The Life of Lokamanya Tilak/Chapter 1
LOKAMANYA TILAK
CHAPTER I
MR. BLUNT
Oh hush thee' my baby, the time soon will come
When thy sleep shall be broken by trumpet and drum;
Then hush thee, my darling, take rest while you may.
For strife comes with manhood and waking with day.
Scott
The highest praise that has yet been accorded to Lokamanya Tilak has come, curiously enough, from the Hon. Mr. Gokhale who is reported to have said to an English friend that, born a hundred and twenty years before, Mr. Tilak would have carved out a kingdom for himself. This pithiest and most appropriate compliment pictures for us Mr. Tilak as he really was, not a product of the Western Civilisation and of the English Government but a solitary surviver of the race which four generations back had well-nigh conquered the whole of India. It was impossible for him to be assimilated, like most of his countrymen by and in the mighty English Government; nor could that Government crush his spirit and make him a helpless spectator of our downfall. He was every inch a soldiera soldier in a civilians' garb. The Press and the Platform were his field of action; and from this battlefield he waged a relentless war on the Indian Bureaucracy for nearly forty years. He alone of all others dared strike the shield of the Government with the " sharp end of the steel." The silent suffering country wanted a man who could speak out without mincing matters, one who could boldly stand up for cur birth-right held in pawn by the rulers of the land. Where could such an one be found except in the great Mahratta race?
Bal Gangadar Tilak was born at Ratnagiri on July 23rd, 1856. Born in a race to which the Peshwas belonged and in a town not far away from the birth-place of Balaji Vishwanath, he was, indeed, destined to play the role of a representative of those who had ruled the greater part of India for nearly a hundred years. In the year of his birth the political atmosphere in India was electric. It was a remarkable year for this remarkable child to be ushered into existence. It was as ominous to the new rulers of the land as this child was destined to be. Lord Dalhousie, the last of the aggressive proconsuls of the British East India Company had just departed, cutting off all the Native poppies that dared appear tall among the degenarates of the vanquished races of India, and while he was thus stretching the red canvas over the country, the last vestiges of the Imperial families of Delhi and of Satara were swept away, with the result that he left a legacy as fatal to his successor as Lord Chelmsford has done to the present Viceroy. Hindus and Mahomedans smarting under the humiliation of eclipsed crescent and Bhagva Zenda had made common cause. The unity was no doubt temporary, the result of a common wrong; the essential condition for a successful revolution was wanting, the proletariat being unwilling to be disturbed by the wails and woes of the feudal landlords with their figure-head Royalties. So the rising ended in smoke, making the EngLIsh still more secure in the land.
Thus it was that when Bal, the only son and second child of Gangadharpant {alias Nana) Tilak was passing the early days of his life in his home at Ratnagiri, remarkable deeds of grim valour and cruel carnage were an every-day occurance in distant Delhi. The red fury of inflamed soldiery that had set the whole country ablaze must have borne its flues and sparks to the birth-place of our hero, at least in the form of a wonderful crop of rumours. It is inconceivable that the green memory of these things should have failed to impress the imagination of a child whose whole life was a dedication to the service of the Motherland.
What little is known of Bal's mother shows that she was a kind-hearted and an intensely religious woman. His father was one of those gems "of purest ray serene" that for want of favourable opportunities lie concealed in the deep "caverns of the ocean." Born in August 1820, he had passed the early years of his boyhood in dreaming dreams of learning and high social position and had, after finishing his vernacular course of instruction at Dabhol (Dist. Ratnagiri), walked over, in those days of difficult travelling to Poona. At a time when a boy learning English had every kind of encouragement given to him. Nana would surely have been able to complete his studies; but a domestic misfortune compelled him to bid good-bye to all his ambitions and rest content, as a school master, with the "splendid" salary of Rs. 10 per mensem. But though he was thus called upon to waste his abilities in the cramping atmosphere of vernacular school-life, he never neglected his duties nor did he abandon his favourite pursuit of knowledge. All his leisure was devoted to the study of Mathematics, Sanskrit and Marathi; and his mastery over the several branches of these subjects enabled him to bring out two books, the one on Trigonometry and the other on Marathi Grammar. But neither the scholarship of Gangadharpant nor his conscientious discharge of duties could make his superiors forget or overlook his stern sense of personal independence. The inevitable consequence followed: he was neglected in official preferment. It was only after full 17 years of service, when his claims could not with decency be set aside, that he was rewarded with the much-coveted post of an Assistant Deputy Educational Inspector and was transferred to Poona (1866).
The intensely religious vein of the mother and the stem sense of personal independence of the father reflected themselves in the wilful nature of the boy, a characteristic which has played no insignificant part in his future career. This delicate child of a delicate mother was not put to school before he was 11, not certainly for want of facilities—Ratnagiri was a District town—but evidently because, the father, himself a school-master, intended to give his son a good grounding in Sanskrit and vernacular in the unfettered freedom of home-life. Bal proved wonderfully responsive to his father's instructions. He loved his childish plays no doubt, but, eveN at that age the ponderous volumes in his father's library impressed him more. One book particularly attracted his fancy. He had heard his father reading the sonorous periods of Bana's Kadamhari and believing the book to be no more difficult than the holy Sanskrit verses he was set to recite every evening, he went up to his father and asked for the loan of the book. Startled with the request, but unwilling to dispirit his son by a curt refusal Gangadhar-pant promised to give the book on one condition. A knotty problem in Arithmetic was set; Bal was to work it out and have the book. Armed with slate and pencil, Bal waged a relentless war on the problem for an hour and a half and carried off the prize amidst the applause of the proud mother and the loving sister.
