Chandrashekhar Agashe

Early life and family: 1888–1914

Agashe was born on 14 February 1888 at the Velhe Mahal in the town of Bhor, at the time part of the Bhor State in present-day Maharashtra. He was the eldest of four children to Govind Agashe and Radhabai Agashe (née Bhimabai Bapat). His family was Chitpavan brahmin, and was established since the 1590s as the aristocratic Agashe gharana of the village of Mangdari in the Bhor State. The family was traditionally occupied as the savkars (money lenders/bankers) and pseudo-hereditary chief justiciars under the Pantsachiv Kings of the Kingdom, and thus owned majority of the land in the village as vassals to the Pantsachiv rulers, where they continued the traditional family businesses of money lending and tenanted farming. Agashe's father, when serving as the chief justiciar, was the only Brahmin savkar at the royal court of Bhor at the time of his birth.

Agashe's maternal family were members of the aristocratic Bapat gharana of Kalyan, having settled a branch of the original family in Junnar in 1698, traditionally occupied as the chieftains of the town. His mother was the fourth daughter of Junnar's hereditary mamledar, Ramchandra Bapat (b.1828, at Kamshet), who worked as a case historian and published several historical cartographs of old Pune after he was appointed the Karbhari of Tulsi Baug by the Sardar Khire (Tulsibaugwale) family in Pune.

After his father's death in 1899, Agashe was meant to inherit the ancestral estate at age 11; but due to his youth, his paternal relatives unlawfully seized the lands, and ousted Agashe's mother and her children from the family home. She relocated the family to her parents' residence in Shaniwar Peth, Pune in 1900. The loss of the family's estate, made Agashe accept secretarial work at the Indian Post Office to support himself and his siblings through school. Later, he was left the Omkareshwar Mandir in Shaniwar Peth in the former owner's will. Agashe attended the Nutan Marathi Vidyalaya, matriculating in 1905 at the age of 17, and later graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Fergusson College in 1914, at the age of 26.

In 1914, Agashe married Dwarka Gokhale, the eldest daughter of Narayan Gokhale from the aristocratic Gokhale gharana of Dharwad. Her family had served as the hereditary royal saraf (jewellers) to the Peshwa Bhat family since the 18th century. She was a great niece of Bapu Gokhale, a general under Peshwa Baji Rao II of the Maratha Empire. She adopted the name Indirabai Agashe after marriage, and the couple had a total of eleven children (including sons Jagdish "Panditrao" Agashe and Dnyaneshwar Agashe, and daughter Shakuntala Karandikar), from which nine survived to adulthood.

Career as an Educator, Lawyer and the Bhor State Council: 1914–1948

From 1914 to 1917, Agashe taught mathematics at the Nutan Marathi Vidyalaya in Pune, after which he was occupied as a visiting professor at a convent school in Karachi. From 1917 to 1926, Agashe worked as an educator in Mumbai, while he pursued the study of law, graduating with an L.L.B from the Government Law College, Mumbai in 1919. He began practicing his advocacy in Pune and was a lawmaking advisor to the Bhor State government.

Between 1920 and 1932, Agashe was appointed the Chief Justiciar at the royal court of Shankarrao Chimnajirao, 10th Raja of Bhor (r. 1871 – 1922), continuing to serve under his successor Raghunathrao II Shankarrao, 11th Raja of Bhor (r. 1922 – 1948). Agashe encountered political unrest between the commoners and the gentry at the Pantsachiv's court resulting in violent rioting from the common-folk of the Bhor State. Agashe co-wrote an opinion piece against this political factionalism with Narasimha Chintaman Kelkar in the newspaper Kesari. With the permission of the king, he soon established a Lokpaksh for carrying out fair trial at the royal court to resolve conflicts.

The discouraging response to the Lokpaksh from the Pantsachiv's subjects led Agashe to consider retiring from law in the late 1920s. Upon attending a speech by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Agashe and his family began practicing the principles of the Swadeshi movement and started considering entrepreneurial ventures as a means to participate in the Indian independence movement in Maharashtra. Agashe supported several Indian freedom fighters, including Lokmanya Tilak and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, but never considered entering politics himself; his younger brother, Narayan Agashe actively participated in politics surrounding the Indian independence movement, serving a brief prison time for rioting against the British Raj in the early 1930s, before aiding his elder brother in his business venture. Around this time, he also become an early subscriber to Savarkar's Hindu Rashtra Prakashan organisation.

In 1932, Agashe was appointed as the Secretary of the Bhor State Council, and in under a year, he was elected to the post of Vice President in 1933, and then the President of the council in 1934, a post he maintained until the accession of the state into the Dominion of India in 1948. During the time of his vice presidency, the unrests and disagreements between the royal court and the commoners of the princely state continued. Several legislations Agashe helped bring forth in favour of the commoners were opposed by the gentry, resulting in growing involvement from the Deccan States Agency.

