Vinayak began his education at the local government school when he was six. A keen interest in reading everything from newspapers to books caught up fast with the precocious child. Soon, he taught himself English till the level of a grade three student in order to access the several books that he found at home. His natural genius was further honed and nurtured by his father, also a voracious reader. There is a lasting memory that Vinayak cherished of his childhood when he was seven or eight years old. Damodarpant would summon his entire family around him after dinner. What followed was an intense reading of the scriptures, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and Marathi and Sanskrit works such as Rama Vijay , Hari Vijay , Pandav Pratap , Shiva Leelamrit , Jaimini Ashwamedh , Bharat Katha Sangrah , along with bakhar s (chronicles) and powada s (ballads) of the heroic exploits of Shivaji, Rana Pratap and the Peshwas. These readings instilled a deep understanding of religiosity and historical consciousness in the impressionable minds of the children. This would be followed by a long and intense discussion in which Radhabai and her four children were encouraged to participate and share their views.
But Damodarpant was also a strict disciplinarian when it came to his children. He would teach Babarao English, something that the latter would seldom understand. This would anger Damodarpant so much that he would run behind him in the courtyard, holding his ears and making him repeat each word and its spelling till he got it right. Tatya would come to his elder brother’s rescue each time he faced their father’s ire and help him hide behind the altar of the family tulsi plant. Once something that Tatya did angered Damodarpant so much that he locked his son in a cupboard. Radhabai was distraught searching for her son all over the house before finding him unconscious in the cupboard. She then gave her husband an earful about how he should not be so harsh with the kids.
The image of this happy family was suddenly shattered in 1892. It seemed like just another day when the family was observing the shradh ceremonies of an ancestor. Radhabai, who was in her early thirties at the time, had suddenly taken ill with a high fever. Despite this, she completed all the chores in the kitchen, but fell unconscious immediately afterwards. In no time her pulse rate declined rapidly. She was diagnosed with cholera. Even as Damodarpant sat by her bedside with tears in his eyes, she summoned all her children, embraced them and gesticulated to their father to take care of them, and soon afterwards, passed away. 14 Vinayak was nine years old and later recalls in his memoirs that even the faintest memory of her face had faded away and that if she appeared in front of him in flesh and blood he would scarcely be able to recognize her at all. He was too young to even register the intensity of the tragedy that destiny had played on him and his siblings. After cremating her and returning home, Vinayak remembers that a potato curry had been prepared by a relative, and that he ate it with much relish, its taste remaining with him all his life. Evidently, the loss of a mother and the immense vacuum that it creates in an individual’s life had simply not sunk in for any of the children.
Damodarpant, who was constructing a big three-storey house for his family, quickly got it completed and moved there to escape the memories that haunted him in the old house. Bapu Kaka stayed back. Given that Damodarpant was a young man, barely in his thirties and with four children to look after, every well-wisher advised him to remarry. But he was vehemently against the idea and instead decided to play the dual role of a mother and a father to the little ones, trying his best to ensure that they did not miss her presence too much. From handling the family business to the kitchen, to putting them all to bed, it was a quick transition that Damodarpant was forced to make. As the eldest sibling, Babarao also had little option but to forget childhood and step up to being a responsible adult in the face of this crisis. He assiduously stood by his father and assisted him in all the chores including cooking.
