Tilak’s contemporary nationalist-journalists also include names like Subodha Chandra Malik and C. R. Das who brought out Vande Mataram. Its editor, Aurobindo Ghosh, along with the editor of Sandhya, B. Upadhyay, and editor of Yugantar, B. N. Dutt, had to face trial for espousing the cause of freedom.
In 1913, the fiercely patriotic journalist, Ganesh Shanker Vidyarthi, brought out a weekly, Pratap, from Kanpur. Krishna Dutt Paliwal started Sainik from Agra, which became a staunch propagator of nationalism in Western UP. In Lahore, Mahashaya Khushal Chand brought out Milap and Mahashaya Krishna started publishing Urdu journals, both of which helped in promoting the national cause. In 1881, Sardar Dyal Singh Majithia, on the advice of Surendra Nath Bannerjee brought out the Tribune under the editorship of Sheetala Kant Chatterjee. Bipin Chandra Pal also edited this paper for some time. Later in 1917, Kalinath Rai joined the paper as its editor.30
The journalist, editor, and nationalist closest to Tilak was Shivram Mahadev Paranjpe, his lifelong supporter. Kal was run along the lines of Kesari in terms of its publisher’s beliefs. The language that Paranjpe used was as strong as that of Tilak’s. About Tilak’s trial on 31 July 1908 Paranjpe wrote: There is no sense in saying that Mr. Tilak was sentenced according to law. There was a mockery of justice. It is sheer madness to argue that there was a possibility of obtaining justice where everything was going according to a pre-arranged plan. Everyone knows what inferences to draw from the fact that Mr. Branson closed his speech all of a sudden and Mr. Davar tried his level best to end the matter the same night and read out a charge to the jury which had been already written out. It is a wonder that the government found Mr. Tilak guilty though the Pioneer and the Civil and Military Gazette innocent. It is a consolation to think in this hour of sorrow that men of all shades of opinion without distinction have condemned Mr. Davar’s decision.
Government is playing a deeper game than is apparent to the casual observer. The present crusade undertaken by the government is very dangerous and we should meet it in a becoming spirit. Government is enraged at the swadeshi and boycott movement but cannot oppose it publicly. They want to kill the agitation by having recourse to subterfuges and by removing the renowned leaders of it from our midst. If we have any stuff in us, we will carry on the agitation with renewed vigour and bring Government to their senses. It is the duty of every one of us to show that he is a Maratha in this hour of dire trial. Mr. Tilak was sent to Manadalay not because he caused any personal loss to the Governor but because the swadeshi movement, which he organised so successfully made the Manchester mills work half time.
The same is the tale to be told about Chidambaram Pillai and Babu Aurobindo Ghosh. Our duty does not end with moaning for a day or two or closing our shops. If we have any manliness left or any sense of honour or any recollection of our best traditions, we can make the Government even now tremble with fear. When Bengal was partitioned, the Bengalis dealt a severe blow to British trade by fighting against it with the double-edged sword of swadeshi and boycott. We should fight with the same weapons now and assist the Bengalis thus already engaged in the industrial war. We should spread swadeshi and boycott in every nook and corner of Maharashtra. We should follow unswervingly the vows of swadeshi and boycott . . . We will be faithless to our salt if we do not complete the work of Mr. Tilak. We would only then feel that we also did our little best in lightening the burden on our motherland in whose service our leaders sacrificed their very life, when we have carried out the vow in question.
There was not a single province in India which did not produce a newspaper to uphold the cause of the freedom struggle. Tilak’s Kesari had company. As for the men of the times, the contemporary leaders, journalists, political thinkers, and revolutionaries were, directly or indirectly, in the very auspicious company of the Lokmanya, the man of the people.
Chapter Four
INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIONS
Advocate-General R. Branson, during Tilak’s trial in 1908: “I express sympathy for the Jury for the torture suffered by it in having to listen for five days to Tilak. Look here. Here is a man who warns the Government, ‘If you don’t give Swaraj or if you don’t make a beginning to give it, we won’t stop the bombs.’ This clearly amounts to exciting disaffection towards the Government.”
