Tilak was born in July 1856, the son of a schoolteacher and petty landowner. The family moved to Poona when he was ten. He completed high school, then graduated from Deccan College with first-class honours. Apart from his native Marathi, he was formidably fluent in Sanskrit and English. In 1880 he started teaching in a school. The next year, he began publishing two newspapers with his friend Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, one in English, the other in Marathi. The polemical tone of their articles attracted much comment as well as several libel suits. In 1882 both Tilak and Agarkar were sentenced to four months in prison for defaming the diwan (chief minister) of the princely state of Kolhapur.
Agarkar and Tilak founded the Deccan Education Society in 1884. Six years later, Tilak left the society for more openly political work. The rift between Agarkar and Tilak was also related to their different attitudes to gender relations—whereas Agarkar (and Gokhale) thought that Hindu women should get a modern education, Tilak had a more conservative view, believing that they were home-makers who had to subordinate themselves to the needs of their husbands and children. By the late 1880s Tilak was also involved in the cow-protection movement, which sought to ban the eating of beef by Muslims on the grounds that it offended Hindu sentiments.
Tilak’s first major work was an attempt to establish the antiquity of the Rig Veda, to demonstrate that the Hindus were civilized and sophisticated while the rest of humanity, and especially the Europeans, were still illiterate barbarians. In 1893 his revivalism took a more formal shape, through his promotion of a festival devoted to the worship of the god Ganapati, or Ganesh. Previously a private domestic affair, observed in homes and temples, Tilak turned the festival into a mass celebration on the streets of the towns and cities of western India, featuring processions where the deity was led along by young men. Tilak also began another festival, to celebrate the memory and achievements of the medieval warrior-chieftain Shivaji.
Tilak was much more hostile to British rule than Gokhale. He saw it as leading to the decline and emasculation of India and Indians. He rejected the idea that ‘the people of Asia will always remain slaves of the foreigners’. In 1897 Tilak was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for preaching disaffection against the Raj. After his release he travelled through south India, Ceylon and Burma. From these journeys he concluded that there was a common Hindu core to social practice and customs throughout the subcontinent, and that (as he put it in a speech at the Ganapati festival in 1900) ‘Hinduism is of higher worth than other religions’.
In the same year, 1900, the viceroy, Lord Curzon, noted with satisfaction that the Congress had settled into a placid annual routine of earnest and dull speeches by well-meaning but ineffectual people. ‘One of my ardent desires,’ remarked Curzon, ‘is to assist it [the Congress] to a peaceful demise.’ Tilak played a crucial role in invalidating this prophecy. He was helped by Curzon himself, in particular by the viceroy’s decision to partition the province of Bengal in 1905, with a view to weaning the Muslims of the eastern part of the province away from the Congress cause. The opposition to the partition was combined with the Swadeshi movement, which opposed the import of foreign goods into India. In these struggles, Tilak played a leading part. He demanded a tariff of 10 per cent on imports to promote Indian enterprise and called for a common language to promote national unity.
Where Moderates like Gokhale asked young men to serve, Tilak asked them to protest and if necessary, go to prison. In this respect, the sarcasm and sharpness of Tilak’s writings are in contrast to the understated reasonableness of Gokhale. As the Poona militant put it in a speech of 1897, ‘God has not conferred upon foreigners the grant inscribed on a copper plate to the kingdom of India.’ In a speech in Calcutta in 1906 Tilak insisted that ‘love of nation is one’s first duty. Next comes religion …’ Claiming that ‘no nation can equal India’ in the antiquity of its history and the depth of its cultural traditions, he tended to believe that India was (as his biographer Stanley Wolpert puts it) ‘God’s chosen nation’.
In 1908 Tilak was charged again with sedition and with intensifying racial animosity between Indians and the British. He was defended by the brilliant Bombay lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The defence could not completely annul the evidence contained in Tilak’s polemical articles. In the event, he was sentenced to six years in prison and deported to Burma. When they heard of the sentence, the textile workers of Bombay downed tools in a spontaneous strike that shut down seventy mills. While in Mandalay prison, Tilak wrote a major and still influential work on the meanings of the Bhagavad Gita.
Tilak came out of jail in 1914, run-down in health and spirit. The fire of his early years was now much attenuated. He was more accommodative of British rule: where he had once thundered that ‘swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it’, he was willing to settle for Dominion status within the British Empire, rather than full independence. However, he continued to be active in politics, forming a Home Rule League in 1916. The same year he was charged once more with sedition. He was defended once again by Jinnah, this time successfully, and acquitted of the charges.
Tilak was a militant, populist leader, who did a great deal to encourage young Indians to join the national movement. (On the negative side, the Hindu tenor of his speeches and writings may have alienated Indian Muslims.) For much of his career, he insisted that political freedom must take precedence over all else, including or even especially social reform. This credo is manifest in an excerpt from a speech of 1916, which carries on a long-running debate with the recently deceased Gokhale: ‘If there is no svarajya there is no use labouring for the spread of female education, there is no use trying to secure industrial development and social reform also can avail but little … Power is the primary necessity and where there is power, there alone resides wisdom; wisdom never resides apart from power.’
Bal Gangadhar Tilak died in Bombay in August 1920.
The Need for A National Hero
In this essay, written as the Swadeshi movement was gathering momentum, Tilak writes of how the Maratha warrior Shivaji could serve as an exemplar and model for the Indian patriot opposing British rule.1
Hero-worship is a feeling deeply implanted in human nature; and our political aspirations need all the strength which the worship of a Swadeshi hero is likely to inspire into our minds. For this purpose Shivaji is the only hero to be found in Indian history. He was born at a time when the whole nation required relief from misrule; and by his self-sacrifice and courage he proved to the world that India was not a country forsaken by Providence. It is true that the Mahomedans and the Hindus were then divided; and Shivaji, who respected the religious scruples of the Mahomedans, had to fight against the Mogul rule that had become unbearable to the people. But it does not follow from this that, now that the Mahomedans and the Hindus are equally shorn of the power they once possessed and are governed by the same laws and rules, they should not agree to accept as a hero one who in his own days took a bold stand against the tyranny of his time. It is not preached nor is it to be at all expected that the methods adopted by Shivaji should be adopted by the present generation … No one ever dreams that every incident in Shivaji’s life is to be copied by any one at present. It is the spirit which actuated Shivaji in his doings that is held forth as the proper ideal to be kept constantly in view by the rising generation. No amount of misrepresentation can succeed in shutting out this view of the question from our vision; and we hope and trust that our Mahomedan friends will not be misled by such wily methods. We do not think that the Anglo-Indian2 writers will object to England worshipping Nelson or France worshipping the great Napolean on the ground that such national festivals would alienate the sympathies of either nation from the other, or would make the existence of amicable relations between the two nations an impossibility in future. And yet the same advice is administered to us in a patronizing tone by these Anglo-Indian critics, being unmindful of the fact that we have now become sufficiently acquainted with their tactics to take their word for gospel t
ruth. The Shivaji festival is not celebrated to alienate or even to irritate the Mahomedans. Times are changed, and, as observed above, the Mahomedans and the Hindus stand in the same boat or on the same platform so far as the political condition of the people is concerned. Can we not both of us derive some inspiration from the life of Shivaji under these circumstances? That is the real question at issue; and if this can be answered in the affirmative it matters little that Shivaji was born in Maharashtra … We are not against a festival being started in honour of Akbar or any other hero from old Indian history. Such festivals will have their own worth; but that of Shivaji has a peculiar value of its own for the whole country, and it is the duty of every one to see that this characteristic of the festival is not ignored or misrepresented. Every hero, be he Indian or European, acts according to the spirit of his times; and we must therefore judge of his individual acts by the standard prevalent in his time. If this principle be accepted we can find nothing in Shivaji’s life to which one can take exception. But as stated above we need not go so far. What makes Shivaji a national hero for the present is the spirit which actuated him throughout and not his deeds as such. His life clearly shows that Indian races do not so soon lose the vitality which [has] given them able leaders at critical times. That is the lesson which the Mahomedans and the Hindus have to learn from the history of the great Mahratta Chief; and the Shivaji festival is intended to emphasize the same lesson. It is a sheer misrepresentation to suppose that the worship of Shivaji includes invocations to fight either with the Mahomedans or with the Government. It was only in conformity with the political circumstances of the country at the time that Shivaji was born in Maharashtra. But a future leader may be born anywhere in India and who knows, may even be a Mahomedan. That is the right view of the question, and we do not think that the Anglo-Indian writers can succeed in diverting our attention from it.