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Right from his childhood, Vinayak found the caste system that plagued Hindu society reprehensible. In his own little way he broke these barriers. Despite being an upper-caste Brahmin, and a landlord at that, all his childhood friends were from poor backgrounds and belonged to the supposed lower castes. Parashuram Darji and Rajaram Darji, who belonged to the tailor community, were among his best friends. Their father owned a village theatre company where he donned female roles and sang melodious songs known as lavani s. The boys ate together and the Darjis’ mother treated Vinayak as her own son, showering him with all her love. Gopalrao Anandrao Desai, the son of the local land record officer, Vamanrao Dhopavkar, Babu Kulkarni, Tryambak Darji, Balu Kulkarni, Bhiku Banjari, Sawalaram Sonar, Bapu and Nathu were the other close childhood friends and associates of Vinayak. The favourite pastime of these boys was to jointly build a mock temple, install a deity in it, and participate equally in its worship and even take out a grand procession on a toy palanquin. These boys were all witness to the rising political awareness and the seeds of revolution germinating in their talented friend Vinayak. He was also an extremely voracious reader, much beyond his age. Vinayak insisted on reading aloud the books and newspapers he loved along with his friends and discussing them in depth, so that they enriched their knowledge together. The feeling of community living and progressing in harmony rather than in competition was thus a part of Vinayak’s character from a very tender age.
The streak of rationality and questioning tradition too came early to him. Once a multicoloured book on the shelf at home caught his attention and he decided to read it, despite it being in Sanskrit, of which he understood very little. When Damodarpant discovered that his young son was reading the Aranyaka s he was enraged. There was a superstition that reading the Aranyaka s at home forebodes evil for the reader’s worldly life and they needed to be read in seclusion in the woods. This left a lasting question in Vinayak’s mind. How could someone as intelligent as his father believe in such superstitions?, he wondered. Mocking the belief, he continued reading the book without anyone’s knowledge and proved to himself that this was just a fanciful and concocted tale.
History fascinated Vinayak from his childhood. A Short History of the World peered at him from the top of the bookshelf and he immediately lapped it up. Sadly for him, the first half of the book was torn and it began from Arab history. This instilled the eternal dilemma that every true and objective historian faces. Even if one were to reconstruct these destroyed pages, his young mind wondered, could one ever get to the story’s ‘beginning’? What about those stories that preceded the ones in print, those that never got written? Have we, in that case, as a civilization, lost them forever? This philosophy of his towards historiography finds a reference in his poem ‘Saptarshi’ in which he emphatically states that if we want to understand world history, we would at best get only a fraction of it, as the ‘beginning’ remains elusive forever. At an age when most of his contemporaries shuddered at the very thought of reading school textbooks, such were the profound thoughts that were finding root in Vinayak’s fertile, young mind.
The same bookshelf held forth several other treasures for him. Among the writings that caught his fancy was the monthly Nibandhamala written by Vishnushastri Krishnashastri Chiplunkar starting 1874. This was one of his favourites. Chiplunkar was a vocal spokesperson for assertive nationalism in Maharashtra. In this seminal work, he reminds the people of Poona of their glorious past and questions British rule. From translations of the Mahabharata, editions of the Kesari newspaper, a monthly journal titled Saddharmadeep and Homer’s Iliad to the Marathi poetry of several stalwart poets such as Moropant and Vaman, Vinayak ravenously devoured all the books. And, all of this even before he was eleven. He emulated Chiplunkar’s style in his own essays on several contemporary issues.
Poetry germinated in Vinayak when he was only eight years old. While he employed all the poetic metres in Marathi of Ovi, Phatka and Arya styles, it was Moropant’s Arya metre that attracted him the most. Unfortunately, his teachers and the school headmaster were far from appreciative of, or understood, his poetic genius and dismissed it as a gimmick. An earlier head
master had been sympathetic to Vinayak’s poetic talents. While he made the young lad run errands for him, he also trusted him immensely. Vinayak was given the most trustworthy task of handling the school seal and also the slightly meagre job of keeping a watch in school while the teacher took a lazy siesta. In return, Vinayak got a patient hearing to all his compositions in Arya. But the man who succeeded this headmaster, a poet himself, had a peculiar aversion to Vinayak. When the boy took his poems to him, the headmaster threw them back after a glance, snapping that merely stringing words together did not make one a poet. Savarkar rues in his memoirs that all his life he singularly missed that loving mentor who could hold his hand and show him the path. But not the one to be disheartened, he kept at it and even sent his poems to several newspapers of the time. It was a proud moment for him and the entire family when his first poem ‘Swadeshi ki Phatkaar’ appeared in the newspaper Jagat Hitecchu. It seemed like sweet revenge to everyone who mocked him and his efforts. Little did the editor of the newspaper know that the poet he had published was just twelve years old!
