Discover the untold story of the RSS leadership with "The Saffron Surge" by Arun Anand, a captivating exploration of one of India's most influential and enigmatic organizations. Prepare to delve deep into the history, ideology, and leadership of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as Anand sheds light on its evolution and impact on Indian society and politics. Uncover the origins and growth of the RSS as Anand takes you on a journey through its formative years and emergence as a formidable force in Indian politics. With meticulous research and insightful analysis, he offers readers a nuanced understanding of the organization's ethos, principles, and goals. Explore the lives and legacies of the RSS leaders who shaped its destiny, from its founding fathers to the present-day stalwarts. Through in-depth interviews and firsthand accounts, Anand provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the RSS and the individuals who have guided its course. Take a closer look at the ideology and worldview that have shaped the RSS's approach to governance, social issues, and national identity. Through careful examination of its core principles and beliefs, Anand offers readers valuable insights into the motivations and strategies of the RSS leadership. The overall tone of the book is one of reverence and respect, as Anand celebrates the dedication, discipline, and vision of the RSS leadership. With its blend of historical narrative, political analysis, and personal anecdotes, "The Saffron Surge" offers a compelling portrait of an organization that has left an indelible mark on Indian society and politics. Since its publication, "The Saffron Surge" has been praised for its thorough research, balanced perspective, and engaging narrative style. It has become a trusted resource for scholars, journalists, and anyone seeking to understand the complex role of the RSS in shaping modern India. Designed for readers interested in Indian politics, history, and society, "The Saffron Surge" offers a comprehensive and nuanced exploration of the RSS leadership and its impact on the nation. Whether you're a student of politics or simply curious about the forces shaping contemporary India, this book provides valuable insights into one of the country's most influential organizations. In conclusion, "The Saffron Surge" is more than just a book—it's a window into the heart and soul of the RSS leadership and the ideological movement they represent. Join Arun Anand on this enlightening journey and gain a deeper understanding of the forces shaping India's political landscape. Don't miss your chance to explore the untold story of the RSS leadership. Grab your copy of "The Saffron Surge" by Arun Anand now and embark on a fascinating journey through the corridors of power and ideology.

Books is on Hindu Nationalism and its icons.

It was a court battle between the first Prime Minister of India Jawahar Lal Nehru and Organiser, an English weekly backed by the RSS that led to restrictions on freedom of expression which we are debating today. The RSS had defended the sacred Sikh Shrine ‘Darbar Sahib’ at Amritsar twice when Muslim League led mobs attacked it in 1947. Did you know that one single anti-India and pro-China book ‘India’s China War’ written by Anglo-Australian journalist Neville Maxwell shaped the global narrative against India for more than five decades. It was a Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner who challenged it and turned the tables on Chinese propaganda with his book ‘China’s India War’ but even Indians don’t talk about it. Everyone remembers the 1962 war when India lost to China but there was another war in 1967 on Sikkim border where India took the revenge of 1967 and defeated China. Most of us don’t even know about this great victory! Indians have been made to remember the 1962 defeat and forget the glorious victory of 1967. Many such stories which comprise the forgotten history of India are part of this book. This forgotten history of India has been buried deep down in the dusty archives waiting to be told.

