The Thought of Bal Gangadhar Tilak- An Intellectual Biography

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This book examines Bal Gangadhar Tilak's views on communal relations within the Indian polity, on caste and reform in Hindu society, and on political ethics regarding violence and non-cooperation. Using a contextualist approach, Robert E. Upton situates Tilak's ideas in local, all-Indian, and global cultural and intellectual contexts by analysing his journalism, speeches, and canonical texts, contrary to current interpretations, arguing that Tilak is misappropriated and/or misunderstood as a proto-Hindutva thinker. Instead, Tilak emerges as a majoritarian pluralist in inter-community terms, a radical liberal in his advocacy for counter-autocratic violence, and a self-strengthening, masculinity-focused reformer and Brahmin supremacist. Upton explores Tilak's contesting and reworking in India's public sphere since his death and shows how his appropriation by Gandhi was contested by those who celebrated his violence to oppose Gandhian nationalism. He also discusses the growing ahistorical demi-official insistence on Tilak's social progressivism and the use of popular or even legal pressure to delegitimize perennial criticism of his socio-political positions, thus illustrating a change in India's public culture. Overall, the book provides a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of Tilak's thought and its impact on Indian society.

Tilak finally has the biographer he deserves with Robert Upton's detailed and comprehensive study of one of modern India's most important and arresting leaders.

This work has its somewhat remote origins in a doctoral project under- taken at the University of Oxford, culminating in the award of the DPhil in 2013. Thanks are due to my supervisor, Polly O'Hanlon, who gave generously of her time and considerable expertise on the social and intellectual history of Maharashtra, greatly enriching the thesis which is the foundation of this work.

Among the History Faculty at the University of Oxford, I am also indebted to Judith Brown and Faisal Devji for making such constructive comments on that thesis's final shape. Nandini Gooptu's comments were also valuable in setting out my initial research path. St Antony's College provided a congenial home and considerable intellectual stimulation throughout my time there. I am grateful to the College's staff and Fellows, and in particular I must thank the then College Warden, Margaret MacMillan, for discharging her duties graciously and taking time to meet with and interest herself in the research of the College's students. My College advisor, Michael Willis, was kind and supportive beyond the call of duty. Jan-Georg Deutsch was a valued part of the community of global historians among whom I developed, and his insights and encouragement are much missed. It is with more unalloyed pleasure I take the opportunity to put on record my enormous intellectual debt to those others who from the beginning of my time at Oxford were responsible for my development there, and I offer my warmest thanks to David Rundle, Zoe Waxman, and John Darwin.

For helping me negotiate the transition to postdoctoral life-which is so often a difficult one-I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Maria Misra, and to David Priestland. Maria was kind and supportive, beyond the norm, of my forays into teaching, and her guidance, encouragement, and support of my career in the years since have been indispensable. For these things, as well as her interest in my work, and the time she has given to provide her scholarly insights, I am immensely grateful.

In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Bal Gangadhar Tilak is described as an icon of modern India Whatever our opinion of Tilak's ideas, this seems a reasonable assertion, and given that it is made in a collection of studies of the lives of men and women who have 'shaped British history and culture, worldwide, it encapsulates the global influence of Tilak's career, and the critical importance of the milieu-and his part in it-in the development of the colonial relationship. Yet we would be misled to think that Tilak, the icon, has an evident meaning. For Tilak is a polysemic icon. In his own career, he showed himself a deft manipulator of historical symbols: history's revenge on Tilak has seen a cacophony of claims to his own symbology in the century since his death, though perhaps it is an irony he would have appreciated.

Tilak, the firebrand nationalist, pioneering journalist-editor, and dominant political impresario of western India in the forty years before M. K. Gandhi's rise to national leadership, was significant enough in his day to have been named a 'maker of modern India' by Gandhi on his death. Following the Mahatma, Ramachandra Guha, modern India's 'preeminent chronicler, named Tilak more recently as one of his own nineteen modern India-makers. His is still a name to be dropped by Indian prime ministers. Yet there has been a curious lack of serious study of his ideas. Tilak, indeed, has not really been seen as a thinker. Even his own former newspaper, Mahratta, editorialized on his second death anniversary in 1922 that he did not 'waste time or energy in academical discussions of political dogmas and hollow theories of political conduct. And the idea that Tilak was a man of practical action has militated against serious study of his thought; his major published works on Aryan history and his treatise on the Bhagavad Gita (the Gita Rahasya) are often seen as an aside or perhaps a footnote to the thrust of his career, and one of his biographers was even criticized for wasting space on a discussion of them.

Yet on the facing page to the editorial just mentioned, his disciple M. R. Jayakar made the recurring claim that Tilak in fact would rather have been a scholar and philosopher than an agitator; this was echoed the same year by Professor Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (more famous as the second President of independent India), contributing to a work on Eminent Orientalists. It also clashed with Tilak's own self-conception as founder- editor of that same newspaper in its earliest days in 1881: Mahratta might have been criticized as theoretical, visionary, or chimerical, he claimed, but he vowed to continue in the vein, offering ranging discussions on topics such as the 'future of India' or the permanence of British rule." It is the contention of this work that Tilak's thought is worthy of serious study, and that the lack of this is a noticeable hole in our understanding of the political and intellectual history of modern South Asia. Tilak's views on the historically important questions of the nature of the Indian polity, the reform of Hindu society, and the conduct of politics-the three areas that are the core concern of the book's central chapters-were pivotal in their ongoing discussion in India, not least because of the period he in- habited. As an intellectual active from 1880 to 1920, he necessarily grappled with these questions at a time when they became more urgent and vital, from the emergence of organized 'nationalist' politics, through to its bourgeoning during the Swadeshi agitation from 1905, and onwards to the dawn of Gandhian nationalism.