The Necessity for A Militant Nationalism
The Swadeshi movement of 1905–07 brought to the fore a split between two tendencies within the Indian National Congress—known as the Moderates and the Extremists. In this speech delivered in Calcutta in January 1907, Tilak makes an eloquent case for the Extremist tendency. Note that the speech singles out, for special and sarcastic attention, Tilak’s rival and fellow townsman, Gopal Krishna Gokhale.3
Two new words have recently come into existence with regard to our politics, and they are Moderates and Extremists. These words have a specific relation to time, and they, therefore, will change with time. The Extremists of to-day will be Moderates to-morrow, just as the Moderates of to-day were Extremists yesterday. When the National Congress was first started and Mr. Dadabhai’s [Naoroji] views, which now go for Moderates, were given to the public, he was styled an Extremist, so that you will see that the term Extremist is an expression of progress. We are Extremists to-day and our sons will call themselves Extremists and us Moderates. Every new party begins as Extremists and ends as Moderates. The sphere of practical politics is not unlimited. We cannot say what will or will not happen 1,000 years hence—perhaps during the long period, the whole of the white race will be swept away in another glacial period. We must, therefore, study the present and work out a programme to meet the present condition.
It is impossible to go into details within the time at my disposal. One thing is granted, viz., that this Government does not suit us. As has been said by an eminent statesman—the Government of one country by another can never be a successful, and therefore a permanent, Government. There is no difference of opinion about this fundamental proposition between the Old and New schools. One fact is that this alien Government has ruined the country. In the beginning, all of us were taken by surprise. We were almost dazed. We thought that everything that the rulers did was for our good and that this English Government has descended from the clouds to save us from the invasion of Tamerlane and Chengis Khan, and, as they say, not only from foreign invasions but from internecine warfare, or the internal or external invasions, as they call it. We felt happy for a time, but it soon came to light that the peace which was established in this country did this as Mr. Dadabhai has said in one place—that we were prevented from going at each other’s throats, so that a foreigner might go at the throats of us all. Pax Britannica has been established in this country in order that a foreign Government may exploit the country. That this is the effect of this Pax Britannica is being gradually realized in these days. It was an unhappy circumstance that it was not realized sooner. We believed in the benevolent intentions of the Government, but in politics there is no benevolence. Benevolence is used to sugar-coat the declarations of self-interest, and we were in those days deceived by the apparent benevolent intentions under which rampant self-interest was concealed. That was our state then. But soon a change came over us. English education, growing poverty, and better familiarity with our rulers, opened our eyes and our leaders; especially, the venerable leader who presided over the recent Congress4 was the first to tell us that the drain from the country was ruining it, and if the drain was to continue, there was some great disaster awaiting us. So terribly convinced was he of this that he went over from here to England and spent twenty-five years of his life in trying to convince the English people of the injustice that is being done to us. He worked very hard. He had conversations and interviews with Secretaries of State, with Members of Parliament—and with what result?
He has come here at the age of eighty-two to tell us that he is bitterly disappointed. Mr. Gokhale, I know, is not disappointed. He is a friend of mine and I believe that this is his honest conviction. Mr. Gokhale is not disappointed but is ready to wait another eighty years till he is disappointed like Mr. Dadabhai.
