Remembering Tilak

Abstract This chapter adopts a cultural history approach, surveying the contesting of Tilak’s memory in the Indian public sphere since his death, giving rise to a range of bitterly disputed contemporary readings. Through this it also contextualizes the historiography on Tilak, while illustrating the porous boundaries between official, popular, and academic accounts. Beginning with Tilak’s remarkable initial remembrance as national ‘founding father’ from 1920 within India and its diaspora, and the relevance of the ‘charismatic’ suffering of his sedition imprisonments for this, it then describes Gandhi’s appropriation of Tilak’s memory, and the subsequent remembering of Tilak as Gandhian; and then details how Tilak’s endorsement of violence was conversely celebrated by many, particularly on the emergent Hindu right in 1920s Maharashtra, helping to posthumously cement his credentials as a Hindutva ideologue, while therefore necessitating a reworking of his ideas. Non-Brahmin political organization, and women’s activism, have helped to concentrate popular and academic attention upon his ‘casteist’, ‘Arya-supremacist’ politics, and his gendered understanding of Indian society; and there has been a partly responsive move to insisting that Tilak was simply a ‘legendary social reformer’. As the post-independence state has used Tilak’s patriotic memory for legitimation, others have instead used him to critique and resist state power. But criticism of Tilak on grounds of religious politics or ‘extremism’ has become more strenuously resisted, and critics (or even textbooks) silenced, in recent years, contemporaneous with the growth in power of the Hindu right, potentially increasing the influence of a specific vision of his politics today.