Savarkar
Page 9
Vinayak suggested that they needed a dual organization—a front-end entity that organized ‘peaceful’ activities like festivals and melas, which could have a wider societal outreach and become the hunting ground for talented youth with a nationalistic drive and organizational skills. Those chosen in this manner would then be a part of the core, secret armed revolution group. So on 1 January 1900, the trio started the ‘Mitra Mela’, or Group of Friends, as a front-end organization of the Rashtrabhakta Samuha. Slowly, people like Babarao, the Datar brothers, Varthak brothers, Aabaa Darekar and others joined the Mitra Mela. It met every week on Saturdays and Sundays; one speaker would be selected and detailed discussions followed every lecture. Initially, the topics were general, but Vinayak slowly began talking about politics, current affairs and the revolutionary zeal. His fiery speeches at the Mela meetings would stress on the need for an armed struggle. He opined that there was no point merely cutting leaves of a poisonous tree; one had to strike at the root to dismantle it. For such a task, one needed an axe and the person wielding it would have to risk his life.
The Congress, Vinayak said, kept harping on about cutting leaves and pouring milk (prayers and petitions) to the poisonous tree. According to him, following the path of the Congress and Gokhale—of peaceful petitions and prayers—might get a few Indians jobs and fanciful titles, but not total independence for the nation. Even Tilak’s initiatives and civil disobedience, Vinayak postulated, would get Indians a few rights, but not the ultimate goal of complete liberation. However, given the immense nationalism and work that patriots like Gokhale and Tilak had put in, Vinayak warned his team not to belittle their contribution, but to effectively fuse their ideologies and build on them. While one needed to be grateful to them for kindling the spark of freedom in the hearts of Indians, there was a need to go beyond, even if it took another hundred years to achieve that eventual goal, he exhorted. Even if the topics of discussions in the Mitra Mela meetings related to language, literature, economy, history, fitness, cow protection, or Vedanta, Vinayak would always steer them to the main theme of political freedom and armed revolution.
The initial meetings were held at Paage or Mhaskar’s house. Soon, they decided to have a permanent venue and the single room at Aabaa Darekar’s house was chosen, given its location atop Vishwamitra’s house. From the narrow lanes of Tilbhandeshwar, even finding this little room tucked away on the first floor, accessible only through a stair of creaky wooden steps, was difficult and this made it a perfect secret spot. The members decorated the place. The main portrait in the room was a painting of Shivaji Maharaj by the royal painter Ravi Varma. Pictures of the heroes of the 1857 uprising—Nana Saheb, Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi, Tatya Tope—and later revolutionaries like Wasudev Balwant Phadke, the Chapekar brothers and Mahadev Vinayak Ranade adorned the walls: a lineage of the armed revolutionaries of the country, of which the Mitra Mela members were the rightful inheritors. Mhaskar suggested toning down the revolutionary spirit in the room by putting up a portrait of the British emperor and empress too so that if the police ever raided the place no suspicions would be raised. But Vinayak strongly vetoed the suggestion, saying that arrest would be a better option than defiling the walls by hanging the portraits of despotic rulers. Hence a compromise was reached, and paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses were hung to camouflage the revolutionary spirit a bit.
Even though the little room was so closeted from the main road and voices would not carry, some members would loiter in the streets outside to check if they were being heard or spied upon. If ever the voices from the room were loud enough to be heard on the street outside, they would send a coded message inside to swiftly switch to safer topics. Talks on non-political issues were written down as well and these were archived, so that in the possibility of a raid it could be shown as a harmless, apolitical forum of young, intelligent men.
The objectives of the Mitra Mela were kept vague: ‘Striving for all-round development of our country.’ New members were selected by a majority of older ones after they were satisfied about the suitability of those willing to join. The Mela documented the list of enrolled members, taking care to keep the title blank so that the police did not get a whiff of what was under way. Slowly, when the government started getting suspicious of their activities, the Mela stopped writing or documenting anything, including the income-expense statements that used to be normally read out.
