A brief history of swadeshi in India: from 1800s till the present

On Tuesday, Modi asked Indians to make swadeshi and Aatmanirbhar Bharat their “jeevan mantra”. Earlier on Sunday, he had called for the purchase of only Indian goods so that the rupee did not “go out” of the country.

What does swadeshi mean in the Indian context? “[It] is a term that most people instinctively understand, yet it has meant different things to different people at different times,” Nitin Pai, director of The Takshashila Institution, wrote in his 2021 paper ‘A Brief Economic History of Swadeshi’.

Here’s a history of swadeshi in India, and of its persistent effervescence in Indian political and economic discourse.

Early articulations of swadeshi

The historian Christopher A Bayly identified the earliest manifestations of swadeshi in the conservative backlash to early 19th century Christian missionary activity and Hindu reform movements. In his book Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (2012), Bayly mentions an 1822 article in Samachar Chandrika, an ultra-orthodox Bengali weekly, which said that “many, in order to pass for very religious men, do not make use of any Europe goods”.

“Here we see a very early intimation of Swadeshi, the consumption of home produce for religious and national salvation, which was to become the key ideology and practice of Indian nationalists nearly a century later,” Bayly wrote.

More concrete appeals to reject foreign-made goods were made by the likes of Marathi social reformer Gopal Hari Deshmukh (1823-92) and the Bengali intellectual Rajnarayan Basu (1826-99) in the early- to mid-19th century.

Cultural reasons aside, these appeals were borne out of economic considerations and a recognition that the onrush of cheap European goods into Indian markets would be ruinous for indigenous industries and artisans.

Even rebel proclamations in 1857 made rudimentary articulations of swadeshi. In the paper ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930’ (1986), Bayly wrote about the Azamgarh Proclamation, which “noted how weavers, cotton dressers, carpenters, black-smiths, and others had been reduced to penury”, and that a return of Mughal rule would see artisans “employed exclusively in the services of the kings, the rajas, and the rich”, which would “no doubt ensure their prosperity”.

In 1872, Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842-1901) went one step further than previous advocates of swadeshi when, during a series of speeches in Poona (now Pune), he spoke about “preferring the goods produced in one’s own country even though they may prove to be dearer or less satisfactory than finer foreign products” (Bipan Chandra, The rise and growth of economic nationalism in India, 1966).

This framing has stuck. Historian Sumit Sarkar in Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-08 (1973) defined swadeshi as a sentiment “that indigenous goods should be preferred by consumers even if they were more expensive than and inferior in quality to their imported substitutes…”.

Added economic heft, evolution of idea

The early articulations of swadeshi were refined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a number of political and economic thinkers and activists. Most notable in this regard were Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917) and Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909) who, according to Chandra, made the argument that “on the whole, British rule was economically injurious to India and that perhaps it was designedly so”.

In his two volumes of The Economic History of India published in 1901 and 1903, Dutt showed that the British had used “the arm of political injustice” to destroy the traditional handicrafts of India, thus creating the “present helpless dependence on agriculture” which in turn had been ruined by excessive land tax, Sarkar wrote.

Dutt’s thesis of deindustrialisation during British rule held sway, especially in Marxist and left-nationalist circles, well into the 1980s.

Naoroji conceptualised the “drain of wealth” theory in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901) which posited that over the course of British rule India had lost at least 200 to 300 million pounds which could otherwise have been spent on Indians.

“The theory of the drain…implied the constant flow of wealth from India to Great Britain in the form of excess exports over imports, the balance being the tribute India had to pay to maintain the most expensive machinery, civil and military, of foreign rule,” Chandra wrote. The theory of drain revealed that “the Indian taxpayer had paid richly for his own servitude”.

This analysis of the Indian economy under British rule would provide heft to the argument for swadeshi. “India had been reduced to the status of supplier of raw materials and market for British manufactured goods,” Sarkar wrote, “[and] protection of what remained of the traditional crafts and a vigorous drive for industrialisation on modern lines were the obvious ways of ending this condition of dependence”.

Political deployment of the argument

In the 1860s, during the Namdhari agitation in Punjab, Guru Ram Singh told his followers to boycott British goods and services, including cheap foreign-made cloth. His biographers called him the “harbinger of swadeshi”.

In the foreword of Jug Paltao Satguru (1948), Forward Bloc leader Sardul Singh Kavishar wrote that Guru Ram Singh adopted “the cult of swadeshi to free ourselves from economic serfdom” (quoted in Joginder Singh, A Short History of Namdhari Sikhs of Punjab, 2010).

In 1896, the government imposed excise duties on manufactured Indian cloth. In response, Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1929) organised boycotts and public burnings of foreign cloth in the Bombay Presidency. This would become the template for the political deployment of the idea of swadeshi, and less than a decade later, galvanise the first “mass movement” of the freedom struggle.

The Swadeshi Movement was triggered by Viceroy Lord Curzon’s 1903 decision to partition Bengal on communal lines, although this was only “a last straw in a long series of humiliations”.

