A review of the book 'Tilak: The Empire's Biggest Enemy' written by Vaibhav Purandare.
Vaibhav Purandare encapsulates Tilak's saga in this definitive biography. He traces Tilak's journey from his early days in Konkan to his influential role across India, highlighting his battles against the British, imprisonments, and commitment to Swaraj.
Rediscover an icon of Indian history whose ideas and actions continue to resonate today. Bal Gangadhar Tilak's story is not just a tale of resistance but a testament to perseverance and conviction.
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Coming up: A review of the book 'Tilak: The Empire's Biggest Enemy' written by Vaibhav Purandare.
Namaste Friends. My name is 'Shinil Subramanian Payamal' and you are listening to the Historylogy podcast.
Before I proceed, a full disclosure: This book was bought with my own money and not been provided to me by the author or publisher.
Little bit about the author:
Vaibhav Purandare is the author of the acclaimed Shivaji: India’s Great Warrior King, Savarkar: The True Story of the Father of Hindutva, Hitler and India: The Untold Story of His Hatred for the Country and Its People, Sachin Tendulkar: The Definitive Biography and Bal Thackeray and the Rise of the Shiv Sena. He works as a senior journalist and editor.
Let me read a brief description of the book from the inside flap:
QUOTE
Before Mahatma Gandhi, there was Bal Gangadhar Tilak—the revolutionary who ignited the spark of Indian nationalism. The Times, London, called him ‘the father of Indian unrest,’ and the one-time Secretary of State for India Edward Montagu felt he had ‘the greatest influence of any person’ on the Indian people. Above all, for the British Raj, Tilak was sedition-monger-in-chief—it prosecuted him thrice for sedition.
Hailed as 'Lokmanya' or 'One Revered by the People,' Tilak transformed India's fight for freedom from polite discourse to a mass uprising. His fierce writings, relentless activism, and controversial stances earned him the title 'enemy of the British government’ from the Raj, which saw him as its greatest threat. And at a time the British were undermining Indian self-esteem and dismissing Indians as ‘uncivilized heathens,’ Tilak argued powerfully and relentlessly that there was much of enormous value in India’s past, its culture, heritage and civilization, awakening Indians to a sense of their own identity.
Vaibhav Purandare encapsulates Tilak's saga in this definitive biography. He traces Tilak's journey from his early days in Konkan to his influential role across India, highlighting his battles against the British, imprisonments, and commitment to Swaraj.
Rediscover an icon of Indian history whose ideas and actions continue to resonate today. Bal Gangadhar Tilak's story is not just a tale of resistance but a testament to perseverance and conviction.
UNQUOTE
It’s a coincidence that today i.e. 1st of August, 2024 when this book review is being published, it happens to be the 104th Punyatithi (death anniversary) of Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
Some of the things I liked in this excellent book:
1. Apart from Tilak’s early life, the book also talks about the formation of the Congress and the rise of the Lal, Bal and Pal trio.
2. Governor Richard Temple wrote to Viceroy Lytton in July 1879 about the Maharashtrian Brahmins.
QUOTE
Like as the Mahrattas under Brahminical guidance once beat the Mahomedan conquerors bit by bit so the Chitpavans imagine that some day more or less remote, the British shall be made to retire into that darkness where the Mughals have retired.
UNQUOTE
3. Tilak aggressively countered the British government’s allegation that the cow protection groups had created conditions for an outbreak of violence. He wrote in an editorial in the Kesari:
QUOTE
We haven’t heard from anywhere that the Muslims have been robbed of their food ever since the agitation for cow protection began … In north Hindustan, the Muslims may be dominant in many parts, but in our regions, that has never been the case. The history of Maharashtra before the arrival of the British shows how the Marathas had acquired a sanad (legal authority) for cow protection from the badshah of Delhi himself. If such an arrangement was in place between Hindus and Muslims during Muslim rule, then why the Muslims should be provoked into attacking Hindus here on the issue of cow protection today is beyond us.
UNQUOTE
As we know, even in 21st century India, cow protection groups are facing the same allegation.
4. Tilak said ‘he hated communal riots’ and had absolutely ‘no desire to hurt the feelings of his Muslim countrymen’. Nevertheless, departing again from the stance of the Moderates, he added, indirectly urging the Hindus to build and maintain their own strength, that ‘friendship and good relations can exist only between people of equal strength’.
5. The orthodox sections of the Hindus, and Tilak himself, had noticed that a number of Hindus used to participate annually in the Muharram processions of the Muslims and even lend music to those gathering. Tilak decided to make the celebrations of the Ganeshotsav sarvajanik, or public.