The Shivaji festival used to be an insipid affair in Nashik, but with the Mitra Mela and its mobilized youth, the utsav, or festival of 1900, was a grand one. During this occasion, Vinayak delivered a stirring speech:
Till now we Maharashtrians kept saying that Shivaji Utsav is only a historical commemoration and it has no political colour. But the festival that we have organized here in Nashik is both historical and political. Only those people, who have the capability to struggle for the freedom of their country just like Shivaji Maharaj, have the real right to organize and celebrate a festival commemorating his memory. Our main objective must therefore be to strive towards breaking the shackles of colonial rule. If our only aims are finding solace in foreign rule, earning fat salaries, be peaceful negotiators with the government on inconsequential issues such as lowering taxes, diluting some laws here and there, and secure ourselves enough to eat, lead comfortable lives, earn pensions and privileges—then this Utsav is not for you or for Shivaji, but that of the last Peshwa Baji Rao who capitulated to British might! Here we are invoking the god of revolution, Shivaji Maharaj, so that he may inspire and instil that energy in all of us. Depending on circumstances our means might change, but the end is non-negotiable and that end is total and complete freedom for our motherland. 4
The speech became the talk of town and Mitra Mela suddenly created quite an impression on the people of Nashik. The Ganapati festival soon followed and the Mitra Mela members got an idol of Lord Ganesha installed. Vinayak’s talks drew huge audiences. Aabaa Darekar wrote stirring lyrics, set them to tune and sang them. During the festival, the streets of Nashik reverberated with the chants of ‘Swatantrya Lakshmi ki Jay ’, or ‘Victory to the Goddesss of Freedom’—a slogan coined by Vinayak.
The Mitra Mela members had to select subjects of their choice, research them, read books on the topic, write essays and then lecture and debate on them in the weekly meetings. However, many rarely took this seriously and only came for bigger events, utsavs, processions or if a visiting celebrity’s lecture was organized. Vinayak insisted that people take part in these meetings and lectures to understand the history and context of the freedom struggle and revolution by becoming aware of what was happening inside and outside the country. These topics could not be discussed openly at educational institutions or public spaces and hence the Mitra Mela meeting was the best forum to equip oneself with knowledge and past experiences before planning anything big. Revolution was not a mindless activity; it had to be backed by strategy and knowledge. Vinayak resolved to hold these meetings weekly irrespective of the attendance. Many, including Babarao, who was initially not at all interested in politics or revolution and just came for his younger brother’s sake, slowly started becoming more regular.
However, all these activities did not hamper Vinayak’s studies. Towards the end of 1899, he got into high school in grade five and in a couple of months got promoted to grade six by doing well in the examinations. R.B. Joshi, the principal of Nashik High School, was an eminent scholar. He was a close associate of Gopalkrishna Gokhale. He, and all the other school teachers, knew about Vinayak’s multifarious extracurricular activities and praised him as the most talented boy in school who fared well despite these distractions.
Since most members of the Mitra Mela were young, Vinayak did not want their studies to suffer due to their involvement in the activities. He, along with a few others, would undertake teaching pro bono for those members who were weak in any subject and ensure they all passed examinations. Most of Vinayak’s day was spent reading newspapers, gathering knowledge on current politi
cal issues in India and outside and reading books outside the school curriculum. But even as the half-yearly or annual exams beckoned, for a month or two he would shut himself in a room and make a thorough and meticulous study of the subject. He passed his examinations with flying colours, much to the surprise of his teachers who had predicted failure because of his irregularity at school. Babarao would celebrate his younger brother’s success by distributing sweets in the neighbourhood and patting Vinayak’s back with love and pride—something that Vinayak recounts as the best reward he could ever aspire for.