Due to his interest in reading the scriptures, history, poetry and epics, Vinayak would sometimes fall back on his homework. But he devised an ingenuous way of circumventing this problem. He would come late to class on the day he had not finished his homework and sit at the very last bench. By the time his turn came, he would have finished the work, while others were submitting their answers, thereby also managing to emerge first in class, winning the accolades of teachers.
His penchant for reading newspapers gave Vinayak a window to the happenings in contemporary Maharashtra and the country. It was a turbulent period that witnessed numerous events, all of which caught his attention.
Socio-political situation in Maharashtra
A significant demographic change that occurred in Maharashtra after 1818 was the rapid decline of Poona, the erstwhile capital of Peshwa glory, in every walk of public life. Several rich sawkar (banker) families who had also accumulated significant wealth suddenly lost their eminence. Disbanded members of the Peshwa army loitered jobless. Replacing Poona in its eminence, the city of Bombay began to emerge as a modern metropolis of cosmopolitanism and economic growth. With the opening of British trade with China in the 1830s, Bombay was the veritable bridge in the commercial lifeline of the East India Company stretching from Liverpool to Canton. Textile industries began to be set up here. The first cotton mill was started in 1851 by Kawasji Dawar; by 1880 the number of mills rose to forty-three, and to seventy-three by 1885. 15 Significantly, the movers and shakers of this new economic resurgence were largely non-Maharashtrians. The British, Parsis, Bhatias and Khojas dominated the Bombay textile industry, while the Marathi speakers were relegated to the status of workers in the mills, whose plight was beyond miserable. In education too, Bombay stole a march with the then governor, Mounstuart Elphinston, establishing a network of educational institutions. It was only from the 1870s that Poona began to stage a comeback in the socio-political narrative and presented a contrast to Bombay on almost every issue. While Bombay presented a progressive, liberal and moderate viewpoint on several issues, Poona became the mouthpiece of conservative and, sometimes, extremist trends.
One of the pioneers who shifted the axis of importance to the Maharashtrian cultural capital of Poona was Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901) after his transfer to the city in 1871. A liberal thinker and judge in the Bombay High Court, he was active in campaigns to promote women’s education and to end the taboo surrounding widow remarriage. Through several social, political and cultural institutions and his own oeuvre of prolific writings, he advocated social reforms, criticized the British economic policies, and insisted on industrialization and capital investment through swadeshi or home-grown initiatives. Around the same time, the Sarvajanik Sabha established in Poona in 1870 under the leadership of Ganesh Vasudev Joshi (popularly known as Sarvajanik Kaka) began to play an important role as the mouthpiece of Poona’s intellectuals, and through them, the Marathi-speaking citizens of the Presidency. From petitioning governments to intervening in matters related to Indian representation in governance to famine relief and social reforms, the Sabha, with which Ranade too got deeply involved, tried to build a new Poona narrative in Maharashtrian politics.
In 1880, a group of young graduates who were inspired by Vishnushastri Krishnashastri Chiplunkar opened the New English School at Poona. The principal objective was to make English education accessible and affordable to a large cross section. They found a unique way to overcome the problem of lack of funds. The teachers serving in the school agreed to work gratis. M.B. Namjoshi, who ran the Deccan Star newspaper, offered his services by merging it with the school. A vernacular newspaper was also in the works. The profits from the press were meant to subsidize the activities of the school. By early 1881, under Chiplunkar’s leadership, Bal Gangadhar Tilak headed the activities of the school. 16 A spirited young man, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, joined them soon. They started the publication of two newspapers—the Mahratta and the Kesari . In no time, the school became a success and financially viable. This inspired the founders to establish the Deccan Education Society in 1884 and by the end of the same year, Fergusson College.
