Kesari Newspaper History: How Tilak Weaponised the Marathi Press

Kesari came out of a group, not one man. In January 1880, Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahadev Ballal Namjoshi opened the New English School in Pune, and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar soon joined them. Their plan was that Indians should educate Indians. A year later the same group launched two weekly newspapers: The Mahratta in English on 2 January 1881 and Kesari in Marathi on 4 January 1881.

The split was deliberate. The Mahratta spoke to officials and English-educated Indians, the people who already read newspapers. Kesari spoke to Marathi readers in towns and villages who had never been addressed by a political paper in their own language. Agarkar edited Kesari; Tilak edited The Mahratta. This is often reversed in popular accounts, but Kelkar, Tilak’s own biographer and later Kesari editor, and the paper’s present owners both describe Agarkar as its first editor.

The timing mattered. The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 had given the government sweeping powers over Indian-language papers only, and it was repealed in 1882. Kesari was born into a legal climate that had just shown how much the Raj feared the vernacular press.

In 1881–82, Kesari and The Mahratta took up the case of the young Raja Shivaji IV of Kolhapur, who had been declared insane and confined. The papers argued he was being mistreated and accused the British-appointed regent, Mahadeo Barve, of plotting against him. Their evidence was a set of letters that turned out to be forged.

Barve sued for defamation. On 16 July 1882 a jury found Tilak and Agarkar guilty, and they were sentenced to four months in Dongri jail in Bombay. They admitted in court how they had received the letters and that they had trusted them. Public sympathy went their way, and the case made both men well known. It was the first sign of a pattern: what Kesari printed could land its editors in prison.

Tilak and Agarkar disagreed more and more. Agarkar believed Indian society had to reform itself first, on caste, widow remarriage, child marriage and women’s education. Tilak believed political freedom came first and that reform imposed by or through the British would divide Indians. In 1887 Agarkar left Kesari and in 1888 started his own reformist paper, Sudharak (“The Reformer”). Tilak also left the Deccan Education Society in 1890 over similar arguments.

From then on Kesari was Tilak’s paper. It came out every Tuesday, and Tilak wrote many of its editorials himself. The two papers moved in 1905 to Gaikwad Wada in Narayan Peth, a building Tilak bought from the Maharaja of Baroda, now known as Kesari Wada. The paper is still published from there.

Kesari’s power was not that it reported news. It was that it told readers who was responsible. A failed harvest became a question about land revenue. A plague search became a question about who governed Pune and how. A 17th-century king became a question about whether Indians could rule themselves.

Tilak also built public stages for these ideas. He helped turn Ganesh worship from a household ritual into a public festival in 1893–94, and set up the Shivaji Fund Committee in 1895, which led to public Shiv Jayanti celebrations from 1896. Kesari reported and promoted both, so a reader could meet the same argument at home, in print, and in the street.

Historians note that these festivals had other organisers and roots, and that they also sharpened Hindu–Muslim divisions in 1890s Maharashtra. The formula was powerful, and it was not neutral.

When famine hit the Deccan in 1896–97, Kesari did something simple and effective. It printed what the government’s own Famine Relief Code said about suspending and remitting land revenue, and told cultivators who could not pay that they did not have to sell their cattle or land to do it. Tilak’s Sarvajanik Sabha sent workers into the villages with the same message.

Officials called this a no-rent campaign. Kesari presented it as informing people of their rights. Either way, it turned the paper from a Pune publication into one that mattered in the countryside, and it put Tilak in direct conflict with the Bombay government months before the plague.

Bubonic plague reached Pune in late 1896. In March 1897 the government set up a Special Plague Committee under W.C. Rand, with soldiers searching homes, removing the sick and burning belongings. Many Punekars, including Tilak, saw the searches as humiliating, and Kesari attacked how they were carried out.

On 15 June 1897 Kesari printed a report of the Shivaji festival and a poem, “Shivaji’s Utterances”, imagining Shivaji waking to see his land plundered by foreigners. On the night of 22 June 1897, the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, the Chapekar brothers shot Rand and Lieutenant Ayerst as they left a reception at Government House in Pune. Ayerst died on the spot; Rand died on 3 July.

Tilak was arrested in July and charged under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, but not with the murder. The trial ran at the Bombay High Court from 8 to 14 September 1897 before Justice Arthur Strachey and a jury of six Europeans and three Indians. The prosecution worked from English translations of Marathi text, and the meaning of the translations was argued over in court. The jury convicted 6–3, the three Indians voting to acquit. Tilak was sentenced to 18 months’ rigorous imprisonment. The Privy Council refused leave to appeal. He accepted conditional early release on 6 September 1898.

The lasting damage was legal. Strachey told the jury that “disaffection” meant simply the absence of affection and that no call to violence was needed. That reading of Section 124A was used against Indian journalists for decades.

