leadership – indeed, Gandhi, then a young lawyer and political activist in
South Africa, followed the movement with interest; his manifesto, Hind
Swaraj, written in 1910, was largely a commentary upon the issues raised
by the movement. Swadeshialso stressed the importance of indigenous
manufactures, and self-strengthening education, particularly in scientific
and technological subjects – incorporating earlier nationalist debates
about the need for national self-sufficiency and the nature of valid
borrowings from the ‘West’, also to be major planks of Gandhian politics
later.
The movement spread quickly outside Bengal, with middle-class
radicals organising boycotts and swadeshidemonstrations across the
country. This was the moment of division between the old moderate
‘mendicant’ leadership of the Congress and the emergent ‘extremist’
leadership, men like the Marathi Brahmin, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, less
squeamish about staying on the right side of the law. The extremists were
acutely conscious of the need to take nationalism out of the confines of
the debating chamber and into the realms of mass politics. To this end,
they needed to employ a more popular idiom than the pedantic and formal
English of an imagined British liberalism.
But in the search for such a popular idiom, the extremists drew
strongly on Hindu – and often upper-caste – symbolism. This could
obscure the genuine attempt on the part of the Bengal swadeshiagitators
to reach out across those limitations. Nevertheless, an undoubted legacy
of the rise of extremist politics was a rise in Hindu rhetoric in nation-
alist politics: the attempt to glorify historical figures who had fought
against Mughal rule, now cast as alien and foreign; the worship of Mother
India as a Hindu goddess; and more explicitly a reference to a glorious and
untarnished ancient Indian past, identified with ‘Hinduism’. The possi-
bility of counter-mobilisation on the basis of Islam had showed itself early
on, especially as some of the more enthusiastic of the swadeshivolunteers
used coercive measures to attempt to stop poor peasants in rural eastern
Bengal (most of whom were Muslims) from buying British-made goods.
In the absence of cheap swadeshialternatives, this was hardly practical –
it could only be a sacrifice made by the more affluent – and the result was
sectarian tension and occasional violence as religious leaders, encouraged
by government officials, told Muslims that their interests and those of the
‘Hindu’ agitators were opposed.
Jawaharlal’s sympathies, as he read about these events, were with the20 THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL