Gopal Krishna Gokhale

Born in 1866 in Ratnagiri and educated in Pune, Gokhale was drawn early to public life through the Deccan Education Society and Fergusson College, where he taught economics and history. His approach to politics was pedagogical: persuade by reason, alter budgets by analysis, and prepare citizens by schooling. In the Legislative Council he became renowned for budget speeches that exposed inequities in military expenditure, tax policy, and currency management. He insisted that empire could no longer be financed by Indian poverty and that the test of any policy lay in its effect on villages and schools. His founding of the Servants of India Society (1905) was an institutional answer to a moral question: How to produce public workers who choose service over glory? Members took vows, accepted modest stipends, and labored in education, sanitation, and civic training. Gokhale’s nationalism therefore refused the dichotomy between “political” and “social.” He saw that a people cannot wield power responsibly if it has not practiced responsibility in local affairs. While he debated Tilak fiercely about methods, he shared with him a love of education and a respect for law as an instrument of freedom rather than merely a chain to be broken. As a negotiator, Gokhale sought realistic gains: expansion of councils, Indianization of services, protection of civil liberties, and fiscal prudence. As a teacher, he mentored Gandhi during the latter’s early political apprenticeship, modeling restraint, documentation, and principled compromise. Critics called him too cautious; admirers understood that he wanted durable change rooted in institutions, not transient victories of anger. He died in 1915, before the mass movements of the next decade, but his society endured, and his budgetary rigor entered the bloodstream of Indian parliamentary practice. In an era that prizes volume over reason, Gokhale’s example recovers a different heroism: patience in pursuit of the public good.