Bal Gangadhar Tilak - Dr. S Radhakrishnan

Tilak is well known as a politician of great power and personality, who did his best to promote the political freedom of his country. Yet, the field of politics to which he devoted the best years of his life was not the one for which he was made. Tilak was by nature a scholar and only by necessity a politician. Not for nothing did he come from the Mahratta country. Latterly it has not been possible for the thinking minds of India to be indifferent to the political situation. The subjection of the country worked persistently on the mind of Tilak and triumphed over his natural bent. Politics in India, when taken up seriously, is not only exacting but also exhausting. If one has to succeed in it, one must give up all other pursuits. The jealous mistress cannot brook the rivalry of other intellectual exercises involving patient labor and continued thought. Tilak who fell a victim to the political struggle was unable for a long time to give his best to Oriental studies. The Government however came to his rescue and enabled him to practice a little more economy of interest, by forcibly retiring him from public life. The prison cell was the place where his brave soul could pursue its congenial vocation. In the ten years of enforced leisure spent in Mandalay and elsewhere, Tilak did his best literary work, by which he will be remembered even after his fame, as a politician, grows dim.

Tilak’s literary work is not the traditional distraction of an unemployed statesman. As a rule, the transformation of a professional politician into a man of letters is not successful. But Tilak’s natural aptitude had been in the direction of Oriental studies and so we find in his work, instead of the discursiveness of the amateur, the solid learning and the keen insight of a trained scholar.

Source: `Eminent Orientalists’ published (1991) by Asian Educational Services, C-2/15, SDA New Delhi 110 016.

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