Forget whether Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat’s swadeshi idea is really what contemporary India needs. The question to ask is: Were the versions suggested by Mahatma Gandhi and his predecessors an economic success? Did they boost Indian economy? Were Indians who supported the anti-colonial struggle purchasing local goods even if they were more expensive than foreign products?
In fact, no empirical estimates exist of the economic impact of Gandhi's swadeshi campaign. For their assessment of the situation, most historians rely on deductions they make from broad economic trends prevailing at the time. But these exercises are complicated because of factors like famine, the Great Depression of the 1930s, currency fluctuations and the disruptions of international trade during the two world wars.
However, the swadeshi campaign did inspire those who had capital. For instance, JN Tata established his Swadeshi Mill in 1886. Around the same time, Ardeshir Godrej fervently believed that India could realise its dream of self-rule by reducing its dependence on the West for manufactured goods, notes Dwijendra Tripathi, a former professor of IIM Ahmedabad and author of the acclaimed The Oxford History of Indian Businesses. “Godrej Boyce, established in 1897, was an eloquent testimony to Ardeshir’s belief,” said Tripathi. The idea of swadeshi even inspired Indians to float banks, such as the Punjab National Bank, which was born in 1892.
The protests against the partition of Bengal in 1905 provided a fresh impetus to the swadeshi movement, leading to successful ventures in sectors such as porcelain, soap, matches and cigarettes. These were not large enterprises. The paucity of capital was the limiting factor, notes Sumit Sarkar in his book, Modern India, 1885-1947. He cites a leading Calcutta merchant saying that it was much easier to make “money by an agency in imported goods than by investment in industrial enterprise”.
Nor did the swadeshi movement have an all-India appeal. For instance, the boycott of British goods prompted Mumbai mill-owners to hike the prices of their products, brushing aside the entreaties of leaders in Bengal. The Mumbai mill-owners wished to exploit the economic opportunity presented to them by the relative absence of competition from British manufacturers.
No doubt, British goods were boycotted and burnt in Bengal. In August 1906, the Kolkata customs reported a dip in imports – 22% in cotton piece goods and 44% in cotton twist and yarn, compared to the figures reported for the same month the year before. But this decline was also because of a trade dispute between Manchester manufacturers and Kolkata traders. The steepest decline was in the import of boots (68%) and cigarettes (55%), which Sarkar, citing contemporary accounts, says were still the staple of only the middle class. This testifies to the narrow social support for swadeshi.
The credit for providing a mass appeal to swadeshi is decidedly Gandhi’s. His tools for propagating it were the spinning wheel and khadi. Explaining their significance, Lisa Trivedi, associate professor of history at New York's Hamilton College writes in her seminal book, Clothing Gandhi’s India – Homespun and Modern India: “Gandhi promoted khadi as both a commodity and symbol of the swadeshi movement, which sought to establish India’s economic autonomy from Britain as the basis of self-government… Swadeshi…became a moral system of labor and consumption for the nation.”
Morality play
Consumption as morality is also the theme of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, but, unlike Gandhi, he does not provide alternative symbols of production and consumption. In typically Hindutva style, he spoke at his Vijaya Dashmi on October 3 of Indians buying “foreign-made statues of our Gods and Goddesses”, a relatively recent phenomenon. It suggests Bhagwat’s swadeshi instincts are largely aroused because of religion.
Bhagwat hasn’t presented alternative symbols because he hasn’t imagined an alternative model of production and consumption. By contrast, Gandhi clubbed all industrial cloth as foreign, even if it was actually produced in Indian-owned mills. Once Gandhi adopted the spinning wheel, he inspired the formation of the All-India Khadi Board to impart training in the production of khadi, and for supervising its propagation and sale.
Unlike Bhagwat, Gandhi did not merely pay lip service to the cause of swadeshi. Congressmen who didn’t wear khadi at official functions were deprived of their voting rights. Joining the Congress entailed contributing 2,000 yards of even spun yarn per month that the member had made themselves, as Trivedi notes in Clothing Gandhi’s India.
Nevertheless, this shouldn’t imply that khadi was a runaway economic success, or that the dovetailing of the swadeshi movement with the Non-Cooperation movement in the 1920s wasn’t contested, both inside the Congress and by the Indian business class. Economics, Bhagwat should note, was among the important factors behind opposition to khadi. It was nearly six times costlier than mill-produced cloth, its high price damming the tide of swadeshi passion.
