The Swadeshi Movement Of 1905

The Indian national movement took a major step forward with the start of the Swadeshi Movement around the turn of the century. For the first time, women, students, and a large segment of the urban and rural populations of Bengal and other parts of India became active participants in politics. Almost all of the major political trends of the Indian national movement emerged over the next half-decade. The movement gave birth to everything from conservative moderation to political extremism, from terrorism to nascent socialism, from petitioning and public speeches to passive resistance and boycott. The movement's diversity was not limited to politics alone. In Indian literature, music, science, and industry, this was a watershed moment. Indian society was experimenting as a whole, and people's creativity was expanding in all directions.

 

•    The anti-partition movement that arose in response to the British decision to partition Bengal gave birth to the Swadeshi Movement. 

 

•    There was no denying that Bengal, with a population of 78 million people (roughly a quarter of British India's population), had become administratively inefficient. It was also impossible to deny that the real reason for partitioning Bengal was political. 

 

•    Indian nationalism was growing in strength, and partition was expected to weaken what was seen as India's nerve centre at the time. The attempt was to ‘dethrone Calcutta' from its position as the ‘centre from which the Congress Party is manipulated throughout Bengal, and indeed which the Congress Party centre of successful intrigue' and ‘divide the Bengali speaking population,' in the words of Lord Curzon, Viceroy (1899-1905).

 

•    Curzon wrote to the Secretary of State in response to the almost instantaneous uproar in Bengal over the partition proposals. ‘If we yield to their clamour now, we will never be able to dismember or reduce Bengal again; and you will be cementing and solidifying a force that is already formidable and certain to be a source of increasing trouble in the future.' 

 

•    Bengali influence was to be stifled not only by dividing the state into two administrations, but also by reducing Bengalis to a minority within Bengal itself, with seventeen million Bengalis and thirty-seven million Oriya and Hindi speakers in the new proposal. 

 

•    The partition was also intended to foster a different kind of division, this time based on religion. The policy of bolstering Muslim communalists as a counterweight to the Congress and the national movement, which had become increasingly crystallised in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was to be revived. 

 

•    Curzon's Dacca speech revealed his attempt to 'woo the Muslims' into supporting partition. He argued that with partition, Dacca could become the capital of a new Muslim majority province that would “invest the Mohammedans in Eastern Bengal with a unity that they have not enjoyed since the days of the old Mussulman Viceroys and Kings.” As a result, Muslims would get a "better deal," and the eastern districts would be free of Calcutta's "pernicious influence."

 

•    Even Curzon's successor, Lord Minto, was critical of the way partition was imposed, despite public opinion that it was a good political strategy; Minto argued that “from a political point of View alone, putting aside the administrative difficulties of the old province, I believe partition to have been very necessary . . .”

 

•    The partition's design was clearly visible to Indian nationalists, who unanimously condemned it. The anti-Swadeshi and anti-partition movements had begun.

 

REACTION OF MASSES AFTER DECLARATION OF PARTITION:

•    When the partition proposals were made public in December 1903, there was an outpouring of immediate and spontaneous opposition. The decision to partition Bengal was announced on July 19, 1905.

 

•    The strength of this protest can be gauged by the fact that 500 protest meetings were held in East Bengal alone in the first two months after the announcement, particularly in Dacca, Mymensingh, and Chittagong. 

 

•    Nearly half a million copies of pamphlets critiquing the partition proposals were distributed throughout Bengal. 

 

•    Surendranath Banerjea, Krishna Kumar Mitra, Prithwishchandra Ray, and other leaders used journals and newspapers like the Bengalee, Hitabadi, and Sanjibani to launch a powerful press campaign against the partition proposals. 

 

•    In March 1904 and January 1905, large protest meetings were held in the city of Calcutta, and numerous petitions (69 memoranda from the Dacca division alone), some of which were signed by as many as 70,000 people — a large number considering the level of politicisation at the time — were sent to the Government of India and the Secretary of State. 

 

•    Even the big zamindars, who had previously been loyal to the Raj, allied with Congress leaders, who were mostly intellectuals and political workers from journalism, law, and other liberal fields.