What this meant was that while families continued their traditions, each village and unit within the village, individual areas or markets in towns and even lanes and by-lanes could install their own Ganpati idols.
6. In 1883, James Douglas, an Englishman, walked up the Raigad Fort and complained about the terrible state of the Samadhi of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.
Taking the cue, Tilak stepped forward to champion the cause of the memorial. He said:
QUOTE
It is useless to blame the government for neglecting the shrine. It is the business of the people of Maharashtra to take the opportunity to vindicate the name of Shivaji. It would be highly creditable to those generous and grateful descendants of the Maharaja who opened their purses for contributing to the fund of the insignificant Lord Harris, if they renovated the shrine of Shivaji.
In another piece, he asked, ‘Should we not hang our heads in shame that a foreigner should tell us about our duty to Shivaji?’
UNQUOTE
7. Tilak on Shivaji Maharaj killing Afzal Khan:
QUOTE
Did Shivaji commit a sin in killing Afzal Khan? The answer to this question can be found in the Mahabharata itself. Shrimat Krishna’s teaching in the Gita calls for the killing even of one’s teachers and kin. No blame at all attaches to a person if he is doing deeds without being actuated by a desire to reap the fruits of his actions. Shri Shivaji Maharaj did not commit the deed for personal motives. He killed Afzulkhan from disinterested motives for the public good. If thieves enter a house and we have not sufficient strength in our wrists to drive them out, we should without hesitation shut them up and burn them alive. God has not granted the mlecchas (foreigners) a copper plate (sanad or charter) to rule India. Shivaji was not guilty of coveting what belonged to others, because he strove to drive them out from the land of his birth. Don’t circumscribe your vision like a frog in a well. Get out of the Penal Code, enter the sublime sphere of the Bhagawad Gita, and consider the achievements of great men.
UNQUOTE
8. Tilak on the word Hindutva, by which he meant Hinduness. He said that:
QUOTE
The common factor in Indian society is the feeling of Hindutva. I do not speak of Muslims and Christians at present as everywhere the majority of our society consists of Hindus. We say that the Hindus of the Punjab, Bengal, Maharashtra, Telangana, and Dravida are one, and the reason for this is only Hindu dharma. There may be different doctrines in the Hindu dharma, but certain principles can be found in common, and because of this alone a sort of feeling that we belong to one religion has remained among people speaking different languages in such a vast country. And this feeling of being one is still alive because in different provinces there are different institutions of the Hindu religion like temples, etc., or famous places of pilgrimages.
UNQUOTE
9. Morning Leader, a British daily, said very few people in England were in a position to understand what Tilak’s arrest meant in India.
QUOTE
His personal power is unapproached by any other politician in the country; he dominates the Deccan, his own country, and is adored with a kind of religious fervour by every extremist from Bombay to the Bay of Bengal … His is the mind that conceived, his the pen that expressed, and his the force that has directed the extraordinary movement against which the bureaucracy is now calling up all its resources. Bal Gangadhar Tilak is a Maratha Brahmin ─ thinker and fighter in one.
UNQUOTE
Conclusion:
The author has sprinkled this book with many such wonderful quotes and anecdotes. And he has rightly said in the Introduction part of the book:
QUOTE
Without the solid base built by Tilak, Gandhi would have had no mass movement to build on and carry forward. Tilak made the first major cracks in the British Raj’s imposing structure, and the punch he packed in smashing its walls paved the way for the Mahatma and his apostles like Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and Subhas Chandra Bose to walk through and deliver on the dream of complete freedom.
The strange thing is that Tilak has not been a subject for several biographers. For a man who was the most popular Indian of his time and the mobilizer of an entire colonized population, he has been ludicrously overlooked and his story and its significance by and large unrecognized. During his centenary in 1956, when India was still in the first flush of freedom, a flurry of books came out; after that, he joined many others, including Patel and Bose, in being relegated securely to the background, his life either devolved into clichés around his famous slogan of ‘Swaraj is my birthright’ or into a blur of dates in the manner of India’s terrifically soporific textbooks.
UNQUOTE
This brilliantly written book is just over 400 pages and it is very easy to read and fast paced and certainly lives up to the claim of being the first definitive biography of the man who raised the slogan that ‘freedom is my birthright and I shall have it.’
I give this book 4.5/5.
The hardcover format of this book is available for around Rs. 650/- on Amazon India. And for $31.99 USD on Amazon USA where it is scheduled to be released on the 15th of November, 2024. And the book is also available in Kindle and Audible format. I have given the respective buy links in the show notes. Please check them out for the latest prices.
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