PATRIOTISM WITHOUT PEOPLE 19 one of the great systematisers and stylists of the Marathi language. But few would mistake his criticism of Phule as being inspired by the latter's quite obvious literary limitations. Vishnu Shastri's outbursts, rather, were characteristic of Brahmin orthodoxy's attitude towards Phule's social reform movement. Along with Vishnu Shastri, Agarkar and Tilak were themselves closely involved in early educational work in Pune. Unlike Agarkar, Tilak never really distanced himself from the orthodox Brahminical position that Vishnu Shastri had staked out very early in his political career.39 Though he himself never seemed directly to have engaged Phule in debate, his younger associate N.C. Kelkar—later a prominent 'Responsive Cooperator' with the British Raj—was to record in his biography of Tilak, that Vishnu Shastri's criticisms of Phule were almost certainly justified.40 Jyotirao Phule died in 1890. Bhimrao Ambedkar was born the following year, and attained political maturity a good three decades later. In the intervening period, the politics of militant self-assertion by the lower castes remained on a low ebb. The political terrain was captured by the genteel Anglophiles of the Indian National Congress on the one side, and the Hindu radicals on the other. The balance of advantage however, lay decisively with the latter. As Jawaharlal Nehru puts it in The Discovery of India: 'The powerful agitation against the partition of Bengal had thrown up many able and aggressive leaders there of this type, but the real symbol of the new age was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, from Maharashtra. The old leadership was represented also by a Maratha, a very able and a younger man, Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Revolutionary slogans were in the air, tempers ran high and conflict was inevitable. ... in 1907 the clash came, resulting apparently in a victory for the old moderate section. But this had been won because of organisational control and the then narrow franchise of the Congress. There was no doubt that the vast majority of politically minded people in India favoured Tilak and his group. The Congress lost much of its importance and interest shifted to other activities'.41 From the last decade of the nineteenth century, till his deportation in 1908, Tilak was the dominant figure in Indian politics. He never attained to the presidency of the Indian National Congress, which speaks eloquently for the relevance of that body in the period. In An Autobiography, Nehru records how all through this period of stalemate, the nationalist project remained dormant. The moderates controlled the sole instrument of nationalist consolidation—the Congress—but they were not up to the challenge in tactical terms. Motilal Nehru—then and for long afterwards the dominant political influence upon his son—found himself, though ideologically in tune with the moderate position, somewhat averse to their bankruptcy at the practical level. And though he found much that was commendable