Bal Gangadhar Tilak

In News

Recently, the Prime Minister of India has paid tributes to Bal Gangadhar Tilak on his Jayanti.

About Bal Gangadhar Tilak

• Birth: 23^rd July 1856 at Ratnagiri (now in Maharashtra).
• He was a scholar, mathematician, philosopher and ardent nationalist with firm belief in Indian values and ethos. He helped lay the foundation for India’s independence by building his own defiance of British rule into a national movement.
• Early Life
  • He was born into a cultured middle-class Brahman family and earned bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Sanskrit and also studied law.
  • He taught mathematics in a private school in Poona, which became the basis for his political career when he developed it into a university college after founding the Deccan Education Society (1884).
    • The society aimed at educating the masses, especially in the English language, which he considered to be a powerful force for the dissemination of liberal and democratic ideals.
• Death: 1^st August 1920 in Bombay (now Mumbai)

Major Contributions and Significance

• He sought to widen the popularity of the nationalist movement, mostly confined to the upper classes at that time, by introducing Hindu religious symbolism and by invoking popular traditions.
  • For that, he started organising the Ganesh festival in 1893 and the Shivaji festival in 1895.
• Swadeshi was an important cause espoused by Tilak, in which he was supported by Lala Lajpat Rai and Bipin Chandra Pal, leading to the emergence of the famous triumvirate of those days, popularly known as Lal, Bal and Pal.

• When Bengal was partitioned in 1905 by Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, he supported the Bengali demand for partition’s annulment and advocated a boycott of British goods.
• In 1906, he set forth a programme of passive resistance, known as the Tenets of the New Party, with the hope to end the influence of British rule.
  • Those forms of political action (boycotting of goods and passive resistance) were later adopted by Mahatma Gandhi in his Satyagraha.
• He aimed for Swarajya (independence) and not small reforms so he attempted to persuade the Congress Party to adopt his militant programme, which led to his clash with the Moderates culminating in Indian National Congress’s split at the Surat Session in 1907.
  • The British government took advantage of the situation and prosecuted him again for sedition and inciting terrorism and deported him to Mandalay, Burma (Myanmar).

• In 1916, he set up the Home Rule League in Poona and gave the famous slogan “Swarajya is my birthright and I will have it.”
• In the same year, he rejoined the Congress Party and concluded the Lucknow Pact with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, which provided for Hindu-Muslim unity in the nationalist struggle.
• In 1918, he visited England and established firm relationships with the leaders of the Labour Party, which was the ruling party while India got freedom, justifying Tilak’s foresight.
  • He was one of the first to maintain that Indians should cease to cooperate with foreign rule, but he always denied that he had ever encouraged the use of violence.
• In late 1919, while attending a Congress meeting in Amritsar, he had mellowed sufficiently to oppose Gandhi’s policy of boycotting the elections to the legislative councils established as part of the reforms that followed from the Montagu-Chelmsford Report to Parliament in 1918.
  • Instead, he advised the delegates to follow his policy of responsive cooperation in carrying out the reforms, which introduced a certain degree of Indian participation in regional government.
• In tributes, Gandhi called him the “Maker of Modern India” and Jawaharlal  Nehrudescribed him as the “Father of the Indian Revolution”.
• Literary Works
  • He published The Orion or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas (1893) and The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903).
    • Both works were intended to promote Hindu culture as the successor to the Vedic religion and his belief that its roots were in the so-called Aryans from the North.
  • He tried to make people politically conscious through two weekly newspapers that he owned and edited viz. Kesari, published in Marathi and The Mahratta, published in English.
    • Through those newspapers, he became widely known for his bitter criticisms of British rule and of moderate nationalists advocating for reforms on Western lines.
    • He thought that social reform would only divert energy away from the political struggle for independence.
    • For his writings, he faced three trials in cases related to sedition and was imprisoned twice. The trial and sentence In 1897’s prosecution earned him the title Lokamanya (Beloved Leader of the People).
  • In the Mandalay jail, he wrote his magnum opus, the Srimad Bhagavadgita Rahasya (Secret of the Bhagavadgita), an original exposition of the most-sacred book of the Hindus.
    • He discarded the orthodox interpretation that the Bhagavadgita taught the ideal of renunciation and he emphasised more upon selfless service to humanity.

Source: PIB