On 30 April 1908, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki threw a bomb at a carriage in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, meant for magistrate Douglas Kingsford. It killed two English women instead. The government answered with arrests and new press controls.

Kesari replied in two editorials: “The Country’s Misfortune” (Deshache Durdaiva, 12 May 1908) and “These Remedies Are Not Lasting” (He Upay Tikau Nahit, 9 June 1908). Tilak said he regretted the violence but argued that repression produced it and that only Swaraj would stop it. He was arrested in Bombay on 24 June 1908 and charged under Sections 124A and 153A.

The trial ran from 13 to 22 July 1908 before Justice Dinshaw Davar, who had been Tilak’s own counsel in 1897. Tilak defended himself and spoke to the jury for hours. The jury convicted 7–2, the two Indian jurors dissenting. Late on 22 July, Davar sentenced him to six years’ transportation, served in Mandalay, Burma, and a fine of ₹1,000. Some accounts date the sentence to 23 July, Tilak’s 52nd birthday, because it was pronounced close to midnight.

Bombay’s textile workers went on strike for several days in protest, often cited as one of the first political strikes by Indian workers. In Mandalay, Tilak wrote his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Gita Rahasya. He was released on 16 June 1914.

His words after the verdict are now inscribed in marble outside the Chief Justice’s court in Mumbai: “All that I wish to say is that in spite of the verdict of the jury I still maintain that I am innocent. 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 which I represent may be benefited more by my suffering than by my pen and tongue.”

Each time Tilak went to prison, the paper kept coming out. Narasimha Chintaman Kelkar, a lawyer and writer, edited Kesari during both imprisonments, 1897–99 and 1908–14, and stayed with it after Tilak’s death. He wrote the first major biography of Tilak and later sat in the Central Legislative Assembly. Kelkar summed up the bond himself: it was impossible, he wrote, to think of Kesari without Tilak or Tilak without Kesari.

That continuity is Kesari’s quieter achievement. Many nationalist papers of the era closed when their editors were jailed, fined or ran out of money. Kesari survived because Tilak built an organisation around it.

Back in Pune in June 1914, Tilak rejoined the Congress and in April 1916 founded the Indian Home Rule League at Belgaum, alongside Annie Besant’s separate league. Its membership grew from about 1,400 in 1916 to around 32,000 by 1917. Pamphlets went out in Marathi, English and other languages, and Kesari carried the argument. This is the period of the slogan “Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it.”

The government tried again. Over speeches at Belgaum (1 May 1916) and Ahmednagar (31 May and 1 June 1916), the Poona magistrate ordered Tilak to post a security of ₹20,000 for good behaviour under Section 108 of the Criminal Procedure Code. M.A. Jinnah argued his appeal, and on 9 November 1916 the Bombay High Court set the order aside, holding that asking for self-government by lawful means was not sedition. It was the first time the courts sided with him.

Tilak died in Bombay on 1 August 1920, the day Gandhi launched the Non-Cooperation Movement.

After 1920, Kesari stayed with the Tilak camp and with Kelkar. Its format grew slowly: bi-weekly in 1929, tri-weekly in 1951 and daily in 1962, under Tilak’s grandson Jayantrao Tilak, who was also a Congress parliamentarian and chairman of the Maharashtra Legislative Council. He died in 2001.

The paper’s politics also shifted. Research by historian Marzia Casolari found that between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s Kesari ran many articles admiring Mussolini and Italian fascism, and by the 1940s it was close to the Hindu Mahasabha. This is part of the record and is rarely mentioned in centenary tributes.

Kesari marked its centenary in 1981. In 2009 the Kesari Maratha Trust launched the Lokmanya Tilak National Award for Excellence in Journalism; the first went to Vir Sanghvi. Tilak’s great-grandson Dipak Tilak, the trustee editor and a former vice-chancellor of Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth, died in Pune on 16 July 2025 at 78. In 2026 Kesari is 145 years old, still published from Kesari Wada, and describes itself as the only Indian newspaper run by the same trust for its whole life.

Section 124A, the law used against Kesari, survived independence. In Kedar Nath Singh (1962) the Supreme Court kept it but limited it to speech that incites violence or public disorder, rejecting Strachey’s “absence of affection” test. On 11 May 2022 the Court put all pending sedition cases on hold. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, in force from 1 July 2024, dropped the word “sedition”, but its Section 152, on acts endangering India’s sovereignty, unity and integrity, is criticised by some lawyers as broader than the old section.

That is why Kesari’s story is not only about 1897 or 1908. The questions its trials raised are still being argued: where criticism of government ends and incitement begins, who decides what a translated sentence really means, and whether jailing an editor silences an idea or spreads it.