Jinnah was the lawyer who defended India's fiery nationalist Tilak
Before Gandhi, the best-known Indian politician was a mathematics teacher from Ratnagiri whose slogan declared self-rule his birthright. The British tried Bal Gangadhar Tilak for sedition three times, and his counsel in two of those cases was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, later the founder of Pakistan, who won him an acquittal in 1916.
Born Keshav Gangadhar Tilak on 23 July 1856 in Ratnagiri, in the Bombay Presidency, he was the son of a schoolteacher and Sanskrit scholar who died when the boy was sixteen. Tilak earned a mathematics degree from Deccan College in Poona in 1877 and a law degree two years later. With friends he founded the New English School in 1880, the Deccan Education Society in 1884 and Fergusson College in 1885, aiming to instil national pride through Indian culture, and he taught mathematics there before turning to politics and journalism.
Through his newspapers Kesari, in Marathi, and Mahratta, in English, he became Congress's leading radical, scorning the moderates led by Gopal Krishna Gokhale. With Lala Lajpat Rai of Punjab and Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal he formed the trio known as Lal Bal Pal. After Lord Curzon partitioned Bengal, Tilak promoted the Swadeshi movement for Indian-made goods alongside a boycott of foreign ones, calling them two sides of one coin. At Surat in 1907 Congress split between his camp and the moderates. Admirers gave him the title Lokmanya, roughly a leader whom the people embrace.
His writing brought repeated prosecutions. In 1897 he was jailed for 18 months over articles written during a harsh British plague campaign in Pune. In 1908, after defending young revolutionaries in print, he was convicted of sedition by a 7 to 2 jury and sent to Mandalay in Burma for six years. There he wrote Gita Rahasya, donating the proceeds to the independence movement, and developed diabetes. The British writer Valentine Chirol branded him the father of Indian unrest.
Prison softened him. Released on 16 June 1914, he backed Britain's war effort, embraced constitutional agitation and rejoined Congress at the Lucknow Pact of 1916. He argued for a federal India of equal partners and was the first Congress leader to propose Hindi in Devanagari as the national language. Tilak urged Gandhi to seek self-rule by any means; Gandhi disagreed but raised money for him, and called him the Maker of Modern India. He died on 1 August 1920.
Source: Bal Gangadhar Tilak