On behalf of Professor Hugh Brady, Director and Senior Fellow, The Flag Research Center at the University of Texas School of Law, "Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique (Springer 2021) has been selected as the recipient of our Gherardi Davis Prize is presented for a significant contribution to vexillological research for the year 2021. This work was selected because of its breadth and depth in examining flags as meaningful transmitters of significant symbolic information concerning the origins, culture, self-image, and values of a society. We believe it represents a signal achievement in the study of flags that sets a new standard for research in the field." The Flag Research Center, founded in 1962, is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the human need to create and use symbols to express political, cultural, and social ideals through flags and flag-related material culture. The book deals with the identification of “identity” based on culturally specific color codes and images that conceal assumptions about members of a people comprising a nation, or a people within a nation. Flags narrate constructions of belonging that become tethered to negotiations for power and resistance over time and throughout a people’s history. Bennet (2005) defines identity as “the imagined sameness of a person or social group at all times and in all circumstances”. While such likeness may be imagined or even perpetuated, the idea of sameness may be socially, politically, culturally, and historically contested to reveal competing pasts and presents. Visually evocative and ideologically representative, flags are recognized symbols fusing color with meaning that prescribe a story of unity. Yet, through semiotic confrontation, there may be different paths leading to different truths and applications of significance. Knowing this and their function, the book investigates these transmitted values over time and space. Indeed, flags may have evolved in key historical periods, but contemporaneously transpire in a variety of ways. The book investigates these transmitted values: Which values are being transmitted? Have their colors evolved through space and time? Is there a shift in cultural and/or collective meaning from one space to another? What are their sources? What is the relationship between law and flags in their visual representations? What is the shared collective and/or cultural memory beyond this visual representation? Considering the complexity and diversity in the building of a common memory with flags, the book interrogates the complex color-coded sign system of particular flags and their meanings attentive to a complex configuration of historical, social and cultural conditions that shift over time. Advance Praise for Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative "In an epoch of fragmentation, isolation and resurgent nationalism, the flag is waved but often forgotten. The flag, its colors, narratives, shape and denotations go without saying. The red flag over China, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Tricolore are instantly recognisable and over determined, representing a people, a nation, a culture, languages, legacies, leaders. In this fabulous volume flags are revealed as concentrated, complex, chromatic assemblages of people, place and power in and through time. It is in bringing a multifocal awareness of the modes and meanings of flag and color in public representations that is particular strength. Editors Anne Wagner and Sarah Marusek have gathered critical thinkers from the North and South, East and West, to help know the essential and central - yet often forgotten and not seen - work of flags and color in narratives of nation, conflict, struggle and law. A kaleidoscopic contribution to the burgeoning field of visual jurisprudence, this volume is essential to comprehending the ocular machinery through which power makes, and is seen to make, the world."Kieran Tranter, Chair of Law, Technology and Future, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Australia "This comprehensive volume of essays could not be arriving at a more opportune time. The combined forces of climate change, inequality, and pandemic are causing instability and painful recognitions of our collective uncertainties about nationhood and globalism. In the United States, where I am writing these few lines, our traditional red/white/blue flag has been collapsed into two colors: Red and Blue. While these colors have semiotically deep texts, the division of the country into these two colors began with television stations designing how to report the vote count in the 2000 presidential election year creating "red" and "blue" parties and states. The colors stuck and have become customary. We Americans are told all the time by pundits that we are a deeply divided nation, as proven by unsubtle colored maps. To a statistician, we are a Purple America, though the color is unequally distributed. White, the color of negotiation and peace is rarely to be found. To begin to approach understanding the problems flagged in my brief account requires the insight of multiple disciplines. That is what Wagner and Marusek, wonderful scholars in their own work, have assembled as editors -- a conversation among scholars at the forefront of thinking about how flags and colors represent those who claim them thus exemplifying how to resist simple explanations and pat answers. The topic is just too important."Christina Spiesel, Senior Research Scholar in Law, Yale Law School; Adjunct Professsor of Law, Quinnipiac University School of Law, USA "Visuals, such as symbols and images, in addition to conventional textual forms, seem to have a unique potential for the study of a collective identity of a community and its traditions, as well as its narratives, and at the same time, in the expression of one’s ideas, impressions, and ideologies in a specific socio-political space. Visual analysis thus has become a well-established domain of investigations focusing on how various forms of text-external semiotic resources, such as culturally specific symbols, including patterns and colors, make it possible for scholars to account for and thus demystify discursive symbols in a wider social and public space. Flags, Identity, Memory: Critiquing the Public Narrative through Colors, as an international and interdisciplinary volume, is a unique attempt to demystify the thinking, values, assumptions and ideologies of specific nations and their communities by analyzing their choice of specific patterns and colors represented in a national flag. It offers a comprehensive and insightful range of studies of visual and hidden discursive processes to understand social narratives through patterns of colours in the choice of national flags and in turn to understand their semiotic, philosophical, and legal cultures and traditions. Wagner and Marusek provide an exclusive opportunity to reflect on the functions, roles, and limits of visual and discursive representations. This volume will be a uniquely resourceful addition to the study of semiotics of colours and flags, in particular, how nations and communities represent their relationship between ideology and pragmatism in the repository of identity, knowledge and history."Vijay K Bhatia, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Full Professor, Hong Kong "In all societies, colors play a critical function in the realm of symbolism. Nation societies perceive great significance in the colors of flags and national emblems. Colors constitute, in other words, sign systems of national identity. The relation of color codes and their relation to concepts of nationhood and its related narratives is the theme of this marvelous and eye-opening collection of studies. Flags are mini-texts on the inherent values and core concepts that a nation espouses and for this reason the colors that they bear can be read at many levels, from the purely representational to the inherently cultural. Written by experts in various fields this interdisciplinary anthology will be of interest to anyone in the humanities, social sciences, jurisprudence, narratology, political science, and semiotics. It will show how a seemingly decorative aspect of nationhood—the colors on flags—tells a much deeper story about the human condition."Marcel Danesi, University of Toronto, Full Professor of Anthropology, Canada

