Balkrishna Mahadev Gogte (IAST: Bāḷakr̥shṇa Mahādeva Gogaṭe; 16 September 1916 – 26 February 2000), known colloquially as Raosaheb Gogte (IAST: Rāvasāheba Gogaṭe), was an Indian lawyer, industrialist, philanthropist and educationist.
Gogte was the founder of the Gogte Group of companies, involved in mining, minerals, salts and textiles. He gave his name to the Gogte Institute of Technology, Gogte College of Commerce, the Gogte Hall at the Shivaji Park Gymkhana in Dadar, Mumbai, the Gogte Suite at the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, the Gogte Hall at the Belgaum Chamber of Commerce, and the Gogte Circle in Belgaum.
Biography
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.
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.