Mrs. Branson, his wife, in a letter to Tilak asking him for monetary help of £ 500 in 1914: “I appeal not only to your generosity but to your sense of justice to ask you for me and my daughter who have been left quite unprovided for. I am working with my needle to try and make a bare livelihood but at my age (64) it is so hard to get known. My daughter also tried to get employment but without success.”
Mrs Branson, consequently, received £ 500 from Tilak.
Tilak was one of the more controversial personalities in the Indian freedom struggle. To his friends, from whom he received the highest adulation, he was “Lokmanya”. To his opponents he was a social reactionary, a rabble-rouser, a man who was nothing but trouble. It’s interesting how those who got to know him either hated him passionately or admired him deeply for what he was. But the fact remains that no one could possibly ignore Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
Tilak’s foreign connections were wide in their scope and hue. Among those who disliked Tilak were his political opponents, chiefly British, as also some French and Americans. Among his admirers too were some British, Americans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese and many others.
On his release from the Mandalay prison in 1914, Tilak had come across a book, Indian Unrest, written by Valentine Chirol. In this book Chirol had stated that dissatisfaction against the British Empire in India was confined mainly to cities and to the so-called upper castes and he called Tilak the “father of Indian unrest”. He further alleged that it was at Tilak’s instigation that some hotheaded youths had taken to acts of terrorism. Tilak decided to file a suit for libel against Chirol. Chirol had cast aspersions on India’s movement for swarajya and had dubbed the freedom struggle as a terrorist movement. Tilak said that it was like calling a dog mad and shooting him. It was not the people, in this case, who had lost their heads, but the government, which fitted the description due to its actions. Tilak thought that by approaching the law courts in England he would be able to enlighten the people of England about the real nature of the political movement in India. To file a suit against Chirol, it was necessary for him to go to England. There was another reason why he was so keen to go to England. On his arrival in India, Lord Montague, as secretary of state for India, had accepted representations and statements from a number of individuals and institutions. But a decision regarding the proposed Reforms Bill was to be taken only on English soil. Tilak therefore felt that by meeting politically important and influential persons in England, he could plead for India’s cause in a better manner and win over their support. He left for England on 14 July 1918.
Tilak caused Valentine Chirol considerable stress by the legal action. Although Tilak ultimately lost the suit, Chirol ended up spending almost two years in India on account of it, missing the bulk of World War I. In an interview given to the Observer in London, Chirol said, “I have been a professional columnist in newspapers for number of years. During my journalist career I have encountered only two persons who had the audacity to stun me with insolent question—one is Tilak and the other is German Emperor Kaiser William. Many people will simply amaze to see me uttering these two names in one breath but these are truly worthy to be pronounced together.”
With reference to Tilak Lord Sydenham wrote in his book Studies of an Imperialist: “These proposals (the Montague-Chelmsford report) will not placate the Brahmans and lawyers who have raised ferment in British India, and British India only, during the war. The political leaders are already vehemently protesting against these proposals. Mr. Tilak said of this reform scheme, ‘It is entirely unacceptable and will not satisfy anybody. It is only a miserable cheese-paring measure proposed in the interests of the bureaucracy, whose vested interests must always remain adverse t
o our aspirations. We must now take our case to England and appeal to the British democracy.’ It was my painful duty in 1908 to order the arrest and trial of Mr. Tilak for articles in which it was plainly represented that the bomb was a charm calculated to work for the benefit of the people. Mr. Tilak . . . now proposes to come home to appeal to the British democracy.”
The book Administrative Problems of British India by Joseph Chailley, member of the French Chamber of Deputies, and translated by William Meyer, discusses the nationalists and the extremists. He says,
To an observer from Europe, this party appears at first sight worthy of sympathy. It claims to be an agent of emancipation, a propagator of that spirit of liberty which one meets with throughout history, and which instinctively provokes enthusiasm and gratitude. But when we examine the party more closely, and follow its evolutions and strategy, we are bound to withdraw a portion of our admiration, if not of our esteem. It is, in essence, a party of theorists—armchair politicians, who, I fear, shrink in reality from the open air and a life of action. Writers and orators, proud of their knowledge and their caste, disdainful, and perhaps even ignorant, of the lower classes, aloof from the mass of the people, they have little more knowledge of that mass than they can derive from the documents brought together and published by the Anglo-Indian Government which they tax with selfishness, oppression, and ignorance. Neither their conduct nor their speeches are calculated to inspire confidence. The facts they allege, and base their reasonings upon, are often doubtful; their historical criticism is lamentably weak; while the remedies they propose, whether in the matter of administration or finance, are often childish.