Choice of elites
“Yes, people were certainly purchasing khadi despite the fact that it was more expensive then mill alternatives," Trivedi wrote by email in response to a query. "However, this was possible for those of middle class and elite backgrounds particularly. They could make choices to use consumption as a political statement, which peasants and working classes could not make so easily.” Isn’t there a lesson here for Bhagwat to draw?
There were also issues of aesthetics and convenience. For instance, leaders such as Sarojini Naidu believed khadi “was aesthetically inferior to the traditional textiles of India” and did not wear it often. Congressmen found the task of spinning 2000 yards of yarn too arduous, and the wealthier among them simply purchased their quota of monthly contributions to the party. In fact, Jawaharlal Nehru was investigated on this count.
Ultimately, the Congress reverted to charging four annas for membership, the Khadi Board was disbanded, and Gandhi founded the All-India Spinners’ Association to oversee the swadeshi movement outside the Congress umbrella. Dressing Gandhi’s India cites the 1927 annual report of the Spinners’ Association to show that the sales of khadi grew 40% from Rs 2,399,143 in 1926 to Rs. 3,348,794 in 1927. Again, between 1928 and 1934, the number of spinners and weavers with the association more than doubled, suggesting a rise in demand ‒ but nowhere commensurate with India’s population.
Altering the definitions
Khadi did become a potent symbol of opposition to British rule. Yet funding was required to ensure the popularity of this sartorial symbolism. Industrialists such as Ambalal Sarabhai, Jamanlal Bajaj, GD Birla and Godrej donated lakhs of rupees to bankroll the swadeshi movement. JRD Tata donated 100,000 spindles to the Spinners’ Association.
Perhaps the munificent funding from industrialists led Gandhi to dilute the original meaning of swadeshi. From the late 1920s, swadeshi goods included both cloth produced in Indian-owned mills and those hand-spun. This was perhaps the reason why the sale of khadi in the 1930s did not expand at the same rate it had in the late 1920s, says Trivedi. Cotton mills invoked the slogan of swadeshi in their advertisements, claiming their cloth met the benchmark of being “made in India, by Indian labour, and by Indian-owned businesses”.
In this fact there is a lesson for Bhagwat – price was the principal determinant of the consumer’s choice even in pre-Independence India, except for the brief interludes of intense political activities. Thus, the total value of output of the small-scale and cottage industry (of which khadi was a part) in 1921-1922 stood at around Rs 1,400 million, at constant prices. It touched the peak of Rs 2,250 million in 1930-'31, the year in which Gandhi led the Dandi Salt March to spark off the Civil Disobedience Movement.
But once the passion dissipated, the net value of output slithered down to Rs 1,800 million. This prompted Trithankar Roy, professor of economic history at the London School of Economics: to conclude, “The historical evidence that swadeshi was ever either effective or generally beneficial to the poor is weak.” Nor can we categorically say the swadeshi movement uniformly boosted the growth of Indian-owned mills. “In fact,” said Tripathi, “between 1930 and 1932, the number of cotton mills in India went down from 348 to 339.” Perhaps the Great Depression had begun to impact Indian economy.
Undoubtedly, Gandhi’s swadeshi movement as a political project was immensely successful, as it enabled the Congress to strike roots in villages and bring the masses into the fold of the national movement. It was also a resounding success as a cultural ideology, spawning new ideas about the nation and bridging the divide between the political elite and the masses.
Import substitution
But Gandhi’s swadeshi movement was not an economic succes. Nor could it have been, Bhagwat please note. Roy explains why: “Moral calls (which Gandhi’s swadeshi was) never are successful, unless they are accompanied by policy instruments. The policy instrument in Gandhi’s time was a weak form of tariff protection to domestic textiles. After 1950, there came into being a strong form of protection. We can call that swadeshi. There is no difference between import substitution and swadeshi in effect.”
So can Bhagwat and the RSS succeed where Gandhi failed? It is hypocritical of the RSS to demand Indians sport a swadeshi outlook even when the Modi government pursues consumerist, market-oriented policies, locking India into the global economy. The RSS can influence the Modi government, an advantage Gandhi did not have vis-a-vis with the British colonial government. It is nobody’s case that India should close down borders to imports, but Indian industry, especially small and medium enterprises, has largely survived on protectionism.
To the Indian public, the choice often offered is an either/or option. Either we open the markets completely or turn India insular. It is as if there are no options other than these. Bhagwat has failed to clarify his position on economic policy, apart from shifting the onus on the Indian citizen to buy costlier indigenous goods and turning consumption into morality play. In this sense, his swