Question: Analyze the various components of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal in 1905-08. How far was it successful in achieving its aims?
Answer: The Swadeshi movement was born out of the need for more effective resistance against the partition plan of Bengal chalked by Lt. Governor Fraser, home Secretary Risley and Lord Curzon between December 1903 and 19th July 1905 when the formal announcement was made. The English originally wanted a “transfer of territories” and a relief of Bengal and improvement of Assam for their own administrative convenience and not because of a deliberate ‘divide and rule’ policy as alleged by Nationalist historians.
Till July 1905, the partition plan had been opposed through an intensive use of the conventional ‘Moderate’ methods of press campaigns, numerous meetings and petitions (in districts mainly) and big conferences at the Calcutta Town Hall (March 1904, January 1905) The inefficacy of such methods led to the adoption of new forms- the boycott of British goods and appeals for ‘rakhi-bandhan’ & ‘arandhan’ ( suggested by Rabindranath & R. Trivedi).
On 16th October, the day of the partition, coloured threads were exchanged as symbol of brotherhood and the hearth kept unlit as a sign of mourning. The British employed measures like the “Carlyle Circular” to control student picketers by threatening the withdrawal of grants, scholarships & affiliations from nationalist dominated institutions. Consequently, official educational institutions were boycotted and national schools set up with donations by rich Indians. As repression increased, so did differences within the movement in Bengal: some, like Surendranath, considered the boycott a “last desperate effort” to get the partition revoked by injuring the market for Manchester goods; others saw the movement as a mere stepping stone in the struggle for ‘swaraj’ or complete independence devising a whole range of new methods. By 16th November 1905, the Moderate leaders who now wanted to take advantage of the liberal Morley’s appointment as the Secretary of State called off the educational boycott.
Apart from the established Moderate tradition, there were three main trends in the Bengali political life in 1905-08: the ‘constructive Swadeshi’; extremism; and elite-action terrorism.
‘Constructive Swadeshi’ stood for self-help through Swadeshi industries, national schools, and improvements in village and organization. Expressions of such were found in the business ventures of P. Roy or N. Sircar; or in the Dawn Society and the journal- ‘Dawn’ of Satishchandra Mukherji influencing the national education movement; and the stress of a revival of the traditional Hindu ‘samaj’ or community for constructive work in villages (in Rabindranath’s ‘Swadeshi Samaj’ address of 1904). All would later develop in Gandhian programme of Swadeshi, national schools and constructive village work.
‘Extremism’, which developed against Rabindranath’s ‘atmasakti’ (self-strengthening), which developed slowly and unostentatiously & that did not appeal to the Bengali youth. 1906 onwards Bepin Pal, Aurobindo Ghosh, and B. Upadhyaya etc called for a struggle for ‘Swaraj’ through their journals or literary works. In practice, however, the Extremist leaders would settle for less and thus, the fundamental difference with the Moderates was over the methods. Aurobindo stressed on a programme of “organized and relentless boycott” of british goods, officialization of education, justice and executive administration and recourse to civil disobedience of unjust laws, a social boycott of loyalists, and even recourse to armed struggle. There were no tax or no-rent calls that, according toe Aurobindo, would be against the ‘patriotic’ zamindar community in Bengal. The main contribution of this trend was the building up an impressive chain of district organizations or samitis and providing political leadership to labour unrest.
‘Elite action terrorism’ grew within the ranks of the Extremists challenging it by 1907 calling for an immediate expulsion of the British rule.
A controversy over cultural ideals between Modernists and Hindu-revivalist trends came about. Politics had been closely associated with religious revivalism to boost the morale of the activists and maintain mass contact. Radical politics got mixed up with aggressive Hinduism. There was strong revivalist content in plans for national education, Swadeshi vows in temples made; traditional caste sanctions were used to enforce boycott; Shivaji-utsava was stressed on with image worship etc. There were several strands of opposition: on the grounds obscurantism and the glorification of an ‘ideal’ past (-Sanjivani, Prabasi); boycott of the Shivaji-utsava by the Anti-Circular Society to respect the sentiments of Mohammedan workers and sympathizers and Rabindranath’s departure from the programme after communal riots in mid 1907.
