Lokmanya Tilak- the First National Leader

by Gayatri Pagdi

  The central and local governments of India hesitated to take any steps that would alienate Indian moderate opinion. They feared that the constant imposition of additional police would soon become a weapon in the hands of the agitators, who would represent it as the action of an oppressive government.

  Political unrest within India cut across provincial boundaries. The unrest in eastern Bengal was engineered in Calcutta, while Punjabi nationalists sent money to Calcutta, which then found its way into eastern Bengal and Assam. Moreover the development of the Indian revolutionary movement overseas was increasingly worrying to the government of India. Stevenson-Moore wrote: “It is quite possible for a group of separate Provincial Secret Services to deal adequately with political conditions of such extent and character as prevail in India. The chief centers of the Indian political movement are Calcutta, Lahore, Poona, New York, Paris and perhaps Japan. The chief agitators in these places are in close connection with each other and the necessity for secret agents in America and London has recently been brought to notice in letters from London and Dublin.”

  A prominent figure in the revolutionary struggle was Shyamaji Krishnavarma of Kathiawar. Krishnavarma went to London after the arrests in connection with Rand’s killing. In January 1905 he started in London the India Home Rule Society and started Indian Sociologist, a monthly publication. In that paper he described that the objective of the society was to secure home rule for India and carrying on a genuine Indian propaganda in England by all possible means. In December 1905, Krishnavarma announced that he proposed to establish six lectureships of one thousand rupees each for enabling authors, journalists and other qualified Indians to visit Europe, America and other parts of the world so as to equip themselves efficiently for the work of spreading among the people of India a knowledge of freedom and national security. He also published a letter from another Indian in Paris, S. R. Rana, who offered three travelling scholarships of two thousand rupees to be named after Maharana Pratap and Shivaji Maharaj.

  With these offers, Krishnavarma was able to bring over some very revolutionary minds, among them Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, then aged twenty-two. Savarkar considered Tilak his political guru. Before he left for England, Savarkar and his brother were the leaders of an association known as the Abhinav Bharat Society in Nasik. Started in 1899 it was probably one of the most significant secret societies formed against the British. It had members who were employed by the British government and helped them as much as they could covertly. Those working in the telegrams department would decode telegrams and inform the activists about them. Those working in the police departments warned them of a raid in advance, some provided monetary support and others helped hide the activists while they were on the run or had gone underground. Ganesh Savarkar supervised the teaching of drill, physical exercises, and fencing to the members in Nasik. The organisation had thirty-nine branches and stretched from Tryambakeshwar, Satara, Murtijapur, Poladpur, Harne, Umbergao in Thane, Kalyan, Bhiwandi, Vasai, Pen, Dahanu, Bhainder, Kothur, Bhagur, Ahmednagar, Baroda, Indore, Calcutta, Nagpur, Bhingar, Solapur, Belgao, Dondai, Poona, Khed, Chinchwad, Dhule, Igatpuri, Ratnagiri, Bombay, Jalgao, Panvel, Karad, Yevla, Aurangabad and Erandol. At the same time when the Abhinav Bharat was active, there were other secret societies of armed agitators, all devoted to Tilak, active in places like Yeotmal, Vardha, Amravati, Hyderabad, Gwalior, Goa, Dharwad and Pandharpur.

  During the year 1906 and the following year, the India House in London became a centre of all nationalist activity. In July 1907 a question was raised in the House of Commons about whether any action would be taken against Krishnavarma. Soon after, Krishnavarma left for Paris from where he continued the campaign. He still had his paper printed in London. The printer was prosecuted and convicted in July 1909. Another man then offered to take it up for printing. However, he too was prosecuted and convicted in September 1909 and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment. Krishnavarma now decided to print it in Paris. He continued to keep in touch with India House and controlled the work done there through Rana, who frequently visited London for this. In December 1907, the Indian Sociologist wrote: “It seems that any agitation in India must be carried on secretly and that the only methods which can bring the English Government to its senses are the Russian methods vigorously and incessantly applied until the English relax their tyranny and are driven out of the country. No one can see what rule will be laid down or line of action defined for any particular course. That will probably depend on local conditions and circumstances, but it is likely that as a general principle the Russian method will begin with Indian officials rather than European.”

