom,” Clarke said. “During the 1930s, when India was chafing under British rule, the restrictions imposed on Indian nationalists led many to regard Soviet Communism and the Third Reich with its Aryan racial doctrine and the holy Swastika sign as potent alternatives. the writer said.
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Swami Vivekanada has said
dhritiman deb
21 Jun 2010 - 19:04
Swami Vivekanada has said clearly that some races are biologically and intellectually superior than others. It is nature's rule and no civilisation in the world can undo this. Having said that one cannot impose his supremacy on others and the inferior has all the right to defend himself and in the process emerge stronger than before, the allied emerged stronger militarily after the war and the Germans emerged stronger economically . I don't see anything wrong in whatever Savitri Devi might have believed or practised, and Britain-based historian Nicholas Goodricke-Clarke, must cut the sensationalism and remember that there's is the culture which advocates free thinking the most.
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