This was the first triumph of Bal's life. His poor mother did not live to see others. Her health, naturally delicate, undermined by frequent fasting gave way and she died (1866) before realising an Indian mother's ambition of getting her son married. Sometime later, Bal was sent to school. He jumped from standard to standard and was soon transferred to the Poona High School whence he matriculated in 1872. The rigid formality of the classes, with its accompaniment of church-yard silence utterly disgusted him. The spectacle of mediocre teachers hammering scrappy stuff, styled knowledge into the mediocre brains of students was not calculated to charm a boy to whom reading was under- standing and committing to memory no labour. The race of marks and of rank could never allure him; His unwillingness to take down notes and translations was an enigma to his teachers. He was content that he had learnt the lessons and was quite indifferent to the expression. He cared more for knowledge than for words, more for thoughts than for the expression. But the traditional cast of the teachers' mind could not reahse that the brain is more often a better register than the copy-book and that what goes to the copy-book generally misses the memory. Bal however stuck to his methods. When at work in Mathematics, he solved all the examples orally and put down only the answer. "Where is your method" asked the precise pedagogue. "It is here" said our hero, pointing to his head.
Such an "unmethodical" and rebellious child was never likely to be popular with the teachers, who on occasions took complaints to his father. Bal cared little for their good opinion and less for their "time-honoured" methods. His father was intensely proud of him and presaged for him a great career. The promising son of the Assistant Deputy Inspector, could not, in those days of early marriages, long escape the fetters of wedlock. A suitable bride was found in Tapibai, daughter of Ballal Bal of Ladghar (Dist. Ratnagiri), to whom he was married in 1871. Soon after this event happened two others, the one favourable and the other extremely unfortunate. Bal passed his Matriculation in December 1872; but only a few months before his success in the examination his father died, leaving him quite an. orphan. "It is the bitterest element in the vast irony of human life that the time-worn eyes, to which a son's success would have brought the purest gladness are so often closed for ever even before success has come." *[1]
When Bal joined (1873) the Deccan College as a resident student, the Bombay University and its affiliated Colleges were not quite as old as their alumni. The rough and ready methods of the East India Company's Government were, by this time being gradually substituted by Institutions more imposing under the direct rule of the Queen-Empress. In matters educational, Colonel-Professors and Major-Directors were giving place to graduates from Oxford and Cambridge; and although this new University ware was not as a rule a very great improvement on the former military commodity, it was, at least, imbued with the atmosphere of the English academies. Howsoever opinions may differ as to the value of the knowledge Indian students acquired at these Institutions, one thing was certain that they were not slow to admire the gowns and caps of the sartorial Major-domoes, in whose orbits it was their destiny to fall.
Persons of parasitic psychology, whose main purpose is to make the present comfortable without a thought to the future may deride the idea of National Education. But those who can think for themselves are painfully aware of the disadvantages of imbibing foreign ideas through a foreign medium at an immature but impressionable time of life. The system of education transplanted from England to India by well-meaning administrators was itself faulty at the very foundation; and the immature graduates of English Universities who came out to India as custodians of the New learning were entirety innocent of India's storied past and the living present. They were quite ignorant of the dangers of directing the youthful energies of the children of shastris and pundits into the uncongenial channels of an alien culture. It was of course impossible for them to impart instruction in the vernaculars. The students were therfore called upon to do every intellectual work through a foreign medium. The crushing burden of receiving instruction through English has been pronounced by competent authorities to have "atrophied all originality, research, adventure, ceaseless effort, courage and like qualities." But the misfortunes of the student-world did not end here. The assimination of alien thought at an impressionable period of life is an unsupportable burden. The influence of Shelleys and Byrons, like that of all narcotics is at once exhilerating and depressing. It plants alien ideals into the hearts of the young, without affording that corrective which a close study of Hindu ideals can alone give. The deification of Western culture and civilisation inclines the students to apply the crude standards of Western materialism to the nobler civilisation of this country. It is thus that the cry of Social Reform has gone forth. The principles of democracy immortalised in the passionate writing and speeches of Burke, Bright and Gladstone create aspirations difficult of realisation in the cramping political atmosphere of the country. No wonder that many a graduate has found his physical strength and endurance severely taxed in his academical life. The spectacle of hundreds of bright young men annually leaving the university portals as physical wrecks is, in no small measure, due to the circumstances detailed above.