  On 30 April 1908, in Bengal, young Khudiram Bose threw a bomb at a carriage in Muzaffarpur, believing it to be that of Kingsford, an unpopular magistrate. However, two women who were in the carriage were killed instead. Tilak wrote two articles in the Kesari published in May and June 1908 in connection with the Muzaffarpur murders. He was convicted and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.

  Another article published in the Kesari on 22 June of the same year read:

  From the murder of Mr. Rand on the night of the jubilee in the year 1897 till the explosion of the bomb at Muzaffarpur, no act worth naming and fixing closely the attention of the official class took place at the hands of the subjects. There is considerable difference between the murders of 1897 and the bomb outrage of Bengal. Considering the matter from the point of view of daring and skilled execution the Chaphekar brothers take a higher rank than members of the bomb party in Bengal. Considering the ends and the means, the Bengalis must be given greater commendation. Neither the Chaphekars nor the Bengali bomb-throwers committed murders for retaliating against the oppression practised upon themselves; hatred between individuals or private quarrels or disputes were not the cause of these murders. These murders have assumed a different aspect from ordinary murders owing to the supposition on the part of the perpetrators that they were doing a sort of beneficent act. Even though the causes inspiring the commission of these murders be out of the common, the causes of the Bengali bomb are particularly subtle. In the year 1897 the Poonaites were subjected to oppression at the time of the plague and the exasperation produced by that oppression had not exclusively a political aspect. That the very system of administration is bad, and that unless authorities are singled out and individually terrorized, they would not consent to change the system, this sort of important question was not there in front of the eyes of the Chaphekar brothers. Their aim was specially directed towards the oppression consequent upon the plague, that is to say, towards the particular act. The Bengali bombs had of course their eyes upon a more extensive plain brought into view by the partition of Bengal. Moreover, a pistol or a musket is an old weapon, while the bomb is the latest discovery of the western scientist . . . it was the western science itself that created new guns, new muskets and new ammunition and it was the westerner’s science that created the bomb . . . the military strength of no government is destroyed by bombs; the bomb has not the power of crippling the power of an army, nor does the bomb possess the strength to change the current of military strength, but owing to the bomb the attention of the government is attracted towards the disorder which prevails owing to the pride of military strength.

  On 8 July 1908, Shivram Mahadev Paranjpe, the editor of the newspaper Kal and a close associate of Tilak, was convicted in the Bombay High Court of seditious libel in his paper for an article relating to the Muzzafarpur incident. The government noted that it was couched in the same tone of apology for, if not approval of, the crime, which characterised the articles in the Kesari. Wrote Paranjpe in the article: “People are prepared to do anything for the sake of swarajya and they no longer sing the glories of the British rule. They have no dread of British power. It is simply a question of sheer brute force. Bomb-throwing in India is different from bomb-throwing in Russia. Many of the Russians side with their Government against these bomb-throwers, but it is doubtful whether much sympathy will be found in
India. If even in such circumstances Russia got the Duma, a fortiori India is bound to get swarajya. It is quite unjustifiable to call the bomb-throwers in India anarchists. Setting aside the question whether bomb-throwing is justifiable or not, Indians are not trying to promote disorder but to obtain swarajya.”

  The Sedition Committee Report noted: “In June 1908, a Hindu studying at London University gave a lecture at India house on the making of bombs justifying their use and explaining what ingredients were required. He said to his hearers, ‘When one of you is prepared to use a bomb at the risk of his life, let him come to me and I will give him full particulars.’ ”

  In 1909, Vinayak Savarkar rose to the position of acknowledged leader at the India House. Every Sunday, at the meetings held in India House, the members read passages from the book on the Indian mutiny prepared by Savarkar. It was called The Indian War of Independence, 1857, by an Indian Nationalist. The members also began to practise revolver-shooting at a range in London. On 1 July 1909, Madanlal Dhingra, who was associated with the India House, killed Colonel William Curzon Wyllie, Political ADC at the India office, at a gathering at the Imperial Institute in London.

