Why was tilak called lokmanya

Let us give up using a foreign language in the conduct of our affairs, be proficient in our mother tongues and learn to express all our thoughts in them. Let us study Sanskrit and discover the beauties of spiritual wisdom which lie hidden in our Shastras. He was a lover of swadeshi; we too should understand the meaning of swadeshi and adopt swadeshi in practice.

He had unbounded love for the country; let us, too, cultivate the same love for it in our hearts and, to the best of our ability, be daily more devoted to national service. No nation attains greatness without pride in its history.

And pride comes with self-knowledge. Knowledge about its cultural and spiritual traditions which give the nation its unique identity. And also knowledge about developments in the past that weakened the nation, robbed it of its freedom, fractured its unity and sapped its vitality. Many examples prove this point.

Here is one of them. Lokmanya Tilak is a largely forgotten name today. With the passage of time, it is somewhat natural for young Indias not to have the same level of popular knowledge about famous personalities of the last century. But why have the political establishment, the scholarly community and the media pushed Tilak — and several other eminent names from the freedom movement — into oblivion? His statue is missing at Maharashtra Sadan, the opulent and scandal-scarred state government guest house in New Delhi, where only Shivaji, Jyotiba Phule and Babasaheb Ambedkar have a sculptural presence.

The condition of Sardar Gruh in Mumbai, where the Lokamanya lived and also breathed his last, is pathetic. Take one look at it, and you will be left with no doubt that Tilak is now a victim of supreme apathy. This conclusion will be further reinforced if you visit the house in Ratnagiri where he was born on July 23, It is where he spent the first 10 years of his life.

His janmasthan has been converted into a museum, but it hardly has the look of a national monument. There is not even a small bookshop selling his books, books about him, or memorabilia of the kind you find in good museums around the world.

Sadly, the few visitors who happen to come to the place do not even get a flyer about the man and the museum. The Tilak Museum in Pune, at his ancestral house, is privately managed by his descendants. It does not do much justice to his greatness. Not surprising, since neither the government of India nor the government of Maharashtra pay a single rupee to support it. Why has Tilak been marginalised? There are many reasons.

One of them is that successive Congress governments at the Centre eulogised the Nehru-Gandhi family so excessively and exclusively that other great national heroes got sidelined. When one Ambedkarite scholar, Kancha Ilaiah, wrote a fictionalised book about Tilak — Untouchable God , published by Samya in — which consists of an undisguised character assassination, he barely received any challenges. This does not mean we should be uncritical in our admiration of him.

An unbiased and unprejudiced eye alone can help us gain a balanced understanding of historical developments and historical personalities. Tilak ignited patriotic consciousness among the masses during one of the most difficult periods in the freedom struggle. The founding of the Indian National Congress in Bombay in and the All India Muslim League in Dhaka in , were natural responses of a freedom-loving nation that was trying to find its political voice.

However, the voice was still weak and subdued. This is when Tilak began to quicken the growth of nationalist consciousness with the advent of the 20th century. His trisutri or three-point programme for national awakening — Swaraj, Swadeshi and Nationalist Education — lit the fire of self-pride and activism in a nation that was despairing and directionless.

Historians usually credit Gandhi with transforming the Congress into a mass movement. No doubt, he did it. And he did it on a nationwide scale.

But none can deny that Gandhi followed up, and greatly expanded, on mass-oriented political work that Tilak had begun. There are higher powers that rule the destiny of men and nations.

It may be the will of Providence that the cause I represent may prosper by suffering than by remaining free. His superb biographer NG Jog has described this historic moment most aptly.

They breathe the spirit of dedication to freedom and of defiance against the might of the British Raj. In India, too, the proletariat has already developed to conscious political mass struggle — and, that being the case, the Russian-style British regime in India is doomed!

For the first time since the Revolt of India was showing fight and not submitting tamely to foreign rule Almost all of us were Tilakites or Extremists, as the new party was called in India. The English translation does not have the same evocative power as the original poem in Urdu, but here it is. Tilak was a man of many facets. He was, first and foremost, a committed scholar. He was a Jnana Yogi who later became a Karma Yogi. Those foreigners who knew him only as a scholar were astonished when they discovered his political activism.

My interest in him is purely academic. I had been in correspondence with him about the question whether the constellation Orion was mentioned in Sanskrit literature…I certainly regard that a man devoted to antiquarian research would not waste his time in political agitation.

In this book, Tilak, who was also a mathematician, examined astronomical data in Vedic hymns to attempt to calculate the age of Vedas. He surmised the origin of the Vedas to be BC and also placed the antiquity of the Aryan race in the Arctic region. Tilak wrote his magnum opus Shrimad Bhagvad Gita Rahasya , popularly also known as Gita Rahasya , while serving his six-year prison term in Burma from to It must rank very high in the body of prison literature created anywhere in the world.

