Bal Gangadhar Tilak Was Convicted of Sedition by a 6 to 3 Jury in 1897 and a 7 to 2 Jury in 1908, and His Printed Speeches Use the Birthright Idea by 1917, With No Single Dated Source for the Famous Line

No single dated speech is the known source of the full sentence “Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it.” Dhananjay Keer’s 1959 biography of Bal Gangadhar Tilak says he declared the motto “Freedom is a birth-right” at Akola on 2 May 1908, and cites an entry in G. S. Khaparde’s diary saying the phrase was taken up everywhere afterwards. Gopal Ram’s 1956 biography says that after the Congress split at Surat in December 1907, Tilak gave the slogan “Swarajya is my birthright; I will have it” at every meeting he attended.

The birthright line turns up in 1908, 1916 and 1917

The best check is Tilak’s own printed speeches. The 1919 Madras collection of his writings and speeches has him telling the Nasik conference of 1917, “Freedom is my birthright.” At Yeotmal he explained swaraj as the power to rule one’s own home and said, “It is your birth-right to govern your own house or home.” In a speech on strengthening the national will, he told listeners to make “I will try to have my birth-right” their daily prayer. Later, in Madras, he said “birthrights are not always recognised and you must work for them.”

A search of the digitised text of that collection finds no match for the full popular wording, “shall have it.” Keer gives a close version, “Home Rule is my birth-right and I shall have it,” as the end of Tilak’s speech to the Lucknow Congress on 29 December 1916, and cites a volume of reminiscences for it. A popular account in The Better India credits Joseph “Kaka” Baptista, Tilak’s colleague in the Home Rule League, with coining the line. It cites a 1930 Times of India obituary and names no document. None of the sources consulted for this article prints a first use.

Two papers started in January 1881

The English weekly Mahratta appeared on 2 January 1881 and the Marathi weekly Kesari on 4 January, according to Gopal Ram. Tilak, G. G. Agarkar, Chiplunkar and M. B. Namjoshi ran them from the premises of the New English School in Poona. By the end of the first year, Gopal Ram writes, official records were calling the papers unfriendly to government.

In 1882 Tilak and Agarkar were each sentenced to four months for articles attacking Barve, the minister of Kolhapur state, on the strength of letters that turned out to be fabricated. Of that term Tilak served 101 days and lost 25 pounds, Gopal Ram says.

Justice Arthur Strachey told the 1897 jury that Kesari had six or seven thousand subscribers, and a Government of India secretary’s note of 1908, quoted by Gopal Ram, put its circulation at 20,000.

Public Ganesh festivals and a Shivaji festival

After Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay on 11 August 1893, Tilak and his associates set up five public Ganapati images in Poona. Kesari of 26 September 1893, quoted by Gopal Ram, said the immersion procession had taken a public form “in a large measure.” Keer and Gopal Ram both describe household worship moving into the street, with singing groups, lectures and gymnastic clubs. A Kesari editorial of 1896 argued, the UCLA South Asia centre notes, that the festivals could carry political education to villages in a way the Congress could not.

The festivals were disputed from the start. In 1894, Gopal Ram records, a clash between boys singing past a mosque in Poona and Muslims turned into a riot, and Tilak’s critics said the procession copied the Muslim tabut procession and offended Muslims. Tilak answered that Hindu fairs had long had similar drums and processions. A Shivaji festival had already been started in 1885 by men around the reformer M. G. Ranade, Keer adds, and they opposed it once Tilak made it a mass event. Within two years the Ganapati festival had spread across Marathi-speaking towns, and by 1910, according to the UCLA page, the British had curtailed it by order. The ruler the festival honoured is the subject of our profile of Shivaji.

The 1897 trial and an 18-month sentence on a 6 to 3 verdict

Kesari of 15 June 1897 reported the Shivaji coronation festival, printed verses in which Shivaji laments the state of his country, and carried an article asking whether Shivaji sinned in killing Afzal Khan. On 22 June, Poona’s plague commissioner W. C. Rand and Lieutenant Ayerst were shot dead. According to the Bombay High Court’s own account, the killings were blamed on Tilak’s speeches and articles. Tilak was prosecuted for sedition under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, not for the murders.

Bail was refused twice, then granted by the High Court at Rs 50,000 on a third application argued by his counsel D. D. Davar. Justice Strachey opened the trial on Wednesday 8 September 1897. He told the jury that “disaffection” meant the absence of affection, following a Calcutta High Court ruling of 1891. The High Court’s history page calls this a slip, and the lawyer Arvind Datar calls it clearly wrong, because the explanations to Section 124A protect criticism of government measures.

The jury split 6 to 3. LiveLaw lists the nine as five European Christians, two Hindus, one Parsi and one European Jew, and Datar and Gopal Ram agree the three Indians voted for acquittal. Accepting the majority, Strachey sentenced Tilak on 14 September to 18 months of rigorous imprisonment. Asked if he had anything to say, Tilak answered that he still held himself innocent and thought the verdict came from misunderstood Marathi texts. The High Court refused leave to appeal to the Privy Council, and the Privy Council refused special leave although H. H. Asquith argued for Tilak. Tilak was released at 9 p.m. on 6 September 1898 after Government accepted a condition that any later sedition conviction would carry the unserved six months.

