Tilak as a Writer

Abstract This chapter offers an overview of Tilak’s entire written output, describing the range of Tilak’s writings and statements, and their provenance. It gives brief synopses of Tilak’s three main texts—The Orion: Or Researches into the History of the Vedas (1893), The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903), and the Gita Rahasya (‘Secret Import of the Gita’) (1915)—and situates them in the context of his career, as well as offering a contextualization of Tilak in contemporary debates, particularly concerning Aryanism. On Aryanism, it shows that Tilak’s ‘Aryan invasion’ theory stands askance to the emerging Hindutva interpretation of Indian history even during Tilak’s lifetime. Tilak’s turn to the Gita later in his career is used to shed fresh light on the extraordinary valorization of that text, in India and globally, in this period. The chapter also characterizes the main concerns of Tilak’s newspaper writings in the English-language Mahratta and the Marathi Kesari over the course of his career, something hitherto lacking in more selective accounts.