He is young, younger than myself, and I can very well see that disappointment cannot come in a single interview, from interviews which have lasted only for a year or so. If Mr. Dadabhai is disappointed, what reason is there that Mr. Gokhale shall not, after twenty years? It is said there is a revival of Liberalism, but how long will it last? Next year it might be, they are out of power, and are we to wait till there is another revival of Liberalism,5 and then again if that goes down and a third revival of Liberalism takes place; and after all what can a Liberal Government do? I will quote the observation of the father of the Congress, Mr. A.O. Hume. This was made in 1893. Let the Government be Liberal or Conservative, rest sure that they will not yield to you willingly anything. A Liberal Government means that the Government or the members of the Government are imbued with liberal principles because they want to have the administration of their country conducted on those principles. They are Liberals in England, but I have seen Liberals in England come out to India to get into conservative ways. Many of the civilian officers from schools and colleges, when they come out are very good Liberals. Coming in contact with Anglo-Indian women, they change their views, and by the time they leave India they are conservatives. This has been the experience all over. So liberal or conservative, the point is, is any one prepared to give you those rights and concessions which intellectually a philosopher may admit to be fit to be conceded or granted to a subject nation in course of time? It is intellectual perception. A philosopher and statesman cannot be forced to do it. I laughed when I read the proceedings of the meeting in Calcutta, congratulating people on the appointment of Mr. [John] Morley to the Secretaryship of State for India. Passages were read from Mr. Morley’s books. Mr. Morley had said so and so in Mr. Gladstone’s life;6 Mr. Morley had said this and had said that; he was the editor of a certain paper thirty years ago, and he said so and so. I asked myself if it would not have been better that some of the passages from the Bhagavad Gita were so quoted. The persons to whom I refer are gentlemen for whom I have the highest respect. But what I say is, that they utterly misunderstood the position or absolutely ignored the distinction between a philosopher and a statesman. A statesman is bound to look to the present circumstances and see what particular concessions are absolutely necessary, and what is theoretically true or wrong. He has to take i
nto consideration both the sides. There are the interested Anglo-Indians and the Secretary of State is the head of the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy whose mouth-piece he is. Do you mean to say that when the whole bureaucracy, the whole body of Anglo-Indians, is against you, the Secretary of State will set aside the whole bureaucracy and give you rights? Has he the power? If he does, will he not be asked to walk away? So then it comes to this that the whole British electorate must be converted. So you are going to convert all persons who [have] a right to vote in England, so as to get the majority on your side, and when this is done and when by that majority the Liberal Party is returned to Parliament bent upon doing good to India and it appoints a Secretary of State as good as Mr. Morley, then you hope to get something by the old methods. The new Party has realized this position. The whole electorate of Great Britain must be converted by lectures. You cannot touch their pocket or interest, and that man must be a fool indeed who would sacrifice his own interest on hearing a philosophical lecture! He will say, ‘It is a very good lecture; but I am not going to sacrifice my interest.’ I will tell you a story. One of my friends who had been lecturing in England delivered a lecture on the grievances of India. A man from the audience came and asked him how many of them there were. The lecturer replied, ‘thirty crores’. The inquirer replied, ‘Then you do not deserve anything.’ That is the attitude with which an English workman looks at the question. You now depend on the Labour Party. Labourers have their own grievances, but they won’t treat you any better. On the contrary they will treat you worse, because British labourers obtain their livelihood by sending us their goods. This is the real position. This position is gradually recognized. Younger people who have gone to England like Mr. Gokhale are not so disappointed though those who went with him were, like Mr. Lala Lajpat Rai.7 I am entering into personalities but I cannot place these facts in an intelligent manner, if I do not give the names, although all of them are my friends. This is then the state of things. The new party perceives that this is futile. To convert the whole electorate of England to your opinion and then to get indirect pressure to bear upon the members of Parliament, they in their turn to return a cabinet favourable to India and the whole Parliament, the Liberal Party and the cabinet to bring pressure on the bureaucracy to yield—we say this is hopeless. You can now understand the difference between the old and the new parties. Appeals to the bureaucracy are hopeless. On this point both the new and old parties are agreed. The old party believes in appealing to the British nation and we do not. That being our position, it logically follows we must have some other method. There is another alternative. We are not going to sit down quiet. We shall have some other method by which to achieve what we want. We are not disappointed, we are not pessimists. It is the hope of achieving the goal by our own efforts that has brought into existence this new party.