Swadeshi

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.

My work should be, and therefore is, to organise the production of handspun cloth, and to find means for the disposal of the Khadi thus produced. [...] I swear by this form of Swadeshi, because through it I can provide work to the semi-starved, semi-employed women of India.

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.