The end of 1908 again confined Bengal politics confined to the opposite poles of “Moderate mendicancy” and individual “terrorism”. This was not entirely a result of British repression as the period witnessed very prosecutions and no incident of firing on the open movement.
The strength and internal limitations of the principal components of this 1905-08 movement that need to be looked at closely are: boycott & Swadeshi, national education, labour unions, samitis and mass contact methods.
In the ‘Boycott and Swadeshi’ movements which were essentially bourgeois (with ‘bourgeois’ aspirations) in character to Sarkar, bourgeois support was lacking with only limited success of a substantial decline in exports of British manufactured goods like cotton piece goods, cotton twist & yarn, salt, cigarettes, boots & shoes between August 1905 and September 1906. It was mainly a conflict over trade terms between Marwari traders and British manufacturers that led to a decline in Manchester cloth sales, and once the dispute was settled Marwaris returned to their compradore business. Most merchants and industrialists refused to subordinate their profits to patriotism, and in fact some, like the Bombay mill owners used the opportunity to hike up prices despite appeals from Bengal, especially because the finer varieties of Manchester yarn and cloth could not be produced locally. The sharpest decline was in the export of shoes or cigarettes which had a market among the Indian middle class comprising of clerks, pleaders etc.
With an intellectual trend of glorifying handicrafts as the Indian/Oriental way of escaping the evils of large-scale industry, the Swadeshi movement could bring about a revival of handloom, silk weaving, and other traditional artisan crafts. However, a number of attempts to promote modern industries were underway: students were sent abroad using popularly raised funds; setting up of cotton mills, porcelain, chrome tanning, soap, matches, cigarettes etc. The professional intelligentsia and a few big zamindars provided most of the patronage and entrepreneurship. Since it was easier to make profits through trade rather than by industrial investment, Swadeshi couldn’t ‘threaten the British stranglehold over the crucial sectors of Bengal’s economy.’
In the efforts of national education as well, we see certain variations in their emphasis on either technical training or a vernacular medium, or even a combination of the traditional and the modern in a scheme for ‘higher culture’ for selected youth (as proposed by the Dawn Society). Most efforts could not attract the bulk of the student community. Among the remnants of these efforts were the Bengal National College, a Bengal Technical Institute and approximately a dozen national schools in West Bengal and Bihar, and even more in East Bengal (and this was seen by the authorities as an attempt to get hold of primary education by the Swadeshis). The National Education Council ignored most district or village schools and in the end only certain schools survived which became virtual recruiting centers for revolutionaries.
Labour/Industrial unrest in 1903-08 and the role of ‘professional agitators’ in them have been referred to as a novel phenomenon. Usually rising price & racial insults sparked off strikes in white-controlled enterprises, which now found considerable “newspaper sympathy, occasional financial help, and even aid in setting up trade unions.” In September 1905, 247 Bengali clerks of Burn Company in Howrah walked out over new derogatory work regulations. October 1905 saw a tram strike in Calcutta. Soon the first real labour union was set up on 21st October- the Printers Union. A Railway men’s Union followed a strike by the clerks of East Indian Railway in July 1906. Between 1905 and 1908, jute strikes became very frequent affecting at various times 18 out of 37 mills.
The main problem was that contacts with the workers were inevitably often through the babus(clerks) and sardars. Though the potentialities of the ‘Russian method’ of the political general strike were spoken about by some extremist journals, they remained only interesting anticipation. There were no real political strikes, plantation & mine labour remained unaffected, contacts developed with the clerks mainly and interest in labour slumped almost completely after the summer of 1908.
Samitis signified a ‘national volunteer’ movement. These were conceptualized as open bodies engaging in various activities: “physical & moral training of members,; social work during famines or epidemics or religious festivals; a multifarious preaching of Swadeshi message; organization of schools, crafts, arbitration courts and village societies and implementing the techniques of passive resistance.”
The main strength of the movement was in East Bengal with a lot of variety within it- some were essentially ‘secular’ with its important Muslim associates (e.g. the Anti-Circular Society) while some could have training and initiation vows steeped in Hinduism (e.g. the Dacca Anushilan).