  Around the same time, Ganesh Savarkar, the elder brother of Vinayak Savarkar, was convicted in Nasik on a charge of abetment of waging a war against the King under section 121 of IPC. His offence was mainly a series of inflammatory verses published early in 1908 under the title of Laghu Abhinav Bharat Mela. A Marathi-speaking judge of the High Court described it saying, “The writer’s main object is to preach a war against the present Government in the name of certain gods of the Hindus and certain warriors such as Shivaji. These names are a mere pretext for the text which is ‘Take up the sword and destroy the Government because it is foreign and oppressive’. The poems afford their own interpretation and no one who knows Marathi can or will understand them as anything but war against the British Government.”

  Ganesh Savarkar was sentenced to transportation on 9 June 1909 and a cable message was sent from Nasik to Vinayak Savarkar telling him of the sentence. At the usual Sunday meeting at the India House, Savarkar was said to be especially angry and repeated his oath to wreak vengeance on the English. A statement of Dhingra’s reasons for his act was found in his pocket when he was arrested. It was afterwards printed as a leaflet and circulated in India in large numbers by the India House group. The first paragraph said, “I attempted to shed English blood intentionally and of purpose as a humble protest against the inhuman transportation and hangings of Indian youths.”

  In February of the same year Vinayak Savarkar obtained a parcel of twenty Browning automatic pistols with ammunition from Paris and sent them out to Bombay concealed in the false bottom of a box forming part of the luggage of one Chatrabhuj Amin, employed as a cook at India House. Chatrabhuj arrived in Bombay on 6 March, a week after Ganesh Savarkar’s arrest. Before the arrest on 28 February, Ganesh Savarkar had informed a friend that pistols were on their way. His house was searched and among the documents found concealed in the eaves were sixty pages of closely typed matter in English that was a copy of the same bomb manual a copy of which was found in the Maniktala Garden in Calcutta. Savarkar’s copy was more complete than the Maniktala Garden one with forty-five sketches of bombs, mines and buildings to illustrate the text. On 21 December, Jackson, the district magistrate of Nasik who committed Ganesh Savarkar to trial was shot dead with one of the pistols sent out by Savarkar. It wasn’t the first time that Savarkar had sent weapons to India. A year earlier he had got in touch with an artist called Ramkrishna Vaman Deuskar whose Italian sister-in-law, who was on her way to India from Paris, carried weapons for his associates. The woman stitched them up in the cotton covers of a deckchair and sent them to the right people.

  In the Nasik Conspiracy, thirty-eight men were put on trial and twenty-seven found guilty and imprisoned. The Abhinav Bharat or Young India had started off as Mitra Mela in Nasik. Its changed name was inspired by the Young Italy of Mazzini. Its objects were undoubtedly revolutionary. It was founded upon the model of revolutionary societies of Russia. The search of Ganesh Savarkar’s house after his arrest also yielded a well-thumbed copy of Frost’s Secret Societies of European Revolution, 1776 to 1876 in which is described the secret organisation of the Russian nihilists consisting of small circle of groups affiliated into sections, each member knowing only the members of the group to which he belonged. The group was modelled along the lines of the Russian revolutionary groups. In England Savarkar completed a Marathi version of the autobiography of Mazzini. Two thousand copies were printed and distributed.