After Damodarpant’s death, the young and inexperienced Babarao was taken for a ride by many people who usurped much of their family property and farms. There were debts to be cleared and Babarao wanted to take up a government job. To get a job, he needed to produce two security bonds of Rs 500 each. This was hard to get for a long time, but eventually he succeeded and got a job as a cashier in the famine relief department. He faced several hardships and insults but ensured that none of these troubles ever reached his younger brothers, confiding only in his wife Yesu. They would run out of provisions at home, and Babarao and Yesu would many a time starve themselves in order to feed Vinayak and Bal. At work, he soon found out that his department was steeped in corruption. Refusing to be a part of such misdeeds, he raised his voice. Consequently, he was dismissed from the job, even as the threat of mounting debts loomed large. This was when Yesu sold all her jewellery, except her traditional nose ring that her mother had gifted her during her wedding, to clear their debts. But when Babarao needed to pay the fees for Vinayak’s education, he hesitatingly asked her to part with this last ornament. Without a murmur, she handed it over to him as it was for the cause of her favourite brother-in-law’s education. No wonder Vinayak was deeply attached to his sister-in-law. In a poem written to her in 1909, he states:
Mateche Smaran hou na dile, Shrimati Vahine Vatsale!
Tu Dhairyaachi asasi moorti! Maazhe Vahini, Maazhe Sphurti!
O! Loving sister-in-law, you never made me feel the absence of my mother
A symbol of bravery and sacrifice, you are my perennial inspiration!
Yesu even lost a child because she neither took care of herself nor did she get adequate nourishment. The only beacon of hope for Babarao and Yesu was Vinayak and his bright future.
Babarao was not at all worldly-wise and everyone who owed the family money managed to easily con him. He once went to Bhagur to collect money from people to whom Damodarpant had lent money. One Karanjkar made up a story about a huge secret treasure buried by the riverbank and that he would have this excavated after performing a few rituals and donate the entire treasure to the Savarkars. He requested Babarao to give him a few hundred rupees to perform this ritual and the latter readily agreed and secured this money after much effort. They were to meet at the riverbank by night to dig out the treasure, but expectedly the con man never turned up. Babarao waited all night with great expectation, and even later was unwilling to acknowledge that the fellow was a rogue. He believed in the innate goodness of all human beings, but more often than not he was usually cheated because of his naivety.
Vinayak felt miserable about Babarao’s piteous condition and worried constantly about his elder brother having to finance his education. He wanted to quit studies and start working so that he could shoulder his brother’s burden. Once Vinayak ran a high fever and in a half-delirious state expressed his concerns about his education. This moved Babarao and he hugged his brother tight and assured him that he simply need not worry as long as he was alive. Vinayak decided to write to Kal ’s editor, S.M. Paranjpe, to get him any job that might be available at the newspaper desk. Mhaskar who knew Paranjpe decided to carry this letter to him, along with an introduction to Vinayak. 5 Without letting Babarao know, Vinayak even appeared for the public service exam that helped young men secure petty jobs of bookkeeping, accounting, etc., in district offices at a monthly pay of about Rs 15 to 20. He passed the examination as well, but Babarao was adamant that Vinayak should not discontinue his studies and that he was willing to put up with every hardship to ensure that his younger brothers were well educated.
In 1900–01 plague hit Nashik yet again. Babarao and Ramabhau Datar were at the forefront of providing relief to people. They literally carried corpses on their backs, taking them to the funeral grounds, as no one else was willing to perform this task. But when the epidemic lasted for more than two months, Vinayak’s maternal uncle, Bhikaji Sakharam Maohar, forced them to leave Nashik and come to their house in Kothur. Babarao stayed back to help the victims, but the rest of the family moved to a farmhouse owned by Jagirdar Annarao Barve on the outskirts of Kothur. While in Kothur, Vinayak delivered several stirring speeches, inspired people and soon a Kothur branch of Mitra Mela was established. Annarao’s son, Vaman Rao Barve, and his cousin, Balwant Rao, became its members. Soon, a Bhagur branch too came up, administering to its members the same oath of striving for freedom without caring for one’s life.
