An Appreciation by Babu Aurobindo Ghose
importance of life, of action, of human existence, of mas's labour for mankind which is indispensable to the idealism of the modern spirit. The landmarks of Mr. Tilak's life are landmarks also in the history of his province and his country. His first great step associated him in a pioneer work whose motive was to educate the people for a new life under the new conditions, on the one side, a purely educational movement of which the fruit was the Ferguson College,fitiy founding the reawakening of the country by an effort of which co-operations in self-sacrifice was the moving spirit, on the other, the initiation of the Keaari newspaper, which since then has figured increasingly as the characteristic and powerful expression of the political mind of Maharashtra. Mr. Tilak's career has counted three periods each of which had an imprisonment for its culminating point. His first imprisonment in the Kolhapur case belongs to this first stage of self- development and development of the Mahratta country for new ideas and activities and for the national future. The second period brought in a wider conception and a profounder effort. For now it was to reawaken not only the political mind, but the soul of the people by linking its future to its past; it worked by a more strenuous and popular propaganda which reached its height in the organisation of the Shivaji and the Ganapati festivals. His separation from the social reform leader, Agarkar, had opened the way
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