In April 1932, Agashe, in his capacity as editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Sansthani Bharat on behalf of the Bhor State, wrote an article congratulating the 11th Raja of Bhor on his swift action in the reorganisation of the state's previously poorly-advised administration. In March 1933, Agashe also visited Mahatma Gandhi when he was imprisoned at Yerawada Central Jail in Pune.

In June 1933, in an oratory address to Lieutenant-general Harold Wilberforce-Bell, the Agent to the Governor-General of India for the Deccan States Agency in Kolhapur at the time, Agashe put to rest the concerns of any mismanagement of the state and the success of the Lokpaksh in resolving any agitation between the subjects and the nobility of the state. He further referenced how the state and the 11th Raja's administration had performed in line with Lord Irwin's recommendations for the governments of Indian princely states. In the same address, Agashe also encouraged the Deccan States Agency to name the bridge over the Nira River in Bhor after the 11th Raja's extant second wife, Rani Laxmibai.

In August 1947, Agashe, in his capacity as President of the Bhor state council, feted the 11th Raja of Bhor on the occasion of the Raja's silver jubilee alongside B. G. Kher, Vaikunthbhai Mehta, Ganesh Vasudev Mavalankar, Hari Govindrao Vartak, and Raja Chintamanrao II "Bala Sahib" Patwardhan of Kurundvad Senior. Agashe and Narasimha Chintaman Kelkar were further presented with the robes of the state of Bhor at the ceremony.

In March 1948, a photograph of Agashe's was unveiled by the 11th Raja of Bhor during a state visit to Pali, Raigad. That same month, Agashe served as one of the pleaders who declared the 11th Raja's resolution to accede the Bhor State into the Dominion of India as progressive and liberal in nature. During Agashe's later presidency, he provided financial encouragement and legal counsel to small and new business owners in Maharashtra, and used his legal acumen to seize back the family's lost estates in Mangdari from his paternal relations.

Agashe is widely remembered as a philanthropist and patron of the arts and of scholarly works. His most notable philanthropic donation came in the form of the foundation of the Brihan Maharashtra College of Commerce in November 1944, after he donated capital towards the infrastructure of the college to the Deccan Education Society. In honor of his donation, the Society named the commerce college after Agashe's sugar syndicate. His donation was further used by the society in development of their Willingdon College, Ahilyadevi High School, Navin Marathi School and the Ranade Baalak Mandir. He also donated to the Brihan Maharashtra Bhuvan in New Delhi. However, Agashe's philanthropy was heavily criticised by his competition, who viewed it as self-fulfilling.

Agashe began constructing the Agashe Primary School in the village of Shreepur in April 1942, with the school receiving sanctions from the Government in July 1943. He further advised on and donated to the campaign of Indian freedom fighter Narhar Vishnu Gadgil. In September 1945, he was one of the founding members of the Maharashtra Technical Education Society, where he was a patron and gave considerable financial endowments toward the establishment of the Walchand College of Engineering, Sangli in 1947. In April 1946, he was one of the benefactors towards the V. G. Kale Memorial Fund, in honour of the founder of the Bank of Maharashtra, further support the bank by having the syndicate bank with them and rent an office in their building.

Agashe also donated to the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute towards their research work on the Mahabharata, and its subsequent printing and publication in 1927 and 1947, having been a patron of the institute since 1945. In 1948, he donated to the Patient's Relief Association in Solapur, and further founded the Kaushik lectureship at the Sir Parashurambhau College in support of Sanskrit studies, theosophy, and the Aryan peoples, with philosopher Ramchandra Dattatreya Ranade giving the first of these lectures. That same year, he was one of the benefactors towards the publication of an edition of the Dnyaneshwari by K. P. Bhide.

Agashe served as one of the vice presidents of the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal from 1953 to 1955 alongside Bhagwant Rao Trimbak, Raja of Aundh and Sadashivrao Ragunathrao, Raja of Bhor and, during the presidency of Malojiraje Nimbalkar IV, Raja of Phaltan, having become a member of the Mandal in 1945. In 1954, he also represented the Deccan Agricultural Association on the board of the Mahatma Phule Museum. He also established the Brihan Maharashtra Bhavan in New Delhi for the growing Marathi diaspora in the capital. He was also a patron of the Sugar Technologists Association of India in Kanpur.

In the 1960s, Agashe's son Panditrao fulfilled a benefaction to a temple associated with Keshavasuta that Agashe had promised before his death. In his 1967 analytic philosophy text ज्ञानदेव व प्लेटो (lit. 'Dnyanadev and Plato'), Shankar Vaman Dandekar acknowledged Agashe's funding of his research, having previously made Dandekar a shareholder in his syndicate, and this charitable deed of Agashe's was later praised by Manamohan in a poem published in 1977 on the life and works of Dandekar.