Regarding the speeches of the nationalists, he says, “The language is English . . . and the speeches invoke and quote thinkers belonging to the whole world and to all the ages. A single speech will contain references to Gibbon, Napoleon, Fawcett, Labori, Virgil, John Bright, Hume, Darwin, Spencer, Pascal, and Thiers; such a discourse is a veritable Babel, and it is difficult to say whether it is inspired by sincere modesty or by a desire to make a show of superficial learning gleaned at the eleventh hour.” He furhter writes:
The extremists . . . are in open hostility (to the British rule). They include some politicians who, in India, are considered very radical . . . Of late years Mr. Tilak, and Babu Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal have organised a violent party whose methods have tended to discredit more moderate men. The fact remains, however, that the Congress leaders include men who by their moral worth, their enthusiastic eloquence, or their calm judgment have been able to rally to it fresh recruits and to give the movement a serious character which must be reckoned with. It is all very well for Anglo-Indians to go about saying that the Indian Government will concede nothing, and that England will not do anything for people who have no votes. The Government does concede. Follow the budget debates in the Provincial Council and in the Viceroy’s Council at Calcutta, and you will see native members taking up regularly the role of assailants, criticising facts, denouncing abuses, and finally snatching from the administration reforms or measures which it ought to have given itself the credit and prestige of putting forward spontaneously . . . According to them, (the extremist/radical political leaders) the English have done nothing worthy of praise. The latter get no credit for any good they do; it is represented as having been forced upon them. Such indiscreet attacks, besides irritating the Government, deprive it of any inclination to examine such grievances as may lie behind them.
Chailley describes Tilak as “a known militant journalist . . . (who) has enjoyed great popularity amongst students and members of the Young India party as a martyr to the popular cause, and is now, as already stated, the principal leader of the extremist party.” He talks of how Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal with “their followers have conducted a violent press campaign, and engaged in personal propaganda,” due to which “the energy of which has seriously disconcerted the more moderate leaders” and the violent methods of the extremists have now led to a split between them and the moderate party, evidenced by the breaking up, in consequence of the violence of Tilak’s partisans, of the Congress held in Surat in 1908.” However, he also reluctantly admits that when Tilak spoke, “there are passages of true eloquence and ardent patriotism, and grievances, which must be admitted to have some foundation.”
Another Englishman, Edwyn Robert Bevan, wrote in his book Indian Nationalism in 1913 comparing the extremists and the moderates: “Imagine a man unable to swim upheld and grasped in deep water by a strong swimmer. The swimmer says, ‘If I let you go, you will only sink.’ The man, if he is a Moderate, replies, ‘Yes, I want you to go on holding me, but I don’t want you to hold me so tight’ whereas the Extremist says, ‘I know I shall go under and have a horrible time of choking and distress, but that is the only way in which I can learn to swim.’”
And he writes further:
Extremist, one might say, is really a negative term: it involves, of course, a great positive desire, the desire that India should be ruled by Indians, but its essential meaning is that, for the attainment of that end, the policy of the Moderates is no good. It does not mean that you necessarily have any alternative policy, which would be some good. Extremists do not see any hopeful line of action: and yet it remains there all the same, the great insistent desire. In the case of such men Extremist ideas can produce nothing but a blank paralysing pessimism, and pessimism, I believe, is much more rife among the present generation of young Indians than among the older generation which quite thought that Liberalism and Science had solved everything. Other young men may be attracted to Extremism simply by indolence, since it is much easier to say that something is wrong than to say what would be right, and it is easy to say that nothing can be done, till people generally are prepared to make great sacrifices, which at present there is no prospect of their making. I have said that Extremism seemed to me to be drawing into its current the first characters and understandings among the younger men, and that, I think, is true; but I may add that I think it is also drawing the most worthless and thoughtless, the rotter and the poser, the criminal and the cranky.
