In the wake of the 1905 Partition of Bengal, the Swadeshi movement gathered unprecedented momentum. As crowds shouted “Vande Mataram” and called for the boycott of British goods, another label quietly began to acquire new political meaning in Indian bazaars: ‘Made in Germany’.
The boycott was never intended to reject all foreign goods. Where Indian industry lacked the capacity to manufacture certain products or access specialised knowledge, nationalists considered it both legitimate and necessary to turn to countries other than Britain.
Sri Aurobindo articulated this distinction between political strategy and economic necessity in a speech in 1908: “Why should we take revenge upon America or Germany for the oppression caused to us by the people of Britain?… There is a political reason for the boycott of British goods; it is to make the brethren of our oppressors feel the pinch.”
Among the principal beneficiaries of this distinction were German manufacturers. While the Swadeshi movement opened opportunities for several non-British industrial powers, German products occupied a distinctive place in Indian markets. This reflected both the growing commercial rivalry between Britain and Germany and Germany’s increasingly hostile political relationship with Britain, which would culminate in the First World War.
“The idea of the enemy’s enemy being one’s friend takes off significantly, and the Swadeshi activists actively collaborate with the Germans to avoid the British,” historian Christina Lubinski told indianexpress.com.
No industry benefited more from this political climate than German synthetic dyes. By the early 20th century, firms such as BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst had established a near-monopoly over the global synthetic dye industry, with India emerging as one of their most important overseas markets.
Founding site of “Friedr. Bayer et comp.” at Barmen (Official website of Bayer)
The prominence of dyes went far beyond the textile trade. Synthetic dyes represented one of the world’s earliest science-intensive industries, bringing together laboratory research, industrial chemistry and manufacturing on an unprecedented scale. Their production required sophisticated scientific knowledge that few countries possessed.
For Indian textile manufacturers, German dyes offered consistency, quality and a range of colours that competitors struggled to match. For German companies, India became an indispensable market.
Yet Germany never ruled India. Unlike Britain, it possessed no formal colonial authority on the subcontinent. Its influence instead flowed through trade, technology, and commercial networks that developed within the framework of the British Empire.
“But informally there is a form of colonialism baked into these relationships. There was also a clear power imbalance that the Germans were actively exploiting,” Lubinski argues.
A failed colonial empire’s economic entry into India
Germany’s own colonial empire was both late and short-lived. It began only in 1884 and ended abruptly after the First World War, when Germany lost all its colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Although its territorial empire disappeared, its colonial ambitions did not.
Lubinski argues that, in terms of colonial thinking, Germany differed little from Britain. “They were failed colonialists,” she says. “And so they wanted to do economically what they could not do politically.”
Long before the First World War, German businesses had established themselves in India. They became part of the cosmopolitan European commercial elite, collaborating closely with British traders while taking advantage of the infrastructure, institutions, and legal framework created by the Raj.
As Lubinski notes, “Many of the German businessmen were in fact working in Britain and they used the networks and infrastructure that the British had established for their colonial purposes.” They frequented the same clubs, chambers of commerce, and social institutions as their British counterparts. Germany may have remained outside the political structure of empire, but its businesses became deeply embedded in its commercial life.
The outbreak of the First World War brought that relationship to an abrupt end. Once Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, German firms operating in India were immediately classified as enemy businesses. German nationals were interned or expelled, and imports from Germany effectively ceased due to the British naval blockade.
In her 2018 research paper ‘Internment as a Business Challenge’, Lubinski writes that by March 1917, the British internment camp at Ahmednagar in present-day Maharashtra housed 1,621 people, most of them Germans and Austrians.
The sudden reversal came as a shock to many Germans who had until then considered themselves part of India’s European commercial community.
Caricature of a German person being interned by an Indian soldier during World War I (image from Lubinski’s paper, ‘Internment as a business challenge’ (2018))
Lubinski cites the account of N O Tera, an employee of a German rubber company, who wrote: “Here is when for the first time the British destroyed the fiction of the superiority of the white race.”
Another German missionary, Hans George Probst, later recalled the pre-war years as a time when Europeans still imagined themselves to share a common identity in relation to their colonial subjects. The war fractured those assumptions overnight.
Made in Germany: More than just a label
Yet even before the conflict, German industrialists had recognised that their rivalry with Britain could work to their advantage in India. As the nationalist movement gathered strength, Swadeshi supporters increasingly sought commercial relationships with industrialised countries outside the British Empire—countries that could provide products, technology, and expertise without strengthening Britain’s economy.
Nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak captured this thinking when he urged his followers to explore whether goods could be imported “from non-English places”. “We must win the sympathy of traders in Germany, France, America, Japan, etc.,” he said.
