Person · moderate leader & Gandhi's mentor · India
Gopal Krishna Gokhale
Also known as Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Gokhale, G.K. Gokhale
Maharashtrian nationalist (1866-1915), educated at Elphinstone College and Fergusson College Pune (which he later served as professor and principal), who became the central moderate political voice of the Indian National Congress in the first decade of the twentieth century. He served as INC president in 1905, led the Congress's constitutional moderates against Tilak's extremists in the 1907 Surat split, founded the Servants of India Society in 1905 to train full-time political workers under a vow of poverty, and served on the Imperial Legislative Council from 1902 to 1915. Gandhi, who met Gokhale in 1896 and considered him his political guru, modelled the Indian National Congress's post-1915 structure on his approach.
- Date
- 1866–1915
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; INC proceedings and contemporary memoirs.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
His 1905 Servants of India Society members took vows of poverty and lifelong service to the national cause; the Society trained a generation of early twentieth-century Indian political workers including Hridaynath Kunzru and V.S. Srinivasa Sastri. Gokhale toured South Africa in 1912 at Gandhi's invitation and brokered the Smuts-Gandhi settlement that ended the Transvaal campaign. His death at forty-nine in February 1915 removed the Congress's most consequential moderate leader just as Gandhi was returning from South Africa.
About the place
Placed at Pune where he taught and worked.
Connections (4)
- President ofIndian National Congress (founding era)
Gopal Krishna Gokhale presided over the Indian National Congress at the 1905 Benares session, led the Congress's constitutional moderates against Tilak's extremists in the 1907 Surat split, and founded the Servants of India Society in 1905 to train full-time political workers under a vow of poverty. The 1907 split broke the Congress for nine years until the 1916 Lucknow Pact reunited it; Gokhale's early death in 1915 removed the Congress's most consequential moderate leader just as Gandhi was returning from South Africa to take over.
- Mentor ofMohandās Karamchand Gandhi
Gandhi met Gokhale in Calcutta in 1896 on his first visit back from South Africa and formally took him as his political guru. Gokhale toured South Africa in 1912 at Gandhi's invitation and brokered the Smuts-Gandhi settlement that ended the Transvaal campaign. After returning to India in 1915 Gandhi observed Gokhale's suggested one-year silence of travel and listening before entering Indian politics. Gokhale's death that year — before Gandhi's political work began in earnest — made the mentorship a shadow that Gandhi acknowledged for the rest of his life.
- Disciple ofMahadev Govind Ranade
Gopal Krishna Gokhale was Mahadev Govind Ranade's most devoted student from his Elphinstone and Fergusson days in the 1880s. Gokhale's own moderate political temperament — constitutional, patient, programme-oriented — was substantially Ranade's inheritance, and the Servants of India Society Gokhale founded in 1905 extended Ranade's Prarthana Samaj reform organisation into full-time political work. Ranade's death in 1901 made Gokhale the Deccan moderate tradition's institutional heir.
- Based atPune
Gopal Krishna Gokhale taught at Fergusson College Pune from 1884, served as its principal, and built the Deccan Education Society and the Servants of India Society there as the institutional base of his political work. The Pune of the 1890s — Ranade on the Bombay High Court riding up from Bombay for weekends, Gokhale at Fergusson, Tilak at the Kesari, Chiplunkar at the Chitpavan editorial establishment — was the Marathi nationalist movement's working geography and Gokhale was at its moderate centre.