Before she became Savitri Devi, the Nazi ideologue who attempted to fuse Nazism with her interpretation of Hinduism, she was Maximiani Portas, a French-born woman who had consciously embraced Greece as her homeland.
Born in Lyon on September 30, 1905, Portas had a more complicated family background than is often claimed online. Her mother, Julia Nash, was English and came from Cornwall, while her father had an Italian mother and a Greek father. He was also a prominent member of Lyon’s sizable Greek community, which helped reinforce his daughter’s early attachment to Greece.
Long before Portas adopted an Indian name or developed the racial and religious theories for which she became notorious, Greece was already at the center of her political imagination.
Before India, there was Greece
Portas grew up during a turbulent period in modern Greek history. The First World War, the National Schism in Greece and the subsequent Greco-Turkish War formed part of the political background to her youth. According to historians, although she was French by birth, her sympathies lay strongly with Greece. Her later writings portrayed the actions of France and other Allied powers toward Greece as a formative political grievance.
Her Greek nationalism therefore predated her mature commitment to Nazism. It also shaped her academic interests. During the 1920s, she traveled in Greece and spent time in Athens while pursuing research connected with Theophilos Kairis, the Greek intellectual associated with the Greek Enlightenment and the revolutionary era.
The period foreshadowed themes that would dominate her later thinking: antiquity, nationality, religion and the idea of an Indo-European cultural heritage. Unfortunately, those themes would eventually be transformed into an explicitly racist ideology.
The decision to become Greek
The most striking expression of Portas’ identification with Greece came in 1928. In a letter written decades later, Savitri Devi recalled that on May 28, 1928, she gave up French citizenship in Athens and became a Greek citizen. She said Greek officials questioned why a highly educated young woman would abandon the professional opportunities available to her in France for a much less certain future in Greece.
Her account should be treated carefully because many of its details come from her own retrospective testimony. Nevertheless, the episode shows how seriously she took her adopted Greek identity. Her own description claimed that a Greek ancestor named Pavlos Portassi came from the Greek upper class of Constantinople and settled in Italy around 1790. That genealogy is best understood as Devi’s own account rather than independently established fact.
What is much clearer is that Greece became an identity she deliberately chose.
From Greek nationalism to racial mysticism
During the following years, Portas increasingly interpreted ancient Greece through racial theories then circulating in Europe. She became obsessed with what she believed was a common “Aryan” inheritance linking ancient European civilizations with India.
This was her ideological construction, not a conclusion supported by modern historical scholarship or representative of Greek culture. Her search eventually took her to India, where she adopted the name Savitri Devi. There, she interpreted Hindu traditions through the racial worldview she had already developed in Europe. Goodrick-Clarke describes her ideology as an unusual fusion of Aryan supremacism, antisemitism, Hindu religious concepts and National Socialism.
She married Indian publisher Asit Krishna Mukherji and associated herself with pro-Axis circles. Her interpretation of Hinduism was highly idiosyncratic and should not be confused with Hindu belief more broadly.
After World War II, her ideology became still more extreme. She portrayed Adolf Hitler as an almost religious figure, describing him within her own interpretation of Hindu cyclical history as an avatar engaged in a cosmic struggle against decline. She later traveled in defeated Germany, was arrested for pro-Nazi activity and became involved in international neo-Nazi networks. Her writings continued circulating among extremist groups long after Nazi Germany itself had disappeared.
Yet Greece remained part of her personal geography as she returned there during her later movements around Europe. Devi died in 1982 in Essex, England.
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