The changing political climate transformed the meaning of the ‘Made in Germany’ label. Ironically, it had originally been introduced by the British in the late nineteenth century to identify, and implicitly stigmatise, German imports. During the Swadeshi movement, however, the label acquired an altogether different significance. It publicly signalled that a product was not British, turning what had once been intended as a commercial disadvantage into a valuable political asset.
“Sometimes their products get returned because the label is not big enough,” Lubinski says. In her book Navigating Nationalism in Global Enterprise (2022), she recounts a case from Bengal where English goods were fraudulently sold as ‘Made in Germany’ to take advantage of nationalist sentiment.
German dyes reshape India’s colour trade
If the Swadeshi movement gave German products a political advantage, it was the country’s scientific lead in synthetic dyes that secured its commercial dominance.
Historian Prakash Kumar, based at Penn State in the US, explains that before the advent of synthetic dyes, the global trade in natural dyes, including indigo, was dominated by the British Empire. Excluded from this lucrative market, German chemists turned to the laboratory. “The Germans were effectively kept out of it, which led to a concerted effort among them to synthesise indigo,” Kumar said in an email interview.
The breakthrough came in 1899. Building on the work of chemist Adolf von Baeyer, German manufacturers introduced synthetic indigo to international markets. It was purer, cheaper and easier to use than natural indigo, immediately challenging the British-controlled trade.
“By 1899, based on the findings by the chemist Adolf Baeyer, Germany launched the cheaper and purer synthetic indigo on the international market, which immediately started eating into the natural global market dominated by the British,” Kumar explains.
Building on the work of chemist Adolf von Baeyer, German manufacturers introduced synthetic indigo to international markets. (Wikimedia Commons)
Within a few years, three leading German companies—Bayer (founded in 1863), Hoechst (1863) and BASF (1865)—had expanded production on a scale that fundamentally altered the global dye industry.
“This was difficult chemistry,” Kumar says. “Despite their rigour, no one other than the Germans was able to master the technology or science to manufacture synthetic indigo.”
The success of German chemistry had consequences far beyond Europe. In India, it transformed an industry long embedded in the colonial economy.
Natural indigo had been one of Britain’s most valuable colonial commodities. Produced on plantations in Bengal and Bihar and exported to textile manufacturers globally, it had become closely intertwined with the expansion of British rule.
“The rise of indigo plantations in colonial Bengal paralleled the consolidation of British rule on the Indian subcontinent from the last quarter of the eighteenth century,” Kumar writes in his 2016 paper, ‘Plantation Indigo and Synthetic Indigo: European Planters and the Redefinition of a Colonial Commodity’.
Ironically, the greatest challenge to this colonial enterprise came from German laboratories.
As synthetic indigo became cheaper and more reliable, British planters attempted to defend their market through scientific experimentation and new marketing strategies. “They were defending not only their product, but also the plantation mode of production and were resisting their own demise,” Kumar writes.
But it was a losing battle.
Eventually, economics proved decisive. German synthetic dyes offered greater consistency, lower prices, and easier application than natural dyes, making them increasingly attractive to Indian textile manufacturers.
“The natural indigo industry died due to this competition. The death was a slow one, but it happened,” Kumar says, adding that many European planters eventually shifted to sugarcane cultivation.
The decline of natural indigo illustrates a larger transformation underway in colonial India. German companies were not simply exporting a new product; they were introducing a new model of industrial production in which scientific research displaced plantation agriculture as the source of competitive advantage. The colour trade, once rooted in India’s fields, was increasingly being shaped by laboratories thousands of kilometres away in Germany.
Rebuilding German businesses in India
By the eve of the First World War, India had become one of the German dye industry’s most important overseas markets. According to Lubinski, it ranked as the fifth-largest market by volume—after the United States, China, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary—and the fourth-largest by value.
“The British-Indian statistics show that three-fourths of all synthetic dyes came from Germany,” she writes.
German dyes first entered India in the 1870s and 1880s through occasional shipments handled by import-export houses such as Ullmann Hirschhorn & Co., Bell Brandenburg & Co., and established British trading firms including Graham & Co.
Rather than relying solely on European intermediaries, German manufacturers also cultivated relationships with Indian chemists, merchants and dealers, laying the foundations for a durable commercial presence.
One of their most significant collaborations was with the Indian chemist Tribhuvandas Kalyandas Gajjar. In 1890, Gajjar established the industrial school Kala Bhavan at the behest of the Baroda ruler Sayajirao Gaekwad III. Recognising India’s potential as a market for synthetic dyes, Gajjar advised Bayer that the company should train Indian students and professional dyers in the use of its products if it wished to make India one of its largest customers.
