Is Bal Gangadhar Tilak the original Hindutva icon?

Purandare’s early chapters ably embed Tilak in colonial Pune in the second half of the 19th century, a milieu in which the shadow of 1857 and the earlier vanquishing of the Peshwas lay long, and public opinion instinctively shrank from any criticism, however minor, of the colonial state. Completing his under-graduation and a law degree and consciously eschewing the conventional middle-class pursuit of a government job or a legal career, the young Tilak, along with like-minded colleagues, set up a school, a college and a newspaper each in English and Marathi. Somewhat surprisingly, each of these ventures was successful.

Both the school and the college were premised on a good relationship with the colonial authorities and the college was in fact named after the then governor of Bombay James Ferguson. Tilak’s association with these educational ventures would, however, end in acrimony with the founding members falling out, largely on account of ego clashes and personality differences. Throughout his treatment, Purandare does not allow his evident admiration for Tilak, or his subject’s larger-than-life image in posterity, come in the way of an objective charting of Tilak’s personality and its impact on the contours of his political life.

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Focusing now—in the late 1880s when Tilak was in his early 30s—on his newspapers, Tilak’s public profile steadily grew as did controversies around him. He arraigned himself deliberately against protagonists of social reform. To an extent, this was a defensive reaction to an environment created by colonialism in which everything indigenous was devalued. Tilak and others pushed back against this and sought to enhance Indian self-esteem by defending its society and culture.

However, as Purandare also points out, Tilak was “not reform minded" and was essentially conservative by inclination. Inevitably disputes and debates would centre on the status of women—marriage, divorce, rights—and caste. Tilak stood out as a prominent conservative and traditionalist in numerous high-profile cases that punctuate the chronology of this period. Thus, in the famous Rukhmabai case in the 1880s and the proposed Age of Consent law in 1890, Tilak was at the heart of the orthodox reactions. Being a protagonist for tradition further shored up Hindu support—and perhaps more than just upper caste Hindu support.

In mid-1891, amidst Hindu Muslim violence across Bombay presidency, Tilak’s thinking on the use of religion for political mobilisation also crystallised. In Purandare’s assessment, religious mobilisation was almost a natural outgrowth of his stand on social issues. Converting a traditional annual Ganapati festival into a quasi-political event followed. Next on the list was an annual mass mobilisation in 1896 on the anniversary of Shivaji’s birth.

Both the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals cemented Tilak’s position as a mass leader who could draw crowds. Purandare notes that neither was originally anti-colonial in thrust and each was a platform for sectarian mobilisation of Hindus—but the government was worried. Such tactics, plus his innately conservative inclinations, drew criticism from social reformers and from those worried about Hindu-Muslim relations—many of them the principal faces in Indian National Congress (INC).

By the mid-1890s Tilak was himself a rising star in the INC. His stridently nationalist tone and defence of indigenous custom and culture made him appear strikingly different from the Congress’s Westernised moderates. To Tilak, their critiques represented both their elitism and their deference and quietism when dealing with the colonial state.

Alongside this, Tilak’s views on the British in India were hardening—he saw the Raj, Purandare says, “as intrinsically an abomination, its officials mean, crooked corrupt and casually cruel." Matters were soon to come to a head with the assassination of two British officers in Pune. Not surprisingly, Tilak’s writings, his speeches and the editorial stance of his newspapers meant that official disfavour would come down on him hard. He was tried, convicted for sedition—a charge he vehemently denied—and imprisoned for 18 months.

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In this phase of his life—from the conviction in 1897 till about 1907—Tilak, Purandare notes, “established himself as the pre-eminent leader of the people’s fight for emancipation". What did “emancipation" mean in the first decade of the 20th century? We know that Tilak’s political tactics and his stridency set him apart from the moderate nationalists. Yet, as with all major political figures, there is a difference between the intensity of their rhetoric and the substance of their political demands. It is this gap that Purandare could have delved into more deeply, exploring and explaining the substance of how Tilak’s demands differed from those of the moderates he so strongly opposed.

The partition of Bengal in 1905—condemned by Indian opinion of all hues—marks the next stage in Tilak’s political career. Differences sharpened between the moderates and the “extremists"—the latter supported an all-India boycott of the British, while the former, hoping that the government would heed the popular mood, wanted to play things down and restrict protests to Bengal. Tilak’s run-ins with Gopal Krishna Gokhale, in particular, had gradually been increasing in intensity.

To moderates such as Pherozeshah Mehta and Gokhale, the trio of Tilak, Lajpat Rai and Bipan Chandra Pal (Lal Bal Pal) had somehow to be contained. Tilak by now was the “Lokmanya"—one esteemed by the people. The moderate-extremist differences, underwritten as they were by personality clashes, had become too big to be papered over, and in 1907, the Congress split leaving the colonial government delighted. By mid-1908, Tilak would be facing sedition charges again and sentenced to six years imprisonment and transportation to Mandalay in Burma (now Myanmar). For some time, his defence team had included Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

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He returned to his native Pune to even greater popular acclaim. He confronted a changed geopolitical reality with World War I in progress, Muslim opinion alienated from the British over the fate of the crumbling Ottomans in Turkey, and most importantly, a public consensus that the Congress needed to be reunited.

Tilak’s responses to each of these may have appeared uncharacteristic, even a departure from his past positions, to the more diehard of his followers. He pledged loyalty to the Raj in Britain’s hour of need and clarified that he had never been hostile but had only sought administrative and governance reform. Then he put his weight behind healing the internal rifts in the Congress and the new moderation in his tone and tenor certainly helped bring about a unified Congress in 1916. Most significantly, he was to be the main force with Mohammad Ali Jinnah in reaching what was, in effect, a Hindu-Muslim pact between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League to give Muslims greater political representation in relation to their population in elected bodies. Tilak’s role in this amounted to a Nixon-visiting-China moment and without his support and initiative, the agreement could never have been reached.

Along with the Congress unification, this Hindu-Muslim accord meant a qualitatively new political situation in the country and Purandare is right to emphasise how these signal achievements in the last phase of Tilak’s life merged seamlessly with the Gandhian chapter of mass mobilisation against the colonial state with the non-cooperation and Khilafat movements. Much as Tilak’s political style and imagery had made his moderate contemporaries appear timid and deferential, the politics of non-cooperation and mass satyagraha was to supersede Tilak.

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Purandare’s book delves deeply into Tilak’s life, his intellectual interests and most of all his politics. It abounds with other characters—for instance Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and others who merit modern biographers in their own right—who make this book come alive. The dense set of relations—often oppositional and acrimonious—and the nationalist sentiment in which Purandare’s Tilak is embedded, makes a distinctive contribution to understanding Indian politics of a century ago and whose legacies stretch to our own times. It is a pity that in such a fine work the publishers thought an index unnecessary.

T.C.A. Raghavan’s latest book is Circles of Freedom: Friendship, Love and Loyalty in the Indian National Struggle (Juggernaut, 2024).