Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
all his moral and intellectual force could stem the flowing tide of
Tilak's popularity in the Deccan; and in order not to be swept under he
was perhaps often compelled like many other Moderates to go further than
his own judgment can have approved. Tilak commanded the allegiance of
barristers and pleaders, schoolmasters and professors, clerks in
Government offices--in fact, of the large majority of the so-called
educated classes, largely recruited amongst his own and other Brahman
castes; and his propaganda had begun to filter down not only to the
coolies in the cities, but even to the rayats, or at least the head-men
in the villages.
More than that. From the Deccan, as we have already seen in his
relations with the Indian National Congress, his influence was projected
far and wide. His house was a place of pilgrimage for the disaffected
from all parts of India. His prestige as a Brahman of the Brahmans and a
pillar of orthodoxy, in spite of the latitude of the views which he
sometimes expressed in regard to the depressed castes, his reputation
for profound learning in the philosophies both of the West and of the
East, his trenchant style, his indefatigable activity, the glamour of
his philanthropy, his accessibility to high and low, his many acts of
genuine kindliness, the personal magnetism which, without any great
physical advantages, he exerted upon most of those who came in contact
with him, and especially upon the young, combined to equip him more
fully than any other Indian politician for the leadership of a
revolutionary movement.
The appeal which Tilak made to the Hindus was twofold. He taught them,
on the one hand, that India, and especially Maharashtra, the land of the
Mahrattas, had been happier and better and more prosperous under a Hindu
_raj_ than it had ever been or could ever be under the rule of alien
"demons"; and that if the British _raj_ had at one time served some
useful purpose in introducing India to the scientific achievements of
Western civilisation, it had done so at ruinous cost, both material and
moral, to the Indians whose wealth it had drained and whose social and
religious institutions it had undermined, and on the other hand he held
out to them the prospect that, if power were once restored to the
Brahmans, who had already learnt all that there was of good to be
learnt from the English, the golden age would return for gods and men.
That Tilak himself hardly believed in the possibility of overthrowing
British rule is more than probable, but what some Indians who knew him
well tell me he did believe was that the British could be driven or
wearied by a ceaseless and menacing agitation into gradually
surrendering to the Brahmans the reality of power, as did the later
Peshwas, and remaining content with the mere shadow of sovereignty. As
one of his organs blurted it out:--"If the British yield all power to us
and retain only nominal control, we may yet be friends."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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