“Economic distress added to the fires of political frustration and racial injustice. Faith in the ‘providential’ British connection was difficult to maintain in face of the repeated famines and epidemics of the 1890s… [and] as the liberal professions became overcrowded and as prices rose sharply from 1905 onwards,” Sarkar wrote.

The formal proclamation of the Swadeshi Movement was made on August 7, 1905, in a meeting at the Calcutta town hall. During the meeting, the famous ‘Boycott Resolution’, which urged the boycott of Manchester cloth and Liverpool salt, was also passed.

“That the message of boycott went home is evident from the fact that the value of British cloth sold in some of the mofussil districts fell by five to fifteen times between September 1904 and September 1905,” Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, K N Pannikar and Sucheta Mahajan wrote in India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857-1947 (1989).

This message of swadeshi soon spread to various parts of India: among others, Tilak led the movement in Bombay Presidency, Lala Lajpat Rai (18651928) in Punjab and northern India, and Chidambaram Pillai (1872-1936) in Madras Presidency.

The three pillars of the Swadeshi Movement: (from left) Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Bipin Chandra Pal. Wikimedia Commons

Militant nationalists like Tilak, Rai, and Bengal’s Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932) popularised several “new forms of mobilisation” and “techniques of struggle” including the idea of an “extended boycott” which would include “apart from boycott of foreign goods, boycott of government schools and colleges, courts, titles and government services and even the organisation of strikes” with the aim of making administration “impossible” (India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857-1947).

While the Swadeshi Movement fizzled out by 1908, the emphasis on self-reliance “saw a mushrooming of Swadeshi textile mills, soap and match factories, tanneries, banks, insurance companies, shops, etc.”, some of which, such as Acharya P C Ray’s Bengal Chemicals Factory, thrived for decades.

Less than a decade later, Gandhi (1869-1948) would make swadeshi his own.

Mahatma Gandhi & swadeshi

For Gandhi, swadeshi was not merely an economic doctrine, but one that had political, social, and religious dimensions. In a 1916 speech, he described swadeshi as “that spirit in us which restricts us to the use and service of our immediate surroundings to the exclusion of the more remote” (Speeches & Writings of M.K. Gandhi, 1922).

Swadeshi, for Gandhi, was “the ‘law of laws’ ingrained in the basic nature of human being”, Gandhian academic Siby K Joseph wrote in his article ‘Understanding Gandhi’s vision of Swadeshi’ in 2012.

An appeal to boycott foreign clothes, published in The Bombay Chronicle on July 30, 1921. Wikimedia Commons

In religion, for instance, Gandhi said swadeshi would entail “restricting myself to my ancestral religion… If I find it defective, I should serve it by purging it of its defects” (Speeches & Writings, 1922).

Religious swadeshi featured heavily in Gandhi’s critique of modernity.

In another speech, also in 1916, he said: “Swadeshi in religion teaches one to measure the glorious past and re-enact it in the present generation. The pandemonium that is going on in Europe (World War I) shows that modern civilisation represents forces of evil and darkness whereas the ancient, that is, Indian civilisation represents in its essence the divine force” (Speeches & Writings).

The application of swadeshi in politics was to do with “the revival of the indigenous institutions”. “[Gandhi’s] vision of a decentralised political system was Panchayati Raj by which the innumerable villages of India were governed,” Joseph wrote.

In Panchayati Raj, a compilation of Gandhi’s speeches on the topic by Gandhian scholar R K Prabhu in 1959, Gandhi described his idea of village governance as follows: “The government of the village will be conducted by the Panchayat of five persons annually elected by the adult villagers, male and female… this Panchayat will be the legislature, judiciary and executive combined… Here there is perfect democracy based upon individual freedom. The individual is the architect of his own government…”.

Mahatma Gandhi spinning khadi in 1929. Wikimedia Commons

In the domain of economics, swadeshi for Gandhi would mean that one “should use only things that are produced by my immediate neighbours and serve those industries by making them efficient and complete where they might be found wanting”.

(Nitin Pai, in his 2021 paper, would aptly write: “Almost a century later, another Indian leader (Modi) compressed this into a very succinct ‘Vocal for Local’”.)

Gandhi said that “if not an article of commerce had been brought from outside India, she would be to-day a land flowing with milk and honey…” (Speeches & Writings).

But his logic for economic swadeshi also had moral dimensions. “Economics that hurt the moral well-being of an individual or a nation are immoral and therefore sinful… It is sinful to buy and use articles made by sweated labour. It is sinful to eat American wheat and let my neighbour the grain-dealer starve for want of custom,” he wrote in Young India in 1921.

The charkha and handspun khadi, for Gandhi, was “the necessary and most important corollary of the principle of swadeshi in its practical application to society,” Joseph wrote.

“I feel convinced that the revival of hand-spinning and hand weaving will make the largest contribution to the economic and the moral regeneration of India. The millions must have a simple industry to supplement agriculture. Spinning was the cottage industry years ago, and if the millions are to be saved from starvation, they must be enabled to reintroduce spinning in their homes and every village must repossess its own weaver,” Gandhi wrote in Young India in 1920.

