Raosaheb Gogte

Early life, family and education: 1916–1936

Gogte was born on 16 September 1916 at Tembhu, at the time a part of the Bombay Presidency, to Dr. Mahadev Gogte (1891–1953) and Kamlabai Gogte (née Ambutai Latey). Their family was Chitpavan brahmin, and was established as the gharana at Karad since Gogte's grandfather's time. Gogte's father was a practicing surgeon in Karad, with an L. M. & S. from the National Medical College in Calcutta, while his mother hailed from the aristocratic Latey (Bhagwat) family who had been hereditary castellans of the Sadashivgad in Karad under the Peshwas since the Battle of Kharda in 1795.

Gogte was born the eldest of five children, he had two younger brothers and two younger sisters. Through his brother Vaman, Gogte was a paternal uncle to Anjali Dandekar, the first wife of Kokuyo Camlin head Dilip Dandekar, and to Jayant, husband of academician Jyoti Gogte. Through his brother Vasudev, Gogte was a paternal uncle to Rekha Agashe, the wife of BCCI vice-president Dnyaneshwar Agashe, and thus a great-uncle to Mandar, Ashutosh and Sheetal Agashe. He was also a great-uncle of poet Rashmi Parekh, the granddaughter of his brother Vasudev through his second daughter Madhuri.

Beginning in 1925, Gogte began his education at the Tilak High School in Karad, before he was sent to Jalgaon in 1926, to be educated under his paternal uncle Narayanrao Gogte, who was headmaster at the New English School there. In 1928, he accompanied his uncle to Chalisgaon, where they would be members of the Gandhi Ashram there, alongside Hari Vinayak Pataskar. In 1929, he returned to Karad to continue his education at the Tilak High School, and while there, was a classmate of Yashwantrao Chavan till 1930.

By the early 1930s, both his father and uncle had joined the Indian independence movement as Gandhians. By 1931, Gogte's father moved their family to Belgaum, where Gogte continued his education at the Chintamanrao High School at Shahapur, then in the Princely State of Sangli. While at school at Shahapur, Gogte was distinguished at elocution, was elected as general secretary of the student body, and took part in several civil unrests as part of the Indian freedom movement and was once arrested for reading out an Indian National Congress bulletin in public. In early 1932, at sixteen, he survived an assassination attempt from two students at his school, who bombed the venue of the event where Gogte and a few other students were staging Govind Ballal Deval's 1916 play Samshay Kallol.

Though of noble origin as descendants of chieftains from the Peshwai, the family was relatively impoverished, and in 1933, Gogte's father abandoned his medical practice to establish a flour mill. That same year, aged seventeen, he matriculated from school by passing his University of Bombay examinations, and went on to study law, graduating his high court pleader's examination in 1935, aged nineteen. He then moved to Mumbai to work at the Bombay High Court for a year.

While a guest at his maternal first cousin Laxman "Rajabhau" Bhave's residence in Mumbai in 1936, Gogte became acquainted with Ushatai Chiplunkar. She was the younger sister of his cousin's wife, and they were engaged shortly after their acquaintance. The couple married on 7 June 1943, and would go on to have three sons, Arvind (b. 1944), Anand (b. 1946) and Shirish (b. 1950).

Career as a lawyer: 1936–1943

In 1936, at the age of twenty one, Gogte began his practice as an advocate in Belgaum. One of his first notable cases was that of two cutler women from Baluchistan who had been charged with cheating, criminal intimidation and affray. His defense got them acquitted, but Gogte's failure to secure the fees for his service led the women to offer him two Rampuri knives they had made as payment. This incident, alongside the moniker the two women addressed him with (Raosaheb) was widely circulated in legal circles and press, resulting in the colloquial name by which he would be known the rest of his professional and personal life.