Even though the gentlemen had come together with the larger objective of spreading education, ideological differences—particularly between Tilak and Agarkar—soon began to surface. While the Kesari carried articles advocating social reform and government legislation to regulate Hindu society, the Mahratta of the same week under Tilak’s pen would passionately urge the contrary. 17 Their squabbles on every issue of social and political importance were public. Finally, by 1888, a frustrated Agarkar decided to start his own English-Marathi newspaper, Sudharak , assisted by his young accomplice, Gopalkrishna Gokhale, who had joined the Society in 1886. Agarkar wrote bitter letters, some possibly in the heat of the moment, complaining of Tilak’s attitude and what he termed as ‘self-glorification at the cost of honesty, unity, friendship, public duty, and several other social virtues’. 18 The ill will among hitherto comrades eventually blew up in the face of the Society after Agarkar’s alleged misuse of funds given by the Holkar Maharaja of Indore to the Society. 19 This ended with Tilak’s resignation after a hotly contested board meeting. He quit the Society frustrated and deeply disappointed at his own failure to stamp his influence, ideas and leadership on his associates. But Tilak took away with him the two newspapers—Kesari and Mahratta . These newspapers were to prove invaluable assets for him in both launching a vindictive tirade against his betrayers, and also enhancing his own political mastery and influence in the politics of the Deccan. The battle lines between the competing ideological positions of the moderate, liberal, self-flagellating reformist and the extremist, fiercely nationalist and Hindu-conscious were firmly drawn.
Through his newspapers and his political activities, Tilak adopted a unique strategy to make Hinduism, as well as Maharashtra’s historical icons, relevant to contemporary times. Positing himself as a sentinel of nationalistic values, his newspapers combined praise of Hindu society and the glories of its hallowed past with criticisms of the degraded present, along with a beacon of hope for a better future. His popularity rose due to his championing the protests against the controversial Scoble Bill of 1891, also known as The Age of Consent Act, that forbade consummation of marriage with a Hindu girl under the age of twelve, making it a punishable offence. The Bill was part of the reforms agenda of Ranade, Gokhale, Agarkar and others. But given its sensitivity and the impact it would have on traditional Maharashtrian households, Tilak’s fierce opposition to the fact that the British were interfering in the social and religious lives of Hindus won him a lot of popularity.
Tilak also threw his weight behind the celebration of the Ganapati festivals in Maharashtra. After the fall of the Peshwas in 1818, public festivities had petered out, but continued to be celebrated quietly in domestic and temple contexts. It was not until the 1890s that the festival was revitalized for large-scale pub
lic involvement, lasting over ten long days. Bhausaheb Lakshman Javale, a renowned Ayurvedic doctor of Poona, along with some of his friends—Dagdusheth Halvai, Nanasaheb Khasgivale, Maharishi Annasaheb Patwardhan, Balasaheb Natu, Ganapatrao Ghoravadekar and Lakhusheth Dantale—started a small-scale community celebration of the Ganapati festival by erecting a makeshift pandal in Poona in 1892. This came to be called the Bhau Rangari Ganapati Mandal. Tilak approved of this revitalization to unify the Hindu community. He enhanced the scale of the festival and widely publicized it through his newspapers. He thereafter became the much-recognized icon of the Ganapati festivities.
In 1894, Tilak began his own massive Ganapati celebrations, installing a pandal in the courtyard of the Kesari newspaper press in Vinchurk Wada. This also enabled Tilak to circumvent British colonial laws against political gatherings and disseminate his views within the rubric of a religious festival. Many of these Ganapati idols were depicted in a heroic fashion slaying a demon. These hidden transcripts made effective use of religious icons to convey veiled political messages, where the demon being slayed was a personification of the British, and Ganapati, the remover of obstacles that came in the path of freedom.
Savarkar Page 4
