Lokmanya Tilak was inarguably the tallest of the stalwarts of the pre-Gandhi era of the freedom struggle movement which ended with his death on 1 August 1920. Through a strange coincidence, this date had been fixed for the inauguration of Gandhiji's noncooperation movement, marking the beginning of the Gandhi era that led to India's independence twenty-seven years later.
Amongst Tilak’s contemporaries were names like Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917), Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915) and Pherozeshah Mehta (1845-1915). But the Lokmanya, according to Mahatma Gandhi, had become more popular than them as he was a “man with an iron will whose courage never failed him.”
On 4 August 1920, Gandhiji wrote in the Young India: “Let us erect for the only Lokmanya of India an imperishable monument by weaving into our lives his bravery, his simplicity, his wonderful industry and his love for his country.”
Bal Gangadhar Tilak was born in Chikalgaon in Konkan's Ratnagiri district on 23 July 1856. In 1867, his family migrated to Poona (now Pune) where he studied at the Deccan College and graduated from Elphinstone College, Bombay (now Mumbai). After studying law in Pune, he joined the faculty of the New English School which was inspired by the Jesuits. Along with Gopal Ganesh, he started two newspapers—Kesari (Marathi) and The Maratha (English). Before Tilak emerged into the political scene, there was no mass agitation or popular movement in the country. Even though the Indian National Congress (INC) had been founded in 1885, its leaders organised sessions only once a year, passing resolutions to petition the imperial government on various public concerns.
Tilak was the first national leader who declared that resolutions and constitutional methods were insufficient, and the only method that would awaken the government was mass agitation. As an initial step, he inaugurated the Ganpati and Shivaji festivals to inspire national pride and self-respect. Upon accusations of being a social reactionary, he clarified, “We desire to emphasise and preserve the national sentiment by giving due credit to all that is good in the old system but without detriment to progress and reform needed for our national uplift... The Shivaji festival and the Ganpati festival are in reality a means to keep up and maintain a proper pride in the doings of our ancestors, and it is a sheer misrepresentation... to stamp these movements as calculated only to strengthen orthodox prejudices.”
Tilak’s first INC meeting was in 1889, which he attended along with Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Tilak, who first faced incarceration in 1882 for four months, suffered many years in jail, the longest term being for six years from 1908 to 1914. It was during this last term in Mandalay jail that he wrote his commentary on the Bhagwad Gita, The Gita Rahaysa. Earlier, in December 1907, the Congress split into two with the Moderates capturing the party and forcing the Extremists (the re-Christianed Nationalists) out.
Though Tilak had taken an aggressive posture against Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta, he kept the doors open for compromise. Gokhale later emerged as a front rank leader of the Moderates, as opposed to Tilak, the future leader of the Extremists, who were not averse to using extra-constitutional methods to achieve their goal. Tilak opined that the INC should be open to all viewpoints, but the Moderates were in no mood for reconciliation. Pherozeshah Mehta, in particular, opposed the Extremists as he was accused of adopting a posture akin to the GOI. It took some years for the radicals to dominate Congress which only happened after Tilak was released from jail in 1914.
After his long stint in jail, Tilak was a changed man. He moderated his views and founded the Home Rule League, inaugurated in Belgaum on April 28, 1916. Since Tilak was convinced that “no other party but the Congress could be the proper institution for the national struggle,” he asked his followers to join the Home Rule League which had adopted the creed of the Congress.
A few months earlier, Annie Besant (who later became INC President) founded her own Home Rule League in November 1915. The year 1915 also saw the death of Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta, the two biggest leaders of the Moderates. Despite political differences, Tilak deeply mourned the death of these giants. Of Gokhale, he said: “This is the time for shedding tears, this diamond of India, this jewel of Maharashtra, this prince of workers is laid to eternal rest… Look at him and try to emulate him. Every one of you should place his life as a model to be imitated.”
Lokmanya Tilak’s most outstanding, yet unknown achievement, was his contribution to working out the famous 1916 Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League. This provided Muslims representation in the Imperial Legislative Council and provincial legislatures over their population percentage.
Besides Tilak, those who formulated the Lucknow Pact were Ambika Charan Mazumdar (then President INC), Surendranath Banerjee (former President INC), Annie Besant, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Mazrarul Haque and Raja of Mahmudabad. Though Malaviya opposed the Pact, Tilak had his way as the other members supported him. According to CS Ranga Iyer, a leading journalist of the day, “Tilak was the most religious, most learned in the Vedas and amongst the most Orthodox of the Hindus present there… yet he would not listen to anything against the Pact. Lokmanya Tilak's attitude was the deciding factor in the Hindu-Muslim settlement.”
The great nationalist leader, perhaps the greatest before Gandhiji, died on 1 August 1920. Three decades later, unveiling Tilak's portrait in the Central Hall of Parliament, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru concluded his tribute to him thus,
It was not my privilege to come into close contact with Tilak. When he was at the height of his career, I was away in a far country, still a student. But even there, his voice and his story reached us and fired our imagination. We grew up under that influence and were moulded by it. In a sense, India to the youth of that time was what had been presented by Tilak, through what he said and what he wrote, and, above all, what he suffered. That was the inheritance that Gandhiji had to start his vast moments with. If there had not been that moulding of the Indian people and India’s imagination and India’s youth by Lokmanya, it would not have been easy for the next step to be taken. Thus in this historical panorama, we can see one great man after another coming and performing acts of destiny and history which have cumulatively led to the achievement of India’s freedom. We meet here not only to unveil the picture of this great man, the Father of India’s Revolution but to remember him and to be inspired by him.
(Praveen Davar is the ex-secretary of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), ex-Army officer, a columnist and the author of Freedom Struggle and Beyond. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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