The last day of August saw me travel to Solapur, a city in southern Maharashtra, to deliver a talk on ‘Mohammed Ali Jinnah and India’s Partition’. What was heartening was that I was invited by the cultural wing of the employees of the Janata Sahakari Bank, one among the 42 cooperative banks in the city. Moreover, the talk was part of the 10-day Vyakhyaanmaala (public lecture series) to mark the Ganesh Festival, a popular tradition in many cities and towns across Maharashtra.

If animated street-level celebration is one face of the festival, the other is the fine tradition of public lectures meant to educate the people on an amazingly wide range of topics—from climate change to swine flu, from cross-border terrorism to challenges in Indian agriculture. The organisers of these events deserve to be commended because they have kept alive the vision that prompted Lokamanya Tilak, more than a century ago, to use the Ganesh Festival as a platform for patriotic mobilisation of the people during India’s freedom movement. He changed the character of this festival from a mere religious celebration to a cultural congregation, cutting across caste and community barriers, to reawaken the nationalist sentiments among the masses.

Sadly, some irreligious and anti-religious Marxist historians have pronounced leaders like Tilak and Gandhiji guilty of giving a Hindu communal orientation to the freedom movement by using symbols like Ganesh and Ram. This is a baseless charge. There are any number of instances to show that Tilak was not anti-Muslim. He participated in Mohurram processions in Pune. He once invited Jinnah to attend a Ganesh festival programme in Mumbai. Jinnah came and there is a photograph showing him standing next to Tilak at the festival celebrations, which I have used in one of my previous columns in this newspaper (July 23, 2006). That was the happy time when Jinnah was, in the words of Gopal Krishna Gokhale and later of Sarojini Naidu, an “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity”. The unhappy times, when Jinnah became a rank communalist and a venomous votary of India’s Partition, came later.

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