Tilak commanded the allegiance of barristers and pleaders, schoolmasters and professors, clerks in Government offices--in fact, of the large majority of the so-called educated classes, largely recruited amongst his own and other Brahman castes; and his propaganda had begun to filter down not only to the coolies in the cities, but even to the rayats, or at least the head-men in the villages.
More than that.

From the Deccan, as we have already seen in his relations with the Indian National Congress, his influence was projected far and wide.

His house was a place of pilgrimage for the disaffected from all parts of India.

His prestige as a Brahman of the Brahmans and a pillar of orthodoxy, in spite of the latitude of the views which he sometimes expressed in regard to the depressed castes, his reputation for profound learning in the philosophies both of the West and of the East, his trenchant style, his indefatigable activity, the glamour of his philanthropy, his accessibility to high and low, his many acts of genuine kindliness, the personal magnetism which, without any great physical advantages, he exerted upon most of those who came in contact with him, and especially upon the young, combined to equip him more fully than any other Indian politician for the leadership of a revolutionary movement.
The appeal which Tilak made to the Hindus was twofold.

He taught them, on the one hand, that India, and especially Maharashtra, the land of the Mahrattas, had been happier and better and more prosperous under a Hindu _raj_ than it had ever been or could ever be under the rule of alien "demons"; and that if the British _raj_ had at one time served some useful purpose in introducing India to the scientific achievements of Western civilisation, it had done so at ruinous cost, both material and moral, to the Indians whose wealth it had drained and whose social and religious institutions it had undermined, and on the other hand he held out to them the prospect that, if power were once restored to the Brahmans, who had already learnt all that there was of good to be learnt from the English, the golden age would return for gods and men.
That Tilak himself hardly believed in the possibility of overthrowing British rule is more than probable, but what some Indians who knew him well tell me he did believe was that the British could be driven or wearied by a ceaseless and menacing agitation into gradually surrendering to the Brahmans the reality of power, as did the later Peshwas, and remaining content with the mere shadow of sovereignty.