Tracing the growth of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) since its formation in the mid-1920s, the authors examine its ideology and training system. As the first significant book on its internal workings, this book is the prequel to RSS: A View to the Inside. It was for the first time in this book that readers received a glimpse into the inner workings of the RSS. Three decades later, the RSS is one of the most significant cultural organizations in India, making this book a powerful and important read.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) continues to make headlines, despite several books tracing its journey. Curiosity about the functioning of the RSS has increased phenomenally as swayamsevaks have risen to top positions in government and the Sangh's core ideas of Hindu Rashtra and Ekatmata have become the mainstream lexicon of our social and political space.

Of late; political compulsions have made Left and so-called secular parties run malicious propaganda about RSS’s role in independence struggle and malign its sterling record of public service. This book tells us that RSS was wedded to the cause of Swaraj since its inception. Dr. Hedgewar’s life and actions and the oath that swayamsevaks took clearly showed the commitment to freedom struggle. To convert this freedom into Swaraj; India required disciplined and brave spirited young men who would be dedicated to the national cause. British records clearly show that they were vary of RSS using its growing clout for independence struggle. Movement for freedom did not end with ‘Tryst with Destiny’ on 15th August; 1947. There were endless dark nights in this twilight period; when RSS workers were the biggest organised force apart from security forces who put their lives to risk to salvage whatever they could; of destroyed lives of millions. It is for people of India and history to judge whether these acts of bravery were patriotic or communal. The author highlights other factors that led to our Independence and underlines that it was not result of any one agitation or action but rose slowly over a wave that had built up on the back of cultural renaissance triggered by great spiritual leaders of Bharat. The Sangh & Swaraj by Ratan Sharda: This book delves into the historical and political aspects of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its role in the struggle for Indian independence. Ratan Sharda provides insights into the RSS's contributions and its relationship with the concept of Swaraj. Key Aspects of the Book "The Sangh & Swaraj": 1. Historical Exploration: The book offers a historical exploration of the RSS's involvement in the fight for Swaraj (self-rule) during India's independence movement. 2. Political Insights: It provides political insights into the RSS's ideology and its impact on the Indian political landscape. 3. Contributions to Freedom Struggle: Readers gain an understanding of the significant role played by the RSS in the struggle for Indian independence. Ratan Sharda is the author of "The Sangh & Swaraj." He is known for his research and writing on various socio-political topics, including the RSS and its historical context.