Bal Gangadhar Tilak
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Bal Gangadhar Tilak
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Bal Gangadhar Tilak ( pronunciation (help·info)), born as Keshav Gangadhar Tilak (23 July 1856 – 1
August 1920), was an Indian nationalist, journalist, teacher, social reformer,
lawyer and an independence activist. He was the first popular leader of the Indian
Independence Movement. The British colonial authorities
called him "Father of the Indian unrest". He was also conferred with
the honorary title of "Lokmanya", which literally means
"Accepted by the people (as their leader)".
Tilak was one of the first and
strongest advocates of "Swaraj" (self-rule) and a strong
radical in Indian consciousness. His famous quote, "Swaraj is my
birthright, and I shall have it!" is well-remembered in India even today. He also formed a close
alliance with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, later the founder of Pakistan, during the Indian Home rule
movement.
Early
life
Tilak was born in Ratnagiri
district of present day Maharashtra
(then British India). His father, Gangadhar Tilak was a school teacher and a Sanskrit
scholar who died when Tilak was sixteen. Young Keshav graduated from Deccan College,
Pune
in 1877. Tilak was amongst one of the first generation of Indians to receive a
college education .
Tilak was expected, as was the
tradition then, to actively participate in public affairs. He stated:
"Religion and practical life are not different. To take
Sanyasa
(renunciation) is not to abandon life. The real spirit is to make the country
your family work together instead of working only for your own. The step beyond
is to serve humanity and the next step is to serve God."
After graduating, Tilak began
teaching mathematics at a private school in Pune. Later due to ideological
differences with the colleagues in the new school, he withdrew and became a journalist
later.
He organized the Deccan
Education Society with a few of his college friends,
including Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Mahadev Ballal Namjoshi and Vishnushastri
Chiplunkar. Their goal was to improve the
quality of education for India's youth. The Deccan
Education Society was set up to create a new system
that taught young Indians nationalist ideas through an emphasis on Indian
culture.
The Society established the New English School
for secondary education and Fergusson College for post-secondary studies. Tilak taught mathematics at Fergusson College. He began a mass movement towards independence that was
camouflaged by an emphasis on a religious and cultural revival.
Political
career
Indian
National Congress
Tilak joined the Indian
National Congress in 1890. He opposed its moderate
attitude, especially towards the fight for self-government. He was one of the
most-eminent radicals at the time.
Despite being personally opposed to
early marriage, Tilak opposed the 1891 Age of Consent bill, seeing it as interference with Hinduism and a dangerous
precedent. The act raised the age at which a girl could get married from 10 to
12 years.
During late 1896, aplague epidemic spread from Bombay to Pune, and by January 1897, it reached
epidemic proportions. British troops were brought in to deal with the emergency
and harsh measures were employed including forced entry into private houses,
examination of occupants, evacuation to hospitals and segregation camps,
removing and destroying personal possessions, and preventing patients from
entering or leaving the city. By the end of May, the epidemic was under
control.
Even if the British authorities'
measures were well-meant, they were widely regarded as acts of tyranny and
oppression. Tilak took up this issue by publishing inflammatory articles in his
paper Kesari (Kesari was written in Marathi,
and Maratha was written in English), quoting the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita,
to say that no blame could be attached to anyone who killed an oppressor
without any thought of reward. Following this, on 22 June 1897, Rand and
another British officer, Lt. Ayerst were shot and killed by the Chapekar brothers and their other associates.
Tilak was charged with incitement to
murder and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. When he emerged from prison in
present-day Mumbai, he was revered as a martyr and a national hero. He adopted
a new slogan, "Swaraj (self-rule) is my birthright and I shall have it." (Marathi: [स्वराज्य हा माझा जन्मसिद्ध हक्क आहे आणि तो मी मिळवणारच!])
Following the Partition
of Bengal (1905), which was a strategy set out by Lord Curzon
to weaken the nationalist movement, Tilak encouraged the Swadeshi movement and the Boycott movement. The Boycott movement consisted of
the boycott of foreign goods and also the social boycott of any Indian who used
foreign goods. The Swadeshi movement consisted of the usage of goods produced
by oneself or in India. Once foreign goods were boycotted, there was a gap
which had to be filled by the production of those goods in India itself. Tilak,
therefore, rightly said that the Swadeshi and Boycott movements are two sides
of the same coin.
Tilak opposed the moderate views of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and was supported by fellow Indian nationalists Bipin Chandra Pal in Bengal and Lala Lajpat Rai
in Punjab. They were referred to as the Lal-Bal-Pal
triumvirate.
In 1907, the annual session of the Congress Party was held at Surat, Gujarat.
Trouble broke out over the selection of the new president of the Congress
between the moderate and the radical sections of the party . The party split
into the "Jahal matavadi" ("Hot Faction" or radicals), led
by Tilak, Pal and Lajpat Rai, and the "Maval matavadi" ("Soft
Faction" or moderates). Nationalists like Aurobindo Ghose,
V.
O. Chidambaram Pillai were Tilak supporters.
Imprisonment
in Mandalay
On 30 April 1908, two Bengali
youths, Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose,
threw a bomb on a carriage at Muzzafarpur,
in order to kill the Chief Presidency Magistrate Douglas Kingsford
of Calcutta fame, but erroneously killed two women travelling in it. While
Chaki committed suicide when caught, Bose was hanged. Tilak, in his paper Kesari, defended the revolutionaries and called for immediate Swaraj
or self-rule. The Government swiftly arrested him for sedition.
But a special jury convicted him, and the Parsi judge Dinshaw D. Davar gave him
the controversial sentence of six years' transportation and a fine of Rs 1,000.