Of Tilak, personally, Bevan says, “The leader of this new party, the father of this New Nationalism, was none other than Bal Gangadhar Tilak. His orthodoxy is unimpeachable, his patriotism beyond question, before long, he (has been) both idolised and execrated. His personality is a symbol of his Movement, his public career is an epitome of it.” Bevan compares Tilak to Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth like whom he began his political career with an organised “Press-campaign”. Bevan says, with a dose of irony, that Tilak’s best recruiting agent in the campaign for nationalism was none other than Lord Curzon whose “tactlessness made his words heavy with provocation . . . and his contempt (scarcely veiled) for the men who were doing what they could for India in politics, . . . were enough to make the most lukewarm Nationalist militant.”
Curzon’s own writings, his private correspondence for the period as opposed to the official, are less formal and more revealing. In Curzon, India and Empire: The Papers of Lord Curzon (1859-1925) from the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library, London, his private sentiments are laid bare. He expresses his exasperation with the Indian Congress openly, revealing in detail his attitude towards the nationalist leaders.
In India under Curzon (Unrest and Kindred Questions), Lovat Frazer adds his own observations to that of Valentine Chirol’s. He says, “I am in general agreement with Mr Valentine Chirol. The only difference I would express is that while endorsing his exposition of local conditions, I think larger stress should have been laid upon the general revolt against European domination, against the whole impact of western civilization, which was and is visible throughout Asia. The revolt had a reflex influence upon India and incidentally brought to head maleficent intrigues which had been long at work. I would be inclined to state the case against Brahmanism rather differently. Brahmins were only in the front of the movement against British control because from t
ime immemorial they have been the intellectuals of India and some among them were bound to become leaders in the propaganda, which, whatever we may think of it, was directed, by brains. What distinguishes the Indian movement from similar movements in the other countries was that in India, the brains were in the background.”
The book Dawn in India: British Purpose and Indian Aspiration by Sir Francis Younghusband describes how Tilak comes across to the British. Comparing Tilak with Gokhale, Younghusband says,
Of a very different stamp was Tilak. He also was a Brahmin and from the Deccan and well educated. But while Gokhale was suave and moderate, Tilak was all passion and vehemence, all for direct and immediate action. About him there was none of the cautious wisdom, of high statesmanship. He saw his goal, and he would go straight at it. India was under the British. The British must be smashed. India must be rescued. He himself was a Mahratta. The Mahrattas had contended for the throne of the Moguls. He would revive the glories of the past. He would awaken memories of Shivaji, their hero king. Especially would he stir the young. He would train them physically make them men who could fight. Urbanity and self-sacrifice and self-control were not for him. He would brook no restraint. He would act. Force was the only argument. And cultured though he was having graduated with honours he raised a storm of passion against Hindu reformers like Ranade and Gokhale. He allied himself with the bigots of orthodoxy . . .
Then he appealed to popular superstitions by organising annual festivals in honour of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god known in every village. These festivals were known as Ganpati celebrations, and Ganpati societies were formed in all the chief centres of the Deccan. Each had its choir and its dramatic society. And at the festivals dramas were acted and songs were sung in which the ancient legends were employed to arouse hatred against the foreigner. One of these was a deliberate attack on Lord Curzon, so thinly disguised that everyone in the crowded audience who came to see it knew who and what was meant. Legendary characters were employed. But everyone understood the allegory. A weak Government in England has given the Viceroy a free hand. He has made use of it to insult and humiliate India. The Moderates advocate constitutional measures. The Extremists abide their time till the ineffectiveness of these gentle methods has been proved. Then they adopt violent methods. The tyrant is disposed of without difficulty and his followers massacred. Then, having freed their country, the Extremists are able to defend it against all invaders. Such was the allegory, which the crowded audiences could easily see. And they would scowl at the tyrant, scorn the tameness of the Moderates, admire the courage of the Extremists, and hum with satisfaction at the slaughter of the tyrant. The power of the drama was well used by Tilak to impress his standpoint on the people.
Lokmanya Tilak- the First National Leader Page 12