Bayer acted on the suggestion. It helped finance the establishment of a laboratory at Surat and deputed several experts to teach at Gajjar’s institution. The partnership reflected a strategy that extended beyond selling dyes; German companies sought to create technical expertise to sustain demand for their products.
One of their most significant collaborations was with the Indian chemist Tribhuvandas Kalyandas Gajjar. (Wikimedia Commons)
The company simultaneously expanded its commercial presence. In 1892, Bayer appointed Charles J Vernon, a former employee of Graham & Co., as its managing director in Bombay. Four years later, the agency was incorporated as Farbenfabriken Bayer & Co. Ltd., becoming Bayer’s first wholly owned subsidiary in Asia. In the decade preceding the First World War, Bayer’s sales in India increased sevenfold. Other German dye manufacturers followed a similar trajectory.
The war abruptly interrupted that success. “With the outbreak of the war, the total imports of dyes into India fell abruptly to one-third of pre-war amounts,” Lubinski writes.
The disruption extended well beyond trade. Kumar explains that following the Treaty of Versailles, the victorious Allied powers gained access to German scientific and industrial knowledge, including developments in synthetic dyes. “They took away the ‘secret’ indigo-making formula,” he says.
Yet Germany’s commercial ties with India proved more resilient than its political fortunes. Although Germans remained barred from entering India in the immediate aftermath of the war, the networks they had built before 1914 endured. Their Indian associates continued to manage businesses, maintain commercial relationships, and establish new contacts with German manufacturers.
One such example was Calcutta chemist J C Das Gupta, who travelled to Bayer’s headquarters in Leverkusen in 1921 to establish direct links with the company and propose new forms of commercial cooperation.
German firms, meanwhile, found innovative ways to rebuild their Indian operations. From the early 1920s, many resorted to what Lubinski describes as ‘cloaking’—concealing German ownership behind companies registered in neutral countries or under non-German identities. Bayer, for example, revived its Indian business through a Milan-based firm and, in 1921, dispatched its employee Giulio Gut—a German by birth who had acquired Italian citizenship—to support operations in Bombay.
The recovery, however, proved temporary.
German dye industry shattered after World War II
The outbreak of the Second World War once again severed Germany’s commercial ties with India. Hundreds of Germans were interned, company assets were expropriated for a second time, and Indian employees were dismissed as German businesses were shut down.
“The German synthetic industry was virtually destroyed after the Second World War and even taken over by the Americans,” Kumar says.
By the 1950s and 1960s, however, the international business landscape changed. “The world turned into an era of multinationals, an entirely new corporate and industrial climate where thinking in terms of nation was a bit of an anachronism,” Kumar explains.
For German dye companies, the Indian story had come full circle. They never ruled the subcontinent, nor did they possess colonies comparable to Britain’s. Yet through chemistry, scientific training, commercial partnerships and technological expertise, they shaped one of colonial India’s most important industries. Their success demonstrated that influence in an empire could be exercised not only through political authority, but also through knowledge, technology, and trade.
Further reading:
Christina Lubinski, ‘Navigating nationalism in global enterprise: A century of Indo-German business relations’, Cambridge University Press, 2023
Christina Lubinski, ‘Global trade and Indian politics: The German dye business in India before 1947,‘ The Business History Review, 2015
Christina Lubinski, Valeria Giacomin & Klara Schnitzer, ‘Internment as a business challenge: Political
risk management and German multinationals in Colonial India (1914–1947)’, Business History, 2018
Prakash Kumar, ‘Plantation indigo and synthetic indigo: European planters and the redefinition of a colonial commodity‘, Comparative studies in society and history, 2016
*This article is part of ‘The Lesser Colonisers of India’, a series that uncovers how commercial enterprises from countries other than Britain played a significant role in shaping colonial India. The first story was about a Swedish matchbox company that shaped colonial India, followed bye the story of the Swiss company Volkart Bros and the Czech shoe company Bata.
But informally there is a form of colonialism baked into these relationships. There was also a clear power imbalance that the Germans were actively exploiting: Historian Christina Lubinski (Image created by ChatGPT) 
Founding site of “Friedr. Bayer et comp.” at Barmen (Official website of Bayer)
Caricature of a German person being interned by an Indian soldier during World War I (image from Lubinski’s paper, ‘Internment as a business challenge’ (2018))
Building on the work of chemist Adolf von Baeyer, German manufacturers introduced synthetic indigo to international markets. (Wikimedia Commons)
One of their most significant collaborations was with the Indian chemist Tribhuvandas Kalyandas Gajjar. (Wikimedia Commons)
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