Bal must either have instinctively realized these dangers or must have found his fragile frame quite inadequate to the manifestations of the mighty spirit within. For, soon after joining the Deccan College he determined to lay the foundation of that physical strength and endurance, which, in spite of worries and hard intellectual work stood him in good stead during the whole of his life. For full one year, he neglected his studies and devoted practically all his time exclusively to physical culture. Swimming, boating and wrestling were his pastimes. Morning and evening he passed through a severe course of Indian gymnastics. At the end of the year, he failed in his F. A. examination but he succeeded in his ambition and became a robust young man. Instead of being required to measure the quantity of his daily food, his powers of digestion were wonderfully developed. When some years later, he had an occasion to take food for a few months in an hotel at Bombay, the manager found him the least profitable of all customers. He could now stand the rigours of heat and cold and could with impunity spend hours together in physical or mental work. Even in 1900, when his health was unsatisfactory and he could hardly be said to have recovered from the shock of the prison-life of 1897-98, he swam across the Ganges—a distance of more than a quarter of a mile. Once asked the secret of his intellectual tenacity, Mr. Tilak particularly referred to this period of his youth and said "If one only attends to one's body as one does to one's mind from the age of 16 to that of 25, and if the physical strength thus stored up is not dissipated by gluttony or vice, one can stand any amount of hard intellectual work till old age."
This acquisition of health and strenth increased the buoyancy of his mind and he heartily joined in all the innocent pranks of College-life. He however knew where to draw the line between such innocent diversions and culpable mischief. He also knew how to despise the mistaken gentility of apathetic natures. His restless intellect, unfatigued by the rigours of study occasionally found diversion in heated discussions with his fellow-students. His outspokenness earned for him the title of Mr. Blunt. There is nothing paradoxical in the intellectual acuteness and social bluntness of Mr. Tilak. These qualities can otherwise be named as social and intellectual "directness." No beating about the bush, but running straight to the subject in hand—that was his characteristic. His critical faculty had abnormally developed, and like young George Washington playing with his axe, he used it on any and every subject that came in his way. His innate bias for the classical literature of his country, however, saved him from being the slave of his reason; and the excesses of the Social Reformers of the day made him shrink from accepting their gospel without reserve.
Two professors—Principal Wordsworth and Prof. Chhatre—of Mr. Tilak's College-days stood head and shoulders above their contemporaries not only by reason of their profound learning and inimitable teaching but also by their noble character. Till the end of his life Mr. Tilak ungrudingiy admitted the high moral and intellectual equipment they brought to their work. They were Gurus in the real sense of the term.
Out of Mr. Tilak's college-companions, Messrs. Mule, Sharangpani and Kathavte, though not quite so well known, have, in their own way distinguished themselves. Others—Messrs. Shridhar Balkrishna Upasani, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Vamanrao Apte, Daji Abaji Khare, Ganesh S. Khaparde, R. N. Mudholkar, Dayaram Gidumal—need no introduction to our readers. Mr. (Dr. Sir) N. G. Chandavarkar, too was a contemporary of Mr. Tilak, though studying in a different college. He passed his B. A. examination in the same year with Mr. Tilak (1876). Both Tilak and Chandavarkar secured a first Class in the B. A. examination.
The Mathematical abilities of Mr. Tilak were of the highest order and were fully and frankly recognised by Prof. Chhatre who, in those days was considered to be the premier Mathematician of the Presidency. Mr. Tilak's mathematical training, coupled with his fine classical study gave his genius that logical and ima-
- Mr. Tilak's Sanskrit Studies found recreation in occasional
attempts at versification. Here are a few verses, selected from one of his Composition Note-Books : — ^ fTSR^ f^r R^ ^^ ^^^^Wi%^^ ^ & ^^: I ^T^ ^5:r% 37^*11^ ^ ^^-^5^Rt o^T?T^ II ^ n R^t^ ^^ fT ^^' 37^1 cfi^ f^rr^^c^JT nun ginative bent which excites the admiration of the readers of the Gita-Rahasya and the Arctic Home in the Vedas.
His utter disregard of praise and scholarships was not due to the perfunctory method of his studies but rather the reverse. If one were to analyse the prize-hunters' mentality, it will be found that their studies are not the outcome of a love of knowledge but the show of it. The one aim of Mr. Tilak's life was the acquisition of the intrinsic and so all the rewards resulting from the attainment of merely marketable knowledge had no charm for him. His reading was extensive and thorough; while reading for examination the history of the reigns of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, he studied about a dozen standard authors and made his own notes. While preparing for the LL. B. examination, instead of contenting himself with reading Hindu Law from English writers he went straight to the fountain-head and studied Yajnavalkya and other authorities. He also read all the important Acts passed by the Government of India since 1827. The closeness of his application to studies and his ready and prolonged concentration therein were the wonder of his friends; and there was another quality which is equally, if not still more rare, the innate purity of his mind. Mr. Upsani, his life-long friend recalling those three years of Bombay-life says "I shared Mr. Tilak's room while both of us were students of Law at Bombay; and I don't remember a single occasion when he gave expression to any unworthy thought." Happy the youth which, like a lotus, can grow, unsullied and uncontaminated, in the muddy water of worldly life and which, the moment it is full blown is dedicated to the service of the Motherland. For such sacred worship, only the freshest, the most fragrant and unsmelt flowers are necessary. Mr. Tilak passed his LL. B. in December 1879.
- ↑ * Morley's Life of Cobden.