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NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 9 The Revolutionaries (Tilak’s sedition trial) — LET’S EXPLORE

Book page 56 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
When the judge asked Tilak if he had anything to say after being sentenced, Tilak replied, “There are higher powers that rule the destinies of men and nations; and I think, it may be the will of Providence that the cause I represent may be benefited more by my suffering than by my pen and tongue.” What message do you think he was trying to convey?
Answer

He was telling the court that the sentence would defeat its own purpose. The government thought it was silencing him. He replied that his six years in Mandalay would say more for Swaraj than his newspaper ever had.

Three things are packed into that sentence:

  • Acceptance without submission. He does not plead, apologise, or ask for mercy. He accepts the punishment, and in the same breath denies that the punishment settles anything.
  • ‘The cause I represent’. He shifts attention off himself. He is not on trial as Bal Gangadhar Tilak; he stands there for a cause, and causes do not go to jail.
  • ‘My suffering’ against ‘my pen and tongue’. He is naming a real political fact. An article can be censored and a speech can be banned — the Vernacular Press Act existed for exactly that. A public injustice cannot be censored. The trial was, as the chapter says, “rushed and unfair”, and everyone in India could read that in the papers.
Was he right? The chapter’s own evidence says yes. Tilak came out of prison “a national hero… known as ‘Lokmanya’ or ‘revered by the people’”. The same pattern repeats through the whole chapter: Khudiram Bose calm and smiling on the scaffold at 18, with crowds throwing flowers on his funeral procession; Bhagat Singh’s execution making him “a symbol of the resistance”; Lala Lajpat Rai’s death after the lathi charge inflaming the whole country. Repression kept producing the opposite of what it intended. Gandhi later built an entire method — satyagraha, “acceptance of suffering in the quest for truth” — on precisely this insight.
Also worth knowing: Tilak’s lawyer in that trial was Muhammad Ali Jinnah. He lost this case in 1908; in another sedition case in 1916 he defended Tilak successfully. It is a reminder of how differently the story of the 1940s might have looked from 1908.
Q2.
On another occasion, Tilak famously declared, “Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it.” What does this reveal about Tilak’s character?
Answer

It reveals a man who had stopped asking. Look at the two halves of the sentence — each says something different about him.

The wordsWhat they reveal
“Swaraj is my birthright”He rejects the whole idea of being granted freedom. A birthright is not given by a government and cannot be withheld by one — you have it because you were born. This is a direct answer to the Moderate position that self-rule must be earned slowly through good behaviour and gradual concessions
“and I shall have it”Determination, and a promise of action. Not ‘should have’ or ‘hope to have’ — shall. It is a statement of intent from a man who had already been to prison twice for it
“my birthright… I shall have it”Courage in the first person. He speaks as one man taking personal responsibility, which is why anyone hearing it could repeat it about themselves
Why this one sentence spread so far: It is short, it is in the first person, and it needs no education to understand. That was Tilak’s whole political method — the chapter says he was “a powerful orator” who turned Ganesh Chaturthi and the Shivaji festival into popular events “to send message that people needed to be awaken, stand up and resist the oppression”, and who wrote in Marathi in Kesari rather than in English. He was trying to reach people the Congress of 1885, “mostly drawn from Anglicised upper classes”, had never spoken to. A slogan any labourer could remember was a political tool, not a flourish.
Connect it up: Compare this with the Lahore resolution of 1929 — “it is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom”. Tilak’s ‘birthright’ became the Congress’s ‘inalienable right’ twenty years later.
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