Who among the following founded the 'Tilak School of Politics' ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), Lala Lajpatrai. The name of the institution is the trap: the 'Tilak School of Politics' was not founded by Tilak, nor in Maharashtra. It was set up at Lahore by Lala Lajpat Rai as a memorial to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who died on 1 August 1920, and it opened in the months immediately after that death (sources place it in 1920–21). Lajpat Rai and Tilak were two-thirds of the 'Lal-Bal-Pal' trio that had led the Extremist wing of the Congress from the Swadeshi years, so the memorial was a political statement as much as an educational one — the militant nationalist who had survived was institutionalising the teaching of the one who had not. The school was deliberately built outside the university system, which in Punjab meant outside a government-controlled and government-affiliating structure: it taught politics, economics, sociology, journalism and social work to young men who were expected to become full-time public workers rather than degree-holders. That purpose — training what Lajpat Rai called 'national missionaries' — is the thread connecting it to his better-known foundation of the following year, the Servants of the People Society (Lok Sevak Mandal), set up at Lahore in 1921, into which the school's work was folded. Lajpat Rai's institution-building record makes him the plausible founder on general grounds too: he had already been associated with the founding of the Punjab National Bank in 1894, he presided over the special Calcutta session of the Congress in September 1920 that adopted Non-Cooperation, and the National College at Lahore — where Bhagat Singh later studied — grew out of the same non-cooperation impulse to build Indian institutions parallel to official ones. The question tests whether a candidate reads the word 'Tilak' as a dedication rather than as an authorship clue.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Bipin Chandra Pal is the 'Pal' of Lal-Bal-Pal, which makes him the most tempting wrong answer here — if the school honours Tilak, a candidate reasons, one of Tilak's two comrades must have built it, and Pal is as good a candidate as Lajpat Rai. But Pal's life's work ran through journalism and oratory rather than institution-building: he edited and wrote for papers such as Bande Mataram and New India, toured relentlessly during the Swadeshi and Boycott agitation, and is remembered for propagating extremist nationalism in print and on the platform. No school of politics is recorded to him, and by the early 1920s he had also drifted away from the Gandhian Congress mainstream in which the Tilak memorial institutions were being raised.  (b) S. A. Dange is bait for candidates who reach for a Maharashtra name the moment they see 'Tilak'. He was indeed a Maharashtrian who began in the Tilakite milieu — his 1921 pamphlet Gandhi vs Lenin argued the case for a Marxist rather than Gandhian path — but he then became one of the founding figures of Indian communism and of its trade-union work, and was prosecuted in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case of 1924 and the Meerut Conspiracy Case that opened in 1929. His institutional legacy lies in the Communist Party and in the labour unions of Bombay's mill districts, not in an academy of politics at Lahore, and he was far too junior in 1920 to be founding memorial institutions to Tilak.  (d) Aurobindo Ghose belongs to the Extremist generation and edited Bande Mataram, but he is ruled out by chronology rather than by ideology. He was tried in the Alipore Bomb Case of 1908–09, and in 1910 he withdrew from politics altogether to Pondicherry, where he spent the rest of his life on spiritual work and never returned to organised nationalist activity. By 1920, when Tilak died and the memorial school was founded at Lahore, Aurobindo had been out of the political field for a decade, so he could not have founded an institution created to carry Tilak's political method forward.

Concept: The years around 1920 produced a wave of Indian-run educational institutions built deliberately outside the colonial university system. Non-Cooperation asked students to leave government and government-aided colleges, which created an immediate need for places they could go instead: the Kashi Vidyapith, the Gujarat Vidyapith, the Bihar Vidyapith, Jamia Millia Islamia and the National College at Lahore all belong to this moment. The Tilak School of Politics sits inside that family but with a narrower aim — it was not a general national university but a training institute for full-time political and social workers, teaching politics, economics, sociology, journalism and social work to men who would go out as organisers rather than graduates. Lala Lajpat Rai's founding of it, and then of the Servants of the People Society at Lahore in 1921, shows the same idea twice: nationalism needed a cadre that was trained, paid a subsistence allowance and permanently available, not merely enthusiastic.

State PCS 2024 Q1 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q1 — History PYQ with Answer