Beginning in 1936, Gogte taught law at the Karnatak Law Society, alongside his advocacy work, and would go on to form the Belgaum District Students Conference. Around this time, Gogte was acquitted on a false charge of misappropriating sheets of irons given to him by the Iron and Steel Controller of Belgaum. When the Motor Vehicles Act was amended in 1939, he was appointed to be the Honorary Secretary of the Bus Operators' Union of Belgaum by Keshavrao Gokhale of the Bombay Legislative Assembly, where he was involved in several cases of accident insurance, route allocation, and interstate road tax negotiations with the Princely States of Sangli and Kolhapur.

During such a time, when negotiations for route allocations crossing interstate lines, between the union and the Princely States came to an impasse, Gogte was warranted for arrest by the Chief Minister of the Kolhapur State, but evaded arrest by boarding a train bound for Miraj dressed as a woman, after being informed by the private secretary of Shivaji VII, the Maharaja of Kolhapur at the time. After this incidence, the negotiations between the union and the States were formally taken up and resolved by the Deccan States Agency and the Government of Bombay.

By the end of 1942, Gogte had organised the All India Motor Union Congress and was engaged as the chief counsel for all cases between the union and the Bombay Government. By 1943, Gogte was engaged as chief counsel for cases between bus operators' unions in Belgaum, Pune, Nashik and Ahmedabad and their respective Regional Transport Authorities. He would continue to legally represent various sectors of the transport industry into the 1950s.

Venture into business and philanthropy: 1944–1970

By 1944, Gogte had secured loans for his own trucking business. When India's involvement in the Second World War led to petrol rationing, he decided to emulate a British company in Madras, and establish a Gas-fired power plant that used charcoal to generate fuel for his trucking vehicles. This venture proved unsuccessful. In between 1945 and 1948, Gogte next ventured, yet again unsuccessfully, into setting up a Steel rolling mill in Karad.

In 1952, Gogte got involved in the business of transporting mackerel from the coasts of Karwar to inner Maharashtra and Karnataka. The need to preserve the catch, led him to seek investment from the Raja of the Princely State of Kurundwad (Junior) for the installment of an ice factory in Belgaum, which was inaugurated by Morarji Desai, then Chief Minister of Unified Bombay. On the suggestion of Bombay's Superintendent of Fisheries, Gogte travelled to Aberdeen to study flash freezing in order to set his own plant up for the venture, but was ultimately unsuccessful.

In the early 1950s, Japanese interest in the iron and manganese ores of Portuguese Goa led Gogte to explore the possibility of mining for the ores in the districts of Ratnagiri and North Kanara. In 1954, he began mining for manganese near Kuveshi, soon banding with other mine owners to form the Association of Manganese Ore Producers, of which he would serve as the inaugural president. With financial encouragement from local lenders, Gogte established the Gogte Mines company and began mining for iron ore at Redi in 1957, having leased 187 acres and 16 gunthas for the project, and producing 15,000 tonnes of iron ore within the first four months.

When contractors began demanding higher rates, he commissioned two self-propelled barges for the transport of the ore, which were inaugurated by Yashwantrao Chavan and his wife Venutai. When a flaw in their design was discovered, Gogte won the arbitration case, counselled by H. R. Gokhale, against the manufacturers of the barges. Around the same time, Gogte would also go on to assist Mohan Singh Oberoi with the foundation of his signature Oberoi hotel in Mumbai; which Gogte performed the Satyanarayan Puja for at its inauguration, and subsequently Oberoi had one of the hotel's suites named after Gogte.

Between 1959 and 1960, he further secured funding from the Bank of Baroda to import sophisticated mining equipment from the United States, having exported 92,798 tonnes of crude iron ore within that financial year. Between 1961 and 1964, the mining company continued to function at a loss, and so Gogte ventured to secure orders from Japan. In 1963, he scouted 1500 acres of land near Nala Sopara for developing a salt works. He tasked his brother Vasudev with its management, who would apply French and Tunisian techniques of salt production at the works. The Gogte Salts company was inaugurated in 1964 at the hands of Sadashiv Govind Barve. In 1966, Gogte was made a patron of the Karnatak Law Society, and the Gogte College of Commerce was named in his honour. Turning a profit after a decade of functioning, Gogte formally incorporated his mining company on 20 July 1967.