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Articles: Festivals | Owe the mass celebration of the Ganesh Festival only to Tilak
- Mr. devrajgoud kodipyaka
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Bal Gangadhar Tilak's contribution to modern India stands on par with that of Mahatma Gandhi's. Tilak was a great Sanskrit scholar and astronomer. He fixed the origin and date of Rigvedic Aryans, which was highly acclaimed and universally accepted by orientalists of his time. His role in Congress and advocating Home Rule for India were enormous. His newspaper (Kesari) founded in 1881 is going strong even today. Hundreds of schools in India were result of his vision. We owe the mass celebration of the Ganesh festival (see: Ganesh Chaturthi) only to Tilak. He was Guru to Savarkar and hundreds of nationalists and thousands of Indians. Actually he set up the platform for Gandhiji's leadership. Although Gandhi accepted Gokhale as his mentor, in practice, he adopted all of Tilak's ideas of Swadeshi and of social reform. In 1920, when Tilak passed away, 200,000 mourners assembled on Chowpati beach of Bombay, without a single untoward incident. It is very hard to condense the great man's contribution to our country, but I have made an attempt below.
Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it!' were the fiery words of Tilak which roused a sleeping nation to action, making Indian people aware of their political plight under a foreign rule. Tilak did not question the British Sovereignty nor his demands rebellious or revolutionary. All he was asking was favorable conditions in India, to enable people to learn to govern themselves. May be all over the world, the separatist forces should follow his vision and define freedom as ability to govern one's land. But the handful rulers who ruled India's millions thought otherwise. They thought that Tilak was whipping a rebellion and he was imprisoned twice; two years for the first and six during the second. They said, he had committed treason
Born in Ratnagiri, a small coastal town in 1856 in a middle class family, Tilak had to fend himself for college education. At an early age he was convinced that the educational system the British provided for the Indians was not at all adequate. After graduation and a law degree, he helped found a school which laid emphasis on nationalism. He started a news paper 'Kesari' which tried to teach Indians of their glorious past and reminded them to be self reliant (Swadeshi).
The British used all the native raw materials to run their factories in England and sold the finished products to India, keeping the India an ever dependant country. In the process, all the self-employing industries of India like spinning, weaving, glass making, sugar ,dyeing, paper making were destroyed. People became destitute for no fault of theirs to help an empire become richer and stronger.
Tilak tried to breathe life into the moribund nation through four mantras. (1). Boycott of foreign goods (2) National Education (3) Self Government (4) Swadeshi or self reliance. He realized that mere protest against British rule was not going to help and insisted on native production and reliance. 'We have no arms, but there is no necessity. But our strong political weapon is boycott (of foreign goods) Organize your powers and then go to work so that they cannot refuse you what you demand' - he told the masses.
devrajgoud@yahoo.co.in
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