Surat, December 1907

The Congress session meant for Nagpur was moved to Surat after a dispute over its president. Moderates backed Rash Behari Ghose, and Tilak’s side proposed Lajpat Rai. On 27 December 1907 Tilak had given notice of an amendment, but the chairman put Ghose’s election to the vote before Tilak could speak. Standing on the platform, Tilak refused to leave unless removed. A shoe struck Pherozeshah Mehta, and Ghose adjourned the session without a date.

Each side blamed the other. Tilak’s party said the Moderates had hired men with lathis, and a Moderate spokesman, R. N. Mudholkar, said Tilak’s delegates included touts and factory hands, according to Gopal Ram. The Government of Bombay’s own history sketch dates the origin of the Home Rule League to Surat.

The 1908 trial, bail argued by Jinnah, and the Bombay strikes

Two Kesari articles were prosecuted, one of 12 May 1908 and one of 9 June. Both followed a bomb thrown at a carriage at Muzaffarpur on 30 April by Khudiram Bose and a companion, which killed two Englishwomen, and the new laws on explosives and newspapers. Tilak condemned the outrage, Datar notes, but wrote that repression and a refusal of the rights of swarajya would breed more of it. He was arrested in Bombay at about 6 p.m. on 24 June and charged under Sections 124A and 153A.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, then a young Bombay barrister, acted for Tilak at the bail stage. LiveLaw names him as Tilak’s first counsel, and Gopal Ram writes that on 2 July Jinnah applied to the High Court for bail, arguing that Tilak could not instruct counsel from jail, that he had diabetes, and that the official translations of the articles were wrong. Justice Davar, who as Tilak’s lawyer in 1897 had argued the same point, refused bail without hearing the Advocate-General and gave no reasons. At trial, Gopal Ram says, Tilak dismissed his lawyers and spoke to the jury himself.

That address ran 21 hours, a figure that the police commissioner’s report and Davar’s charge to the jury both repeat. Tilak argued that the Marathi had been mistranslated, that criticism of the bureaucracy was not hatred of government, and that Anglo-Indian papers had printed far harsher words without prosecution.

Seven of the nine jurors were Europeans and two were Indians. On 22 July 1908 they divided 7 to 2, the two Indians voting not guilty. Davar told Tilak the articles were “seething with sedition” and sentenced him to three years’ transportation on each of the two charges, to run one after the other, with a fine of Rs 1,000. Tilak replied that higher powers ruled the fate of things and that his cause might prosper more by his suffering than by his freedom.

H. G. Gell, the Bombay police commissioner, reported to Government on 27 August 1908 that Tilak was convicted at 9.40 p.m. He recorded that 70 mills stopped work on 24 July and 76 on 25 July, that troops were called in, and that police and soldiers shot people dead during the disturbances, including three on Chinchpoogly Road on 24 July. Gell also noted a report that cloth-market employees had resolved to stay away for six days, one for each year of the sentence.

Mandalay and the Gita Rahasya

Tilak was held at Sabarmati jail near Ahmedabad until 14 September 1908, when he was put aboard a ship for Rangoon. On 21 September the Bombay Government commuted the transportation to simple imprisonment, which Gopal Ram says cost him the freedom a transported convict would have had. He spent six years in a room of about 20 by 12 feet in Mandalay Central Jail, and Gopal Ram says he was allowed no newspapers. His wife died in June 1912.

B. S. Sukthankar’s 1935 English translation of the Gita Rahasya carries a note on the original manuscript, which fills four bound books dated between 2 November 1910 and 30 March 1911. In a Kesari interview of 30 June 1914, quoted there, Tilak said he was given bound books, not ink, only a pencil that came ready sharpened. His own preface says the draft was made in Mandalay in the winter of 1910 and 1911, and that he completed the unfinished portions after his release. The first edition came out in June 1915, after, Gopal Ram says, a government Marathi expert had found nothing incriminating in the manuscript and it was returned. How the book reads the Gita, putting action ahead of renunciation, is covered in our piece on the Gita’s structure and commentaries.

Tilak was released at 12.45 a.m. on 17 June 1914, a few weeks before his term ended.

Home Rule, Lucknow and the last months

The Government of Bombay’s history sketch and Keer both date the founding of Tilak’s Home Rule League to the Belgaum provincial conference of 28 April 1916, with Joseph Baptista as president and N. C. Kelkar as secretary. Annie Besant’s league followed in Madras in September. His Home Rule speeches at Belgaum and Ahmednagar led the Poona district magistrate to serve a notice on 22 July 1916 asking why he should not give a good-behaviour bond of Rs 20,000, and the magistrate later ordered the bond. Gopal Ram says Jinnah argued Tilak’s case before the magistrate and again in the High Court, which cancelled the order in November 1916. The Bombay High Court’s museum page also records that the bond order was set aside.

At Lucknow in December 1916 the Congress and the Muslim League met together and agreed a joint reform scheme. It reserved seats for Muslims in the provincial councils of seven provinces and one-third of the elected members of the Imperial Legislative Council, all to be filled through separate electorates. Keer writes that Tilak was criticised for accepting separate electorates and that Moonje and Sapru opposed him. Tilak told a Home Rule meeting on 30 December, “We cannot rise from our present intolerable condition without the aid of Muslims.” Jinnah’s part in the pact is told in our account of his record.

Tilak died in Bombay at 12.50 a.m. on Sunday 1 August 1920. Gopal Ram puts the funeral crowd at two lakh (200,000) and says that Gandhi lifted one end of the bier when some mourners wanted only Brahmins to carry it. Gandhi had announced on 28 July that his non-cooperation movement would begin on 1 August.