Godse

[Artur Karp]

Those interested  in certain disquieting aspects of modern Indian political
discourse, may want to read  a 70's paper by Ashis Nandy "Final Encounter:
The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi"; published - together with five
other essays in: "At the Edge of Psychology. Essays in Politics and
Culture", Delhi 1980, Oxford University Press (and, again in OUP, in 1990),
pp. 70-98.

Gandhi, Nandy says,  "[...] was trying to fight colonialism by fighting the
psychological equation which a patriarchy makes between masculinity and
aggressive social dominance and between femininity and subjugation. To fight
this battle he ingeniously combined aspects of folk Hinduism and recessive
elements of Christianity to mark out a new domain of public intervention"
(74).
According to Nandy, "Nathuram Vinayak Godse [...] was a representative of
the centre of the society that Gandhi was trying to turn into periphery"
[76].
And further on: "Godse not only represented the traditional Indian
stratarchy which Gandhi was trying to break, he was sensitized by his
background to this process of elite displacement. Similarly, he also sensed
the other coordinate of the Gandhian 'revolution': the gradual legitimacy
given to femininity as a valued aspect of Indian self-definition. This
revaluation of femininity, too, threatened to deprive the traditional elite
like Godse of two of their major scapegoats: the Muslims and the British,
who had defeated and emasculated the Hindus and made them nirveerya or
sterile and napungsak or impotent. The theory of action associated with such
scapegoating was that the Hindus would have to redeem their masculinity by
fighting and defeating the Muslims and the British. [...]" (86)

Hoping this bit of information is found useful,

Artur Karp