On the voyage back to India, Savarkar staged an attempt to escape from the steamship SS Morea and seek asylum in France while the ship was docked in the port of Marseille.

On return to India, Savarkar was sentenced to life terms of imprisonment totalling fifty years and was moved to the Cellular Jail in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

[12] After being released from his restriction to Ratnagiri district in 1937, Savarkar started traveling widely, becoming a forceful orator and writer, advocating Hindu political and social unity.

During his stay, Gandhi debated Savarkar and other nationalists in London on the futility of fighting the colonial state through acts of terrorism and guerilla warfare.

On 13 March 1910, he was arrested in London on multiple charges, including procurement and distribution of arms, waging war against the state, and delivering seditious speeches.

In addition, the British government had evidence that he had smuggled 20 Browning handguns into India, one of which Anant Laxman Kanhere used to assassinate the Nasik district's collector A.M.T.

A Bombay court tried him in the Nasik conspiracy case and sentenced him for life-imprisonment and transported him to the notorious Cellular Jail of Andaman Island and forfeited his property.

[39][40] Following the two trials, Savarkar, then aged 28, was convicted and sentenced to 50-years imprisonment and transported on 4 July 1911 to the infamous Cellular Jail in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Savarkar submitted his next clemency petition on 14 November 1913 and presented it personally to the Home Member of the Governor General's council, Sir Reginald Craddock.

[47] In view of Royal proclamation, Savarkar submitted his fourth clemency[48] petition to the British colonial government on 30 March 1920,[49] in which he stated that So far from believing in the militant school of the Bakunin type, I do not contribute even to the peaceful and philosophical anarchism of a Kuropatkin [sic.]

And as to my revolutionary tendencies in the past- it is not only now for the object of sharing the clemency but years before this have I informed of and written to the Government in my petitions (1918, 1914) about my firm intention to abide by the constitution and stand by it as soon as a beginning was made to frame it by Mr. Montagu.

Soon after independence, Syama Prasad Mukherjee resigned as vice-president of the Hindu Mahasabha dissociating himself from its Akhand Hindustan (Undivided India) plank, which implied undoing partition.

However, in 1939, the Congress ministries resigned in protest against Viceroy Lord Linlithgow's action of declaring India to be a belligerent in the Second World War without consulting the Indian people.

[66][67] In Bengal, Hindu Mahasabha joined the Krishak Praja Party led Progressive Coalition ministry of Fazlul Haq in December 1941.

Savarkar, a former president of the Hindu Mahasabha, was arrested on 5 February 1948, from his house in Shivaji Park, and kept under detention in the Arthur Road Prison, Bombay.

[72]: Notes  Badge insisted to Mr. Manohar Malgonkar that "even though he had blurted out the full story of the plot as far as he knew, without much persuasion, he had put up a valiant struggle against being made to testify against Savarkar".

[72]: Chapter 12 On 12 November 1964, at a religious program organized in Pune to celebrate the release of Gopal Godse, Madanlal Pahwa and Vishnu Karkare from jail after the expiry of their sentences, G. V. Ketkar, grandson of Bal Gangadhar Tilak,[75] former editor of Kesari and then editor of "Tarun Bharat", who presided over the function, gave information of a conspiracy to kill Gandhi, about which he professed knowledge six months before the act.

Under the pressure of 29 members of parliament and public opinion the then Union home minister Gulzarilal Nanda appointed Gopal Swarup Pathak, M. P. and a senior advocate of the Supreme Court of India as a Commission of Inquiry to re-investigate the conspiracy to murder Gandhi.

Pathak was given three months to conduct his inquiry; subsequently, Jevanlal Kapur, a retired judge of the Supreme Court of India, was appointed chairman of the commission.

[77] The commission was provided with evidence not produced in the court; especially the testimony of two of Savarkar's close aides – Appa Ramachandra Kasar, his bodyguard, and Gajanan Vishnu Damle, his secretary.

[82] On 22 November 1957, Raja Mahendra Pratap moved a bill in Lok Sabha to recognise the service to the country of people like Vir Savarkar, Barindra Kumar Ghosh and Bhupendranath Datta.

His condition was described to have become as "extremely serious" before his death on 26 February 1966 at his residence in Bombay (now Mumbai), and that he faced difficulty in breathing; efforts to revive him failed, and was declared dead at 11:10 a.m. (IST) that day.

[91] During his incarceration, Savarkar's views began turning increasingly towards Hindu cultural and political nationalism, and the next phase of his life remained dedicated to this cause.

"[95] According to Sharma, Savarkar's celebration and justification of violence against [British] women and children in his description of the Mutiny of 1857, "transformed Hindutva into the very image of Islam that he defined and found so intolerably objectionable".

[101] Focusing his energies on writing, Savarkar authored the Hindu Pad-pada-shahi[60] – a book documenting the Maratha empire – and My Transportation for Life – an account of his early revolutionary days, arrest, trial and incarceration.

[109] In a speech before a 20,000 strong audience at Pune on 1 August 1938, Savarkar stood by Nazi Germany's right to Nazism and Italy's to Fascism; their achievement of unprecedent glory in the world-stage and a successful inculcation of national solidarity justified those choices.

[110] By the year end, he was directly equating the Muslims of India with German Jews — in the words of Chetan Bhatt, both were suspected of harboring extra-national loyalties and became illegitimate presences in an organic nation.

[128][118] Historians including Rachel McDermott, Leonard A. Gordon, Ainslie Embree, Frances Pritchett and Dennis Dalton state that Savarkar promoted an anti-Muslim form of Hindu nationalism.

[135] In Kanpur, when 150 children and women were killed he quotes unemotionally as per Sharma in his native language that "the butchers entered Bibigarh ..and sea of white blood spread all over".

[139] One of the commemorative blue plaques affixed on India House fixed by the Historic Building and Monuments Commission for England reads "Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, 1883–1966, Indian patriot and philosopher lived here".