Beginning in 1918, the pursuit of swadeshi featured, in some way or the other, in every Gandhian movement, and occupied a central position in the freedom struggle as a whole.

“During the Gandhian era of mass politics, they (nationalist leaders) disseminated this critique of colonialism among the common people in the urban as well as the rural areas. The twin themes of the drain of wealth and the use of India as a market for Britain’s manufactured goods and the consequent destruction of the Indian handicraft industries formed the very pith and marrow of their agitation.” (India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857-1947).

Modern industry and swadeshi

Gandhi’s conception of swadeshi differed from that of other nationalist leaders in one significant way: he was fundamentally distrustful of modern industry which he called “a curse for mankind” (Young India, 1931).

He wrote: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts…” (Young India, 1928).

His swadeshi alternative to industrialism was a rejection of materialism and a return to the simple village economy. “I believe that Independent India can only discharge her duty towards a groaning world by adopting a simple but ennobled life by developing her thousands of cottages and living at peace with the world,” he wrote (Harijan, 1946).

However, most nationalist leaders, including on the Left, were ardent proponents of industrialisation.

“The Indian national movement accepted from the beginning, and with near unanimity, the objective of a complete economic transformation of the country on the basis of modern industrial and agricultural development,” Chandra and others wrote.

This modern industry would be owned by Indians, and operated for the welfare of the people. “The nationalists were fully committed to the larger goal of independent, self-reliant economic development to be based on independence from foreign capital, the creation of an indigenous capital goods or machine-making sector and the foundation and development of independent science and technology,” Chandra and others wrote.

In post-Independence India, it is this swadeshi industrialism that drove economic policy. Economic historian Aashish Velkar described how the concept of swadeshi became a fulcrum for making capitalist demands.

“The notion that Indian capital needed to be used for the benefit of Indian nationals became established as a key principle within nationalist thought by the 1930s. This principle also formed a central tenet of post independence development planning and protectionist policies,” he wrote in his paper ‘Swadeshi Capitalism In Colonial Bombay’ (2020).

According to Pai, the concern for swadeshi and the “fear of economic imperialism” is what led India to adopt a mixed economy model with a large role for the public sector, use “import substitution as a policy tool that eventually became an end in itself”, control foreign investment and trade, discourage undue consumerism, and protect small scale and handicraft industries from large domestic firms who in turn were protected from foreign competition.

RSS, BJP, and the swadeshi ideal

Amid the economic crisis of the late 1980s, which served as the trigger for the reforms of 1991, swadeshi found a champion in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The Sangh’s economic ideology had long been aligned with the philosophy of swadeshi. The opening of the Indian economy and the movement of the Congress away from the Gandhian and Nehruvian economic outlook provided the RSS with the space to emerge as a strong champion of swadeshi.

“A string of RSS resolutions dating back to the 1950s and issued by its chief policymaking bodies strongly reflected its support for swadeshi over the next five decades,” Walter Anderson and Shridhar D Damle wrote in Messengers of Hindu Nationalism: How the RSS Reshaped India (2019).

In 1991, months after then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh announced the economic reforms, Dattopant Thengadi, an RSS pracharak, established the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM). Thengadi, considered to be one of the most influential ideological figures in the Sangh, had set up the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, the RSS’ trade union, in 1955, and the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, its farmers’ union, in 1979.

Swadeshi Jagran Manch protestors burning Chinese goods after the Galwan Valley faceoff in 2020. Express Photo by Amit Mehra

“Thengadi firmly believed that a truly independent India must avoid dependence on and influence of the capitalist West and countries in the communist bloc and was thus committed to swadeshi as a central element in his views on economics,” Anderson and Damle wrote. This anti-globalisation outlook, also held by Gandhi and Nehru in different ways, has been the central feature of the Sangh’s swadeshi.

The SJM’s first public campaign was against Enron, an American company which was setting up a power plant in Dabhol, south of Mumbai. Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the SJM frequently opposed the government’s policies to allow the entry of foreign companies and capital in India — including when the BJP was in government.

While being in power, the BJP has had to often strike a balance between swadeshi and the reform process. Despite the Sangh’s philosophical opposition to globalisation, the BJP has frequently been at the forefront of easing FDI norms, most notably during Modi’s first term as Prime Minister (2014-19) when the government opened up many sectors, including defence.

Modi’s second term, however, has seen a return of swadeshi both in terms of rhetoric and substance. The Make in India initiative and the emphasis on creating an Aatmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) echo the concerns and prescriptions that advocates of swadeshi have had since the 19th century — but in context of the supply chain disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and India’s difficult relationship with China.

“If swadeshi and self-reliance has enjoyed enduring popularity over the past century, it is because it appeals both to popular sentiment and the commercial interests of Indian firms,” Pai wrote. “By 2020, swadeshi found a new wind in contemporary politics as a form of popular resistance to China’s geopolitical power.”