The Swadeshi movement in India is one which in certain of its aspects can be regarded with much sympathy. A spirit of patriotism is excellent, and the endeavour to engender and foster it, provided it is made along legitimate lines, calls for encouragement and not condemnation.

The Swadeshi movement, in its bad sense—the boycotting of foreign goods—has had no effect on imports as a whole, and even the articles specifically aimed at, cotton goods and sugar, have entered to an unparalleled extent in the last three years. The good side of the Swadeshi movement, the development of indigenous industries, is seen in the increased imports of textile machinery and metals.

The cry of the Indian "Insurgent" to-day is "Shiksha," (education,) education in all its phases and branches, both extensive and intensive; "Swadeshi," (home industries) and "Swaraj" (self-government).

And yet long before this popular ebullition of excitement, I myself had given a thousand rupees, when I had not five rupees to call my own, to open a Swadeshi store and courted banter and bankruptcy.

The anti-partition agitation with its vehement invective, its appeals to Hindu sentiment, its cry that Bengal as motherland, once rich and famous, had been torn in two despite the protests of her children, its proposals for enforcing a punitive boycott of foreign goods and supplanting them entirely by "swadeshi" indigenous products, its enlistment of students and school-boys in picketing operations, gave ample cover for the sedulous teaching of revolutionary doctrines.

When H[erbert] H[ope] Risley—writing in 1909 just after the swadeshi movement had introduced the possibility of mass agitational politics as well as he specter of communal violence in Bengal—contemplated the political implications of the caste system, he confirmed British assumption by declaring that caste opposed nationality and would hinder the growth of nationalist politics.

Mahatma Gandhi was not only a politician but an economic, social and religious reformer too. He felt that if swaraj or self-government was to mean anything for the dumb millions of the country the national movement must touch all aspects of the villager's life. He also developed his scheme of the revival of charkha and the development of swadeshi.

With tension all around, the police laid siege to large areas of the city and started raiding various homes and educational institutions and whosoever was even remotely connected with nationalism and swadeshi were promptly arrested.

The first Indian Industrial Conference meeting in 1905, bringing together industrialists from all over India, decided to "foster and extend the use of such manufactures in India in preference to foreign goods." That demand intersected with the emerging Swadeshi movement, which advocated Indian self-sufficiency, especially in cottons, and symbolized the confluence of cotton entrepreneurs and the emerging nationalist political elites.

Is this news? Not to [Mahatma] Gandhi, whose swadeshi campaigns of local self-reliance drew support away from the dominating colonial paradigm of pauperizing indigenous populations by making them producers of raw materials and consumers of value-added products, …

Swadeshi

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