Chapter 20
1 The author wishes to thank Matthijs Cornelissen, R. K. Naidu, Ashok Nirpharake, Namita Pande, Sunand Sane and Shankar Talghatti for their helpful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
2 For an English translation of the Gītārahasya, see B. C. Sukthankar (1936/1971).
3 Tilak knew Sri Aurobindo personally; indeed they were close colleagues in radical national politics. However, given that Tilak wrote Gītārahasya while in prison in Mandalay from 1908-1914, he could not have known about Sri Aurobindo's writings on the Veda which were published during the 1914-1920 period. It is conceivable that Tilak (1856-1920), a well-known scholar of the Vedas, may have been aware of the deeper, mystical implications of the Veda either on his own, or through his senior or junior contemporaries like Dayānanda Sarasvati (1824-1883) or Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950). However, it is clear that Tilak's discussion of the Vedic karma kāṇḍa is entirely addressed to its interpretation in the Mīmāṁsā system of Jaimini and others.
4 Jaimini's words are: codanā lakṣaṇo artho dharmaḥ׀. See Jaimini's Mīmāṁsā Sūtra (1.1.2); Jaimini (n.d./1984).
5 Karl Potter (1964) has pointed out that the Law of Karma is assumed as a foundational assumption in Indian thought in a way similar to the assumption of causality in modern science. Both are presumed to be true without demanding empirical proof (that is, as a priori principles); they presume lawfulness of events in respectively moral and physical spheres and thereby provide direction to inquiry within respective spheres of inquiry. Systematic study of events in any sphere would be meaningless unless we assume an inexorable orderliness of events in that sphere; to make sense of any inquiry, we need to presume the universe is cosmos, not chaos.
6 Paraphrased by the author of this essay. The words in the Gītā (4.37) are:
yathai‘dhāṁsi samiddho’gnir
bhasmasat kurute'rjuna
jñānāgniḥ sarvakarmāṇi
bhasmasat kurute tathā
7 Tilak (1915/1998, p. 274) uses the Marathi words hāv, āgraha, and the Marathi/Sanskrit word āsakti in this context. It is not easy to accurately convey all the shades of meaning through exact English equivalents.
8 For a modern psychological perspective on the issue of concentric loyalties, see Allport (1954/1958, p. 42).
9 For Tilak's views on the temptations in haṭha yoga practice to seek extra-ordinary powers or to learn tricks of black magic for evil purposes, see his comments on Gītā, 6.15 in the Gītārahasya.
10 This discussion is in Chapter 10, titled ‘karmavipaka va ātmasvātantrya’, meaning the consequences of action and free will.
11 Bādarāyaṇa's words in 2.3.33 are ‘kartā śāstrārthavattvāt’. Swami Gambhirananda (1972, p. 494) translates these words as follows: ‘The individual soul must be agent, for thus alone the scriptures become purposeful.’ What is implied here is the idea that if one denies free will or human agency, then the scriptural injunctions for right action become meaningless. The argument here is similar to Immanuel Kant's famous words, ‘ought implies can’; there is no point in expecting that a man should have helped a lady in distress when his hands were tied by a burglar.
12 The other three prescribed goals are dharma, or doing one's duties appropriate to one's station in social life, artha meaning the acquisition of wealth, and mokṣa meaning liberation of the self.
13 It is difficult to convey the stinging sense of the original Marathi words, which were, ‘sarkārace ḍoke ṭhikāṇāvar āhe kāya?’ (Kelkar, 1928/1988, p. 544).
14 The Marathi expression was that he was ‘telyā tāmboḷyānce puḍhārī’, which named a couple of ‘lower’ castes among his followers, thereby implying that he was incapable of leading the upper castes or the ‘classes’.
15 The original Marathi words are, ‘svarājya hā majhā janmasiddha hakka āhe, āṇi to mī miḷavaṇārac’. The author of this essay has translated the insistence and emphasis implied in the letter ‘c’ added to the ending verb ‘miḷavaṇāra' with the word ‘will’ in capital letters.
16 This book edited by Tilak and Dhavale is an abridged version of the original book of reminiscences and anecdotes compiled by S.V. Bapat in the 1920s.