By the time the plague subsided and Vinayak returned to Nashik, Queen Victoria had died (22 January 1901), and this opened the floodgate of sycophantic Indians expressing their servile gratitude and condolences. Lengthy adulatory columns and obituaries were written in newspapers about how India had been orphaned by the death of her loving mother, the empress. Paeans were sung to the new emperor, Edward. This was nothing new. Such was the sycophancy towards the Empire among several Indians that when Lord Ripon had taken charge as viceroy in 1880, he was heartily welcomed by all and his carriage was reverentially pulled by the scholarly pandits of Kashi. 6 Paage and Mhaskar felt that it might be prudent to call for a prayer meeting in the deceased queen’s memory and declare loyalty to the new monarch, only to escape British suspicion. Although the Mitra Mela was just a year and a half old, the calls to freedom, the festivals and the rhetoric of its members, especially Vinayak, had caught British attention. While Vinayak understood his comrades’ motivation, he felt it was unnecessary as there was no reason for them to prove their character as being non-seditious just yet. He argued forcefully against the queen, whom he accused of being complicit in the massacre of Indians in 1857. His vehemence finally led to the cancellation of the proposed prayer meet.
When festivals in honour of Emperor Edward on his coronation were organized, the Mitra Mela and its volunteers secretly put up posters all over Nashik castigating the festivals and its organizers with provocative statements like ‘Why would you honour someone who had made your mother a slave?’ They would tear up the festoons and flags at pandals where such festivals were organized. When the head of one such festival committee declared King Edward as his father, the Mitra Mela posters mocked him, asking what the emperor meant to his mother. They were pasted by Vinayak and Babarao’s brother-in-law, Anna Phadke.
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In 1901, Vinayak completed grade six and got into high school. His passion for reading only increased with each passing year. He was now acquainting himself with the international histories of various kingdoms of the past and also biographies of revolutionaries from America and Europe. Whatever he read, he would make a quick synopsis of the content so that they were easier to revisit for future essays or talks. This in itself had taken the shape of a huge volume and he had titled it Sarvasaar Sangrah —the summary of everything—which had the distilled knowledge of different books. Sadly, this book too did not survive the future police raids. Even for the Mitra Mela talks, Vinayak prepared a summary sheet to serve as a ready reckoner. He spoke eloquently on diverse topics such as the dynasties of ancient Iran, the Moors of Spain, the Dutch Revolt in the Netherlands, and the lives of Italian revolutionaries Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi to an audience who had barely even heard of anything from outside Maharashtra. In his diary, he made a systematic list of all the books read in a year, pen pictures of people he met, and childhood memories and experiences. These diaries too were unfortunately destroyed during the time of the revolution and raids.
Vinayak had acc
omplished the feat of reading all the Marathi books at the Nashik Library, including those that were not easily comprehensible and hence necessitated a second read. His young mind struggled to gather the complete purport of Herbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianism . Many years later in England, when he asked people who had read Spencer in English, he realized to his amazement that the Marathi translations of Spencer’s works that he had read in Nashik had given him more knowledge than those who read the originals. Vinayak’s fertile mind also correlated these philosophies of Western writers with Indian writings. He firmly believed that Lord Krishna was the first proponent of this utilitarian theory as expounded in his words in the Gita or the Bhagavata. Vinayak had made a list of nearly twenty to thirty books that all members of the Mitra Mela had to read so that they were intellectually aware about world history, heroes such as Napoleon, Mazzini, Vivekananda and others, and events related to revolutions across the world. In addition, they also had to read the Kal , which had two sections ‘Tarun Italy’ and ‘Kheti-Kisaani’ related to revolutions in Europe and how international secret societies operated. Thus, he not only expanded his own knowledge and understanding but also his comrades’ in the Mitra Mela.
Alongside intellectual enrichment, exercise and physical fitness were a compulsory part of the regimen for Mitra Mela members. They had to ready themselves for struggles that involved languishing in jails, hunger, lashings and back-breaking hard work in captivity. Everyone learnt and practised swimming, running, staying hungry for a long time, trekking mountains and forests, among others. Vinayak had a frail and petite body since childhood and he had shaved his head like all Brahmin boys to maintain a pigtail. However, from the age of twelve to thirteen, physical fitness became his enduring interest—he regularly did yoga, surya namaskar, used dumbbells for his workout and managed several push-ups a day. He also learnt the martial arts of mallakhamb (traditional Indian pole gymnastics) and kushti (wrestling).