The Tiger’s Nature, but Not the Tiger: Bal Gangadhar Tilak as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s Counter-Guru
Hind Swaraj’s importance is born out of a dialogue with a figure whom Gandhian commentary has all but deleted: Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Much of Gandhi’s thought and writing has to negotiate the central problem of Tilak’s dominance of India politics through the first two decades of the twentieth century and the astonishing, and unexpected, symmetry between many of their concerns. This article explores the distance that separates Gandhi and Tilak ethically and politically but also attempts to highlight the troubling intimacy of the deep structures of their philosophy.
South Africa, London, Bombay
There is a striking numerological coincidence between the writing of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and Tilak’s 1908 trial for sedition, which gestures to a much more consequential mirroring underlying the argument of this article. Hind Swaraj was written over the course of ten days, between November 13 and 22, 1909, as Gandhi returned to South Africa aboard the Kildonan Castle ( Parel 1997: xiv). Sixteen months earlier, between July 13 and 22, 1908, Tilak stood trial in the third Criminal Sessions of the Bombay High Court, following which he would be sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, most of it spent in solitary confinement.
These dates, although they seem to glint (to recall a Benjaminian metaphor) like gleams of silver pointing a way through a dark mine, signify — of course — nothing.1 However, they help frame a profound similitude between Gandhi’s and Tilak’s philosophical approach to the question of liberation, the self, and the role of violence. This similitude takes the form of a mirroring: point-by- point similarity characterized by inversion but lacking topological transformation.
Most accounts of Hind Swaraj have positioned it antagonistically in opposition to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (figs. 1 – 2), whom Gandhi had met during his London stay at Shyamji Krishnavarma’s India House in Highgate. Savarkar’s Indian War of Independence, 1857 (written in Marathi in 1908) had been translated into English, printed in Holland, and privately published in London (and promptly proscribed) on May 10, 1909.2 This date was itself a strange echo of “the war begun on the 10th of May 1857” ( Joshi 2008: vii, viii, xvii).
The Gandhi-Savarkar dualism also works well as a means of defining the specificity and originality of Gandhi’s understanding of swaraj, the term that Gandhi substituted for swarajya (self-government) in the first English edition of 1910 ( Parel 1997: lxii). Although Savarkar stages swaraj as a freedom from an interconnectedness (“the chain of slavery” [ Savarkar 2008: 11]), he also makes explicitly clear in the first chapter of Indian War of Independence (which bears the title “Swadharma and Swaraj”) that nationalistic self-making was a subsidiary operation of gendered divine and territorial identifications. Commenting on the Oudh Talukdars (crucial participants in the early stages of the 1857 insurrection), Savarkar (2008: 16) argues that rather than “murderous mutineers,” they should be regarded as “noble patriots” who fought for “King and the Motherland — for Swaraj and Swadesh!” The king referred to here is Wajid Ali Shah. Note the gendered split here that positions Indians as subjects of a nation: a self-country that was Bharat Mata and a self-rule that was defined through royal power.
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Notes
- The metaphor is Walter Benjamin’s in a letter to Theodor W. Adorno, November 10, 1930 (Adorno and Benjamin 1999: 7).
- See Sharma 2008: 123 on the history of the book’s retitling, whereby it became subsequently known as The First Indian War of Independence — 1857.