This action must be done to keep the world going by the right path of evolution which the Creator has destined the world to follow. In order that the action may not bind the actor it must be done with the aim of helping his purpose and without any attachment to the coming result.

This I hold is the lesson of Gita. Jnana Yoga there is. Bhakti Yoga there is. Who says not? But they are both subservient to the Karma Yoga preached in the Gita. There is a fundamental unity underlying the Logos Ishvara , Man and the world. The world is in existence because the Logos has willed it so.

It is His will that holds it together. Man strives to gain union with God; and when this union is achieved the individual Will merges in the Mighty Universal Will. It does not stand to reason.

It is not I who say so; the Gita says so. Sri Krishna himself says that there is nothing in all the three worlds that He need acquire and still He acts. If man seeks unity with the Deity he must necessarily seeks unity with the interests of the world also, and work for it. If he does not, then the unity is not perfect, because there is union between two elements man and Deity out of the three, and the third the world is left out. Serving the world and thus serving His Will is the surest way of salvation and this way can be followed by remaining in the world and not going away from it.

Yet, he did not opt for the life of a monk living in the Himalayas. There can be no rest for me so long as there is a single person in India…lacking the necessaries of life, by which I mean a sense of security, a lifestyle worthy of human beings — that is, clothing, education, food and shelter of a decent standard. My Himalayas are here. Tilak too practiced what he philosophised. After he was released from prison in Mandalay in June , he immediately plunged once again into the vortex of freedom struggle.

The next, and last, six years of his life were filled with ceaseless action, which ended only when his tired and ailing body yielded to death in Bombay.

Great scholars often lack the ability — and even the inclination — to connect with the masses. Tilak was a glorious exception. He was a man of oceanic intellect, towering character and unflinching courage, all of which were reflected in his oratory and his writings that touched the minds and hearts of millions of people.

Even though the number of people who read his fiery articles, mainly through his Marathi newspaper Kesari and its English sibling Mahratta, was geographically and linguistically limited, the news of his valiant advocacy of Swaraj spread far and wide because of his travels, his political activities and, above all, the regularity with which he confronted the British, risking arrests and imprisonments.

A staunch internationalist, Tilak hailed the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, led by Lenin, and commended the goals of socialism. His politics was not of, and for, the elitist class. He was one of those early freedom fighters who publicly espoused the cause of workers and farmers. He regularly addressed meetings of trade unions in Bombay and elsewhere.

He wrote about the plight of ryots , or farmers, and the callousness of the British bureaucracy in mitigating the suffering of rural people and cattle during droughts. For him, Swaraj or Home Rule meant the rule of, and the rule for, the common people of India. Addressing an audience of farmers, he once said :. Tilak was also known for not mincing his words.

However, a scholar at heart, Tilak used both activism in the field as well as opinion to hasten slowly and attain the goal of swaraj, something his fellow Congressmen were wary of publicly speaking about at that time.

Of course, his idea of Swaraj was not confined to political freedom. He was conscious of the need for cultural and economic independence too.

Tilak could be rightly described as the Father of the Indian Renaissance. Two other initiatives of his, the public celebration of the Ganesh festival and Shivaji Jayanti, were clearly aimed at cultural assimilation of all caste and community groups.

Swadeshi was the other important cause espoused by Tilak. Both Lala Lajpat Rai and Bipin Chandra Pal joined him in popularising the call of swadeshi nationally, which saw the emergence of the famous triumvirate of those days, popularly known as Lal, Bal and Pal.

However, his swadeshi was not just about boycotting British goods. Although he used the tools of boycott and bonfire of British goods to provide a window for popular participation, his larger objective was promoting indigenous entrepreneurship.

Tilak wanted to promote manufacturing in India. To that end, Tilak started collecting funds for a corpus, known as Paisa Fund. It was the same zeal for promoting swadeshi manufacturing that led to Tilak and Ratanji Jamshedji Tata coming together to open the Bombay Swadeshi Co-operative Stores Co. In Tuticorin, Chidambaram Pillai led a fairly successful swadeshi campaign. Later, when his seminal work Geetarahasya , which he wrote while under imprisonment at Mandalay was to be published, he ensured that the paper to be used was indigenously manufactured by D Padamji and Sons, a swadeshi paper mill.

Today, when we talk about Atmanirbhar Bharat, the legacy of Tilak is carried forward. A philosopher-politician, he pioneered the ideas of swaraj and swadeshi, and used culture, education and the media. Share Via. By Vinay Sahasrabuddhe. Get our Daily News Capsule Subscribe. Thank you for subscribing to our Daily News Capsule newsletter.

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