Road To Freedom

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• For God and Country
• The Empire Builders
• Tribal Uprisings
• Sepoys on the Move
• British Authority Collapses
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Roll of Honour
• The Trial of the Last Emperor
• English Education
• The Blue Mutiny
• Perishing in Peace
• ‘Rani Ka Hookum’
• Barbarous Britannia
• Return to Swadeshi
• The Delhi Durbar
• Hunger Deaths
• The One-Man Army
• Mamool Raj
• The British Raj in Black and White
• Europeans Take To The Street!
• Pressing On !
• The Battle For A Free Press
• The Battle Lines are Drawn
• Women : Crossing the Threshold
• An Old Man's Dream
• Father of Indian Unrest
• The Monk Who Shook The Nation
• The Battle is Taken to the Legislature!
• Partition of Bengal
• The Great Divide
• The New Spirit of India
• Swadeshi Enterprise
• From Swadeshi to Swaraj
• Gandhi in South Africa
• Heroes and Martyrs
• Revolutionaries Outside India
• Carrot and Stick
• Gandhi in Champaran
• The Gentle Satyagrahi
• Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh
• Jallianwala — The Aftermath
• A People Reject Their Rulers
• The Himalayan Blunder
• Gandhiji Withdraws from Political Activities
• Bardoli
• Saga of Indian Revolutionaries
• A Pinch of Salt!
• Gandhi and Ambedkar
• Leave India to God… or to Anarchy
• Quit India
• The Last War of Independence
• Apostle of Peace
• India Wins Freedom
• The Light Has Gone Out
• Under One Flag

From Swadeshi to Swaraj

From Swadeshi to Swaraj

Alarmed at the rapid spread of the spirit of defiance of the government, the British rulers resorted to repressive measures. Even shouting of 'Bande Mataram' became a crime in the eyes of the law. But the harsh measures adopted by the government to suppress the movement proved counter- productive. "The old faith of the people in the British government as the saviour of this country is almost dead," wrote B.C. Pal. Rabindranath summed up this feeling as only a poet could : "The more they tighten their fetters, the more will our fetters snap; the more their eyes redden, the more our eyes will open." Even those who had advocated swadeshi in the late 19th century had not dreamt that the spirit of swadeshi, would bring about a transformation in the Indian attitude to British rule. They had advocated swadeshi because they wanted to promote Indian industry, nothing more. They had not expected it to develop into a movement for self-government. But that is what happened. Swadeshi was quickly conceptualised to mean freedom from foreign rule. A reader writing in a newspaper in February 1906 expressed his feelings in verse : "From life without freedom Oh, who would not fly! For one day of freedom Who would not die!" Even the mild-mannered national leader, Gopal Krishna Gokhale was moved by the spirit of swadeshi. In his presidential address at the Congress session in Benaras in 1905 Gokhale said, "....For the first time since British rule began, all sections of the Indian community, without distinction of caste or creed have been moved by a common impulse and without the stimulus of external pressure to act together in offering resistance to a common wrong. A wave of true national consciousness has swept over the provinces and at its touch, old barriers have, for the time at any rate, been thrown down, personal jealousies have vanished, other controversies have been hushed... the most outstanding fact of the situation is that the public life of this country has received an accession of strength of great importance."

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This "accession of strength" resulted in the people challenging and defying the authority of the government. To go to prison or to get lathi blows from the police became a badge of honour, and not, as formerly, a brand of infamy.
British writer, Valentine Chirol who was a virulent critic of Indian nationalism remarked: "The question of partition itself receded into the background, and the issue…was not whether Bengal should be one unpartitioned province or two partitioned provinces under British rule, but whether British rule itself was to endure in Bengal or, for the matter of that, anywhere in India."
Chirol was not being melodramatic. Others too had come to the same conclusion. Dadabhai Naoroji who presided over the Calcutta Congress abruptly announced Swaraj as the goal of the Congress. Will Durant summed up the importance of the swadeshi movement with a cryptic remark: "It was in 1905, then, that the Indian Revolution began."
Writing about the swadeshi movement, in the Daily Chronicle, J. Ramsay Macdonald who later rose to become the first-ever Labour Prime Minister of Britain, observed, "....It is translating nationalism into religion, into music and poetry, into painting and literature... It is creating India by song and worship, it is clothing her in queenly garments... and from this surge of prayer and song and political strife will come India if India ever does come."

Swadeshi in Art and Literature The swadeshi movement inspired art and literature and in turn the movement itself was sustained by the literature it helped to create. Songs of Rabindranath Tagore, Rajni Kant Sen, Subramania Bharati, Dwijendralal Ray, Mukunda Das, Syed Abu Mohammed and several others echoed throughout the land. Rabindranath Tagore's Amar Sonar Bangla became the national anthem of Bangladesh six decades after its composition. In art, Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose broke away from the Victorian naturalism and looked to the Ajanta, Rajput and Mughal paintings for inspiration. Folk theatre forms such as Jatras were effectively used to spread the message of swadeshi. This period also witnessed the advent of Indian scientists like Jagdish Chandra Bose, and Prafulla Chandra Ray who achieved international recognition for their contribution to science.