Mass contact was formed through various mediums like journals, pamphlets, speeches; patriotic songs, plays, folk media like ‘jatras’, the organization of festivals, and the construction of a traditionalist religious idiom. Hinduism began to be increasingly employed as the principal bridge to the masses, appealing both to the imagination as well as to fear through the use of caste sanctions in the social boycott of loyalists and other similar methods.
However, most of the open samitis disappeared in the face of first round of oppression and became terroristic secret societies. Most disputes now were between zamindari officials and Muslim tenants/sharecroppers, with the former pressurizing the latter.
Hindu-Muslim relations also begin to deteriorate successively in this period. British divide-and-rule methods seemed all the more promising with considerable success been achieved by swaying upper and middle class ‘Muslims’ against the Swadeshi movement by using the propaganda of giving more jobs to the Muslims in the new province, signaling the development of Muslim separatism. Elite politics of the Salimulla group and the Muslim League (founded-Oct 1906) were simultaneous to the communal riots in East Bengal in 1906, with most of the targets being the ‘Hindu’ zamindars and mahajans, some of whom had started levying an ‘Iswar britti’ for maintaining Hindu images.
Though Tagore spoke of bridging the gulf between the educated & the non-educated, his patient methods of constructive work in villages appealed little to the youth, and neither did he have a concrete social or economic programme of mass mobilization.
Extremist propaganda donned aggressive Hindu colours veering towards terrorism, and looking at Muslim rioters as no more than the hired agents of the British especially after the 1907 riots.
There was a marked shift to terrorism.The first revolutionary groups started round about 1902 in Midnapur and Calcutta (Anushilan Samiti) but were initially confined to physical & moral training of members, important only in 1907-08. Many abortive actions were attempted between 1906 and 1908 on prominent British officials and judges. East Bengal saw the growth of a more efficient variety of revolutionary terrorism (under the organization of Dacca Anushilan), which was a direct consequence of the Swadeshi Bengal. The movement took the forms of assassination of oppressive officials or traitors, Swadeshi dacoities to raise funds, or military conspiracies with expectations of help from enemies of Great Britain. However, the movement did not rise to the level of urban mass uprisings or guerilla bases in the countryside. Absolute independence or “Purna Swaraj” became the only ideal worth living or dying for, because political freedom was now essential to enjoy the other freedoms.
Substantial contributions in the national struggle were made by “Elite revolution”. The colonial government had been shaken with extraordinary efforts by the Indians for the cause of complete independence and the development of worldwide contacts for shelter and arms, which ended up with more ideological consequences and influences like that of Marxism on Kanungo. Tremendous admiration of the heroism of the revolutionaries came from very wide circle of educated Indians and from other sections of Indian society.
Nevertheless, British administration did not face any threat of collapse. The intense religiosity of the early secret societies kept the ‘Muslims’ aloof & hostile while occasional emphasis on quixotic heroism over effective programmes took away even more participation. Records show a predominance of upper castes- the Brahman, Kayastha and Vaidya- in the movement. Severe social limitations handicapped the revolutionary terrorism movement with elite action tending to postpone efforts to draw the masses into active political struggles, that would involve linking up national with socio-economic issues through more radical programmes.
Surendra Nath Banerjea has spoken of the Swadeshi movement as “…patriotic is the first instance and industrial in the second..” which roused the moral sense of a whole people in its relations with a ‘bureaucratic power’. To Bipin Chandra Pal, the movement was more a “spiritual movement” where emancipation of Indian manhood & womanhood was the chief object, and not of economic life or political freedom. With its ideologies of boycott, Swadeshi, Swaraj, national education etc alongwith growing political terrorism the movement marked a “revolutionary advance of India’s journey towards political progress”, and was not conservative or reactionary. It broke the illusion of a paternalistic British Raj, which was now seen increasingly as a alien rule. All classes and masses stood combined in this movement in opposition to alien despotism, and the effects were felt all over India.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sumit Sarkar: Modern India (1885-1947)
Sumit Sarkar: The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (1903-1908)
Prof. Haridas Mukherjee & Prof. Uma Mukherjee: “India’s Fight for Freedom” or “The Swadeshi Movement” (1905-1906)