It is said that he is embittered. One of the highest and best of English officials in India told me he admired Mr. Tilak, and would gladly know him personally, but was afraid of inviting him for fear of a rebuff, so irreconcilable was the man reputed. Yet when the meeting did take place, by a kind of accident some weeks later, there was no rebuff, but only courtesy and openly expressed esteem. Certainly, if a fine nature can ever be embittered, Mr. Tilak has had enough to embitter him. Early in the ’eighties he was imprisoned for speaking against the Diwan or Prime Minister of a Native State, whom he accused of cruelty to the Raja. In September, 1897, he was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for attacks in the Kesari upon the Bombay Government when the population of Poona was frenzied at the plague regulations. After a year in gaol he was released, but soon afterwards he became involved in a private suit concerned with his trusteeship for a widow named Tai Maharaj and her adoption of an heir. The Bombay Government took up the case, and the trial, with appeals, dragged on for nearly two years, Mr. Tilak being condemned by one magistrate to a long imprisonment and heavy fine. “The paths of scholarship,” was the Pioneer’s comment, “lead but to the gaol,” and in Court Mr. Tilak was publicly handcuffed. Finally, in March, 1904, his appeal came before the High Court of Bombay, represented by Chief Justice Sir Lawrence Jenkins and Mr. Justice Batty; the conviction and sentence were quashed and the fine was ordered to be refunded.
This judgment confirmed the common Indian opinion that British justice can best be looked for in the High Courts of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, because the judges appointed directly by the Crown can maintain the law without being unconsciously prejudiced by long service under the Anglo-Indian routine. But, unfortunately, owing to Mr. Tilak’s past record, and his connection with the Extremist papers, the ruinous action taken against him had the air of persecution, and laid the Bombay Government open to a charge of vindictiveness. It was during these proceedings that Mr. Tilak displayed his fine unconcern by issuing his treatise on the origin of the Vedas, and in the end, when his innocence was finally established, he found that a leader’s greatest advantage of having suffered for his cause was indefinitely increased.
When I met him that evening on the mountain top, another crisis of his fate was just being decided, but nothing could surpass his outward calm. He was living in one of the dilapidated bungalows thinly scattered over the plateau. I was put to lodge in another empty one, because, belonging, as he does, to the same high caste as Mr. Gokhale, and to the same subsection of it, he refuses, as a strict Hindu, to emancipate himself from the caste obligations and live or eat with mere Europeans. All that night the wind roared over the mountains, but with the first sun he came to lead me round the elaborate ruins of the fortifications, and, as though he had no interest in the world except as tourist’s guide, he showed me where the British guns had battered, and where, in the time of the Mahratta hero, Shivaji, two hundred and forty years ago, his own ancestors crept up the precipice at night and scaled this very wall, aided by a great lizard that was trained to carry a string up the surface and hold tight with its claws till a man could climb. So at this dizzy spot the party had climbed; then killed.
It is easy to perceive the marvels of the past, and belief in them is unimportant. But to realize the strange significance of the man at my side, and to understand the things he believed in at the moment was a different matter. He continued to discourse about the villages half hidden in the deep valleys below, and narrate their sufferings, hopes, and varying prosperity as if he had no further thought on earth beyond their cattle and their rice. But I knew that at Nagpur in the Central Provinces, things had just been happening which deeply involved himself and his party. The annual meeting of the National Congress was to have been held there at Christmas. The Reception Committee had met to appoint a President, and the Moderates of the majority chose Dr. Rash Behari Ghose. Thereupon, the Extremists, insisting upon their majority in the Central Provinces and in the Executive Committee, chose Mr. Tilak. He in turn proposed Mr. Lajpat Rai, as a compromise; but, with his usual chivalry, Mr. Lajpat Rai refused to stand rather than risk a division among the reform party, or an open breach between the Congress and the Government. To be sure, deeper questions of principle or of method lay behind these personal disputes, but on the personal question of the President the Nagpur meeting had just broken up in disorder. The Moderates had determined not to hold the Congress at Nagpur at all, but to accept the invitation of Surat, only a few hours’ journey north of Bombay, which was the headquarters of the strongest section among them.
Compared to the wild adventures of his Mahratta ancestry, or to the economic conditions of the peasants far below us, one might have supposed from his manner that Mr. Tilak regarded these party differences as beneath all notice. Perhaps he did so regard them, and, if he did, he was partially right. But still, at the moment, the party difference was the thing attracting most attention in India, and it was sure to grow in importance. Mr. Tilak’s own thoughts might have been occupied with the situation all day, but it was only in the afternoon that he came quietly into my empty bungalow alone, and began to discuss it in his concise and definite way. When I published a careful abstract of this conversation shortly afterwards, many Moderates and Extremists alike supposed that he had dissembled his true intentions, and told me only what he wished to be known. As he did not ask for secrecy, certainly I never supposed he was telling me things he did not wish to be known, and I think it very likely that he enjoyed giving himself the pleasure of appearing as Moderate as possible. But in the evening I read over to him the notes I had taken of the conversation just as it was afterwards published, and he approved of what I wrote. In studying his speeches and writings of recent years, I have also found the lines of his policy laid down in almost the same words as he used to me, and I am inclined to think that his statements resembled his beliefs rather closely.
His first object was to show that, as to their immediate purpose, Extremists and Moderates did not differ in aim:—
“It is not by our purpose, but by our methods only,” he said, “that our party has earned the name of Extremist. Certainly, there is a very small party which talks about abolishing the British rule at once and completely. That does not concern us; it is much too far in the future. Unorganized, disarmed, and still disunited, we should not have a chance of shaking the British suzerainty. We may leave all that sort of thing to a distant time. Our object is to obtain eventually a large share in the administration of our own country. Our remote ideal is a confederacy of the Indian provinces, possessing colonial self-government, with all Imperial questions set apart for the central government in England. Perhaps our Home Rule would take the form of Provincial Councils of fifty or sixty members, nominated or indirectly elected at first, but elected by popular vote as education became more general.
“But that ideal also,” he went on, “is far ahead of us—perhaps generations ahead. What we aim at doing now is to bring pressure on the bureaucracy; to make it feel that all is not well. Of late the attitude of our British officials has greatly changed for the worse. They no longer speak of educating us up to freedom, as the great Englishmen like Elphinstone did in the past. They appear to agree with the Times that our education in subjects like English history must be checked, because it is dangerous for ‘natives’ to learn anything about freedom. Your present statesmen seem to take the old Roman Empire as their ideal, and even in that they follow the modern school of Oxford historians, who trace the fall of the Empire to the concession of citizenship to the provinces.
“I know the worst that you can say about the Russian bureaucracy; but even that bureaucracy does, according to its lights, seek to maintain the honour and prosperity of Russia, because Russia is its own country. Our bureaucracy administers a country not its own for the sake of a country far away, entirely different in character and interests. Our bureaucracy is despotic, alien, and absentee.”
Mr. Tilak then referred to the well-known complaints brought against our Administration by nearly all students of Indian economics—the “drain” of some £30,000,000 to £35,000,000 a year to England in the shape of various payments from an impoverished country; the ruin of Indian trades and manufactures, first by duties against her exports, and now by customs dues within her own borders, deliberately imposed for the advantage of British, Austrian, and American firms; the reduction of very nearly the whole population to a subsistence on a starving agriculture; and the unexplained increase of malaria, famine, and plague.