  The introduction to this book by Savarkar emphasised the importance of elevating politics to the rank of religion. Savarkar argued that Ramdas, the saint who lived at the time of Shivaji and guided him, possessed the same spiritual essence as Mazzini under a different name. It pointed out how Mazzini relied on the youth of the country to obtain independence and then proceeded to expand upon his two-fold programme of instruction and war. The suggested methods of preparation for war were the purchase and storing of weapons in neighbouring countries to be used when the time was right. Then there was also a suggestion to open many very small and secret factories at some distance from one another for the manufacture of the weapons clandestinely in the country seeking independence and the purchase by secret societies of weapons from other countries to be secretly imported in merchant ships.

  Tilak, says historian and researcher Y. D. Phadke, was not convicted and sentenced to six years in Mandalay merely due to the Muzzaffarpur incident. Most historians have ignored the other incidents that contributed to it. On 2 June 1908, three bomb blasts took place in Poona. One was outside a newspaper office in Budhwar Chowk, the second outside a liquor shop in Shaniwar Peth and the third near Daruwala Bridge. In his article in Kesari, “These Remedies are not Lasting” on 9 June, Tilak forecast the end of an iniquitous British rule in India. Tilak suggested earlier oppressive and unjust colonisers prompted discontent and extreme acts of self-sacrifice but no report of it ever reached the ears of the government. In the 20th century all this had changed. “Turn-headed men” now had access to bombs and could make everyone sit up and listen. He articulated this historical transformation in terms of the access that the oppressed had, not simply to weaponry, but also to the dissemination of the technology of bomb making. The bomb, he told the readers, “is not a thing like muskets or guns. It is a simple sport of science. Muskets and guns may be taken away from the subjects by means of the Arms Act and the manufacture, too, of guns, and muskets without the permission of the Government, may be stopped. But is it possible to stop or do away with the bomb by means of laws or the supervision of officials or the busy swarming of the detective police? The bomb has more the form of knowledge, it is a kind of witchcraft; it is a charm, an amulet.” Tilak went on to describe how bombs could be produced from materials stored in a few bottles and “the formula of the bomb does not at all appear to be a lengthy one because of its portability and its non-industrial and essentially swadeshi identity”. He said it was also “a technology which revealed itself to be an intellectual strategy”.

  Phadke also elaborates how the government by now was sure that the bomb blasts in Poona were actively brought about with the support of Tilak and his friend Shivram Mahadev Paranjpe. However, after after Tilak was arrested, the bomb blasts continued in and around Poona. One of them took place on 28 June, four days after Tilak’s arrest. A student of medicine called Anant Ganesh Karve was caught in this connection and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. On 23 May 1910, in Aundh, a bomb blast occurred and three men, Mahadev Ramchandra Hinge, Narayan Pandurang Mehendale and Vasudev Vishwanath Athlye, all three connected with the Savarkar brothers, were arrested. Athlye was the leader of this group. He studied in Calcutta’s National Medical College where he came in contact with a lot of students who were attracted to armed revolution. Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar of Nagpur, who later revived the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), was one of them
.

  On 25 August, another blast took place in Pandharpur and all those involved in it were convicted and imprisoned. The last attempt was made in Bhor in 1912 by an agitator called Krishnaji Narhar alias Bapusaheb Vaidya. He had sought help of the members of the Ramoshi community to loot the government treasury of Bhor. Some weapons were recovered from him and his associates. After that, there was silence on the front of the armed revolutionaries in western India. Most of their work now took place in north India and also outside the country where they worked with the encouragement of other leaders who shared Tilak’s ideology. Tilak, in the meanwhile, was in Mandalay and had got busy with his Geeta Rahasya.

  Chapter Six

  THEATRE LOVERS

  In the first chapter of his Natya Shastra Bharata gives an account of the creation of drama. He attributes it, in a mythical form, to Brahma, the God of creation. The drama, according to Bharata, was to serve various purposes. It was to be a source of pleasure to the minds weary of strife, wants, and miseries of daily existence. But besides offering entertainment, drama could also influence and uplift the minds of spectators. Natya would teach duty to those who went against it and chasten those who were imprudent. It would bring about self-restraint in the undisciplined, give courage to cowards, and energy to the heroic.