The Tilak week

Lahore, Saturday, August 2, 1924

YESTERDAY was the first day of what has come to be known in the national calendar of India as the Tilak week. We have no doubt that as during the last three years, the week will be celebrated all over the country with the dignity, enthusiasm and solemnity which the occasion so imperatively demands. Many are the great men who have during the last 40 years worked for the country’s political uplift, who have either striven to weld India’s millions into a political entity or win for them their birth-right of freedom and self-determination. None worked more singlemindedly or more assiduously or with greater determination for either of these great ends than the distinguished leader whose name has for a quarter of a century been synonymous with all that is best and strongest in India’s national life and endeavour. We are, indeed, guilty of no exaggeration in saying that the great men who either preceded Bal Gangadhar Tilak or were his contemporaries from Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath and Pherozeshah to the immortal Gopal Krishna Gokhale were all engaged in only preparing the ground for the great fight. It was Tilak, ably aided and seconded by a handful of associates in different parts of the country, who began the actual battle. Pandit Motilal Nehru did less than justice to the noble band of what may aptly be described as the “revolutionary precursors” of India when in a recent speech at Poona he said they constituted nothing more than “an academical society of talents of the country”. They were certainly a good deal more. Some of them took the problem of the country’s political deliverance as seriously as Tilak himself did.