What most people know of the Hindu nationalist leader Vinayak Damodar Savarkar is limited to knowledge gleaned from the pages of school or college textbooks. That he was fluent in Urdu, let alone capable of writing poems in the challenging structure of the traditional ghazal, is certainly not something we were taught in class. So when singer-composer Tauseef Akhtar read the Hindutva leader’s ghazal Yeh Hindustan Mera, he knew he had to lend his voice to the beautifully worded poem.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar