Defiance: The Prison Memoirs of Savitri Devi

Defiance is Savitri Devi’s vivid and impassioned memoir of her arrest, trial, and imprisonment on the charge of distributing National Socialist propaganda in Occupied Germany in 1949. Sentenced to three years imprisonment, Savitri Devi was released early at the request of the government of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Defiance is Savitri Devi’s most readable book. It is not primarily a work of philosophy or history, but a gripping first-person narrative that often reads like a novel. Defiance does, however, contain Savitri Devi’s most profound and moving philosophical meditation, The Way of Absolute Detachment, in which she uses the teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita to console herself before the prospect of the destruction of her writings and to explain the proper Aryan view of the relationship between duty and practical consequences.

Reading Defiance, one quickly understands why the Allies imprisoned Savitri Devi and, once she was behind bars, tried to keep her away from the other political inmates: her spirit of defiance is contagious.

For years, Defiance was almost impossible to find. Published in a tiny edition by Savitri Devi’s husband A. K. Mukherji in Calcutta in 1951, it was distributed privately by the authoress to her friends and comrades. A second edition was published in 2008 by the Savitri Devi Archive. This third edition reprints the second with a few corrections.