 

•    From 1903 to mid-1905, moderate techniques such as petitions, memoranda, speeches, public meetings, and press campaigns dominated. By preparing a fool proof case against the partition proposals, the goal was to turn public opinion in India and England against them. It was hoped that by doing so, enough pressure would be applied to prevent this injustice from occurring.

 

•    Several spontaneous protest meetings were held in mofussil towns such as Dinajpur, Pabna, Faridpur, Tangail, Jessore, Dacca, Birbhum, and Barisal within days of the government announcement. 

 

•    In Calcutta, students organised a number of meetings against partition and for Swadeshi, and it was at these meetings that the pledge to boycott foreign goods was first taken.

 

•    It was formally declared on August 7, 1905, at a meeting held at the Calcutta Town Hall. The movement, which had previously been sporadic and spontaneous, now had a focus and was forming a leadership. The famous Boycott Resolution was passed at the meeting on August 7th. 

 

•    Even moderate leaders such as Surendranath Banerjea went on a nationwide tour urging people to boycott Manchester cloth and Liverpool salt. 

 

•    The value of British cloth sold in some of the mofussil districts fell by five to fifteen times between September 1904 and September 1905, indicating that the boycott message reached home.

 

•    The day partition took effect, October 16, 1905, was declared a national day of mourning in Bengal. No fires were lit at the cooking hearth because people were fasting. 

 

•    A hartal was declared in Calcutta. People organised processions, and band after band walked barefoot in the morning, bathed in the Ganges, and then paraded through the streets singing Bande Mataram, which became the movement's theme song almost by accident. 

 

•    As a symbol of the two halves of Bengal's unity, people tied rakhis on each other's hands. Later in the day, Anandamohan Bose and Surendranath Banerjea delivered speeches to crowds of 50,000 to 75,000 people at two massive mass meetings. These were possibly the largest mass rallies held under the nationalist banner to date. A sum of Rs. 50,000 was raised for the movement within a few hours of the meetings.

 

•    It was clear that the movement's character, both in terms of goals and social base, had begun to expand rapidly. In the words of Abdul Rasul, President of the Barisal Conference in April 1906: ‘What we could not have accomplished in 50 or 100 years, the great disaster, the partition of Ben¬gal, has done for us in six months. Its fruits have been the great national movement known as the Swadeshi movement.’ 

 

 

 

a.    Lokamanya Tilak led the movement to different parts of the country, particularly Poona and Bombay.

 

b.    Ajit Singh and Lala Lajpat Rai spread the Swadeshi message throughout Punjab and northern India. 

 

c.    Syed Haidar Raza led the movement in Delhi.

 

d.    The Swadeshi Movement was active in Rawalpindi, Kangra, Jammu, Multan, and Haridwar.

 

e.    Chidambaram Pillai took the Swadeshi Movement to the Madras presidency, which was also galvanised by Bipin Chandra Pal's extensive lecture tour.

 

•    The Indian National Congress took up the Swadeshi cause, and in 1905, the Banaras Session, presided over by G.K. Gokhale, a supporter of the Swadeshi and Boycott Movement for Bengal, and was held. 

 

•    Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lajpat Rai, and Aurobindo Ghosh, militant nationalists, were in favour of expanding the movement to the rest of India and taking it beyond the Swadeshi and boycott programmes to a full-fledged political mass struggle. 

 

•    Swaraj had become the "pettiest and narrowest of all political objects," and the abolition of partition had become the "pettiest and narrowest of all political objects." The Moderates, for the most part, were not yet ready to go that far. 

 

•    The Indian National Congress, however, took a major step forward in 1906 at its Calcutta Session, which was presided over by Dadabhai Naoroji. In his presidential address, Naoroji stated that the Indian National Congress's goal was to achieve "self-government or Swaraj similar to that of the United Kingdom or the Colonies."

 

•    The differences between the Moderates and the Extremists, particularly over the pace of the movement and the tactics to be used, reached a head in the 1907 Congress session in Surat, when the party split, with serious consequences for the Swadeshi Movement.