Savitri Devi (born Maximiani Portas), a French-Greek thinker and mysticist who later became a spiritual icon of Nazism, helped popularise the idea that all civilisation had its roots in this Aryan “master race” in India. She travelled to India in the early 1930s to “discover the source of the Aryan culture” and converted to Hinduism while there.
She quickly integrated herself into India’s burgeoning Hindu nationalist movement by promoting theories that support privileged caste Hindus’ superiority over Christians, Muslims and unprivileged caste Hindus in the country. In 1940, she married Asit Krishna Mukherji, a Hindu nationalist and Indian supporter of Nazism who had praised the Third Reich’s commitment to ethnonationalism, seeing commonalities between the goals of the Hitler Youth and the youth movement of Hindu nationalism, Rashtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS).