The jury by a majority of 7:2 convicted him. On being asked by the judge
whether he had anything to say, Tilak uttered these memorable words "All
that I wish to say is that, in spite of the verdict of the jury, I still
maintain that I am innocent. There are higher powers that rule the destinies of
men and nations; and I think, it may be the will of Providence that the cause I
represent may be benefited more by my suffering than by my pen and
tongue". The judge sentenced Tilak to six years' transportation and a fine
of Rs. 1,000. In passing sentence, the judge indulged in some scathing
strictures against Tilak's conduct. He threw off the judicial restraint which,
to some extent, was observable in his charge to the jury. He condemned the
articles as "seething with sedition", as preaching violence, speaking
of murders with approval. "You hail the advent of the bomb in India as if
something had come to India for its good. I say, such journalism is a curse to
the country". Tilak was sent to Mandalay,
Burma
from 1908 to 1914. While imprisoned, he continued to read and write, further
developing his ideas on the Indian nationalist movement. While in the prison he
wrote the most-famous Gita Rahasya.
Many copies of which were sold, and the money was donated for the freedom
fighting.
Life
after prison
Tilak had mellowed after his release
in June 1914, because of the attack of diabetes
and also the ordeals faced in Mandalay prison. When World War I
started in August, Tilak cabled the King-Emperor in Britain of his support and
turned his oratory to find new recruits for war efforts. He welcomed The Indian
Councils Act, popularly known as Minto-Morley Reforms, which had been passed by British Parliament in May 1909,
terming it as "a marked increase of confidence between the Rulers and the
Ruled". Acts of violence actually retarded, than hastened, the pace of
political reforms, he felt. He was eager for reconciliation with Congress and
had abandoned his demand for direct action and settled for agitations "strictly
by constitutional means" - a line advocated by his rival Gopal Krishna
Gokhale. Tilak saw the spark in Mohandas Gandhi
and tried his best to convince Gandhi to leave the idea of "Total
Ahinsa" and try to get "Swarajya" by all means. Gandhi, though
looked upon him as his guru, did not change his mind.
All
India Home Rule League
Main article: All
India Home Rule League
Later, Tilak re-united with his
fellow nationalists and re-joined the Indian National Congress in 1916. He also
helped found the All
India Home Rule League in
1916–18, with G. S. Khaparde and Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Annie Besant.
After years of trying to reunite the moderate and radical factions, he gave up
and focused on the Home Rule League, which sought self-rule. Tilak travelled
from village to village trying to conjure up support from farmers and locals to
join the movement towards self-rule. Tilak was impressed by the Russian
Revolution, and expressed his admiration for Vladimir Lenin.
Tilak, who started his political life as a Maratha
propagandist, progressed into a prominent nationalist after his close
association with Indian nationalists following the partition of Bengal. When
asked in Calcutta whether he envisioned a Maratha-type of government for Free
India, Tilak replied that the Maratha-dominated governments of 17th and 18th
centuries were outmoded in the 20th century, and he wanted a genuine federal
system for Free India where every religion and race was an equal partner. He
added that only such a form of government would be able to safeguard India's
freedom. He was the first Congress leader to suggest that Hindi written in the Devanagari
script be accepted as the sole national language of India.
Social
contributions
In 1894, Tilak transformed the
household worshipping of Ganesha into a public event(Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav).
In 1895, Tilak founded the Shri
Shivaji Fund Committee for celebration of "Shiv Jayanti" or the birth
anniversary of Shivaji Maharaj, the founder of 17th century Maratha Empire.
The project also had the objective of funding the reconstruction of the tomb (Samadhi)
of Shivaji Maharaj at Fort Raigad. For this second objective, Tilak established
the Shri Shivaji
Raigad
Smarak Mandal along with Senapati Khanderao Dabhade II of Talegaon Dabhade, who became the Founder President of the Mandal.
Tilak started the Marathi weekly,Kesari in 1880-81 with Gopal Ganesh Agarkar as the first editor. Kesari later became a daily and
continues publication to this day.
Tilak said, "I regard India as
my Motherland and my Goddess, the people in India are my kith and kin, and
loyal and steadfast work for their political and social emancipation is my
highest religion and duty".
Books
In 1903, he wrote the book The Arctic Home in the Vedas.
In it, he argued that the Vedas could only have been composed in the Arctics, and the Aryan bards brought them south after the
onset of the last ice age. He proposed the radically new way to determine the exact
time of the Vedas. He tried to calculate the time of Vedas by using the
position of different Nakshatras. Positions of Nakshtras were described in different Vedas.
Tilak authored Shrimad Bhagvad Gita Rahasya in prison at Mandalay,
Burma
- the analysis of 'Karma Yoga' in the Bhagavad Gita,
which is known to be gift of the Vedas and the Upanishads.
As noted in Shree Gajanan Vijay,
he was devotee of Gajanan Maharaj of Shegaon. Many reference texts of his are available in the epic.
Legacy
- The Kesari is still published as a daily newspaper in Marathi.
- The Deccan Education Society that Tilak founded with others in the 1880s still runs much respected Institutions in Pune like the Fergusson College.
- The Public Ganesh festival (Ganeshotsav) has become a central part of the culture of Marathi Hindu communities throughout the world. Increasingly, other Hindu communities are also adopting the practice.
- Because of Tilak's efforts, Shivaji, the founder of Maratha Empire is the only figure from that era revered by contemporary Marathi masses and Hindu nationalist parties like the Shivsena.
- The Swadeshi movement started by Tilak at the beginning of the 20th century became part of the Independence movement until that goal was achieved in 1947. One can even say Swadeshi remained part of Indian Government policy until the 1990s when the Congress Government liberalized the economy.
- Tilak Smarak Ranga Mandir, a theatre auditorium in Pune was dedicated to him.
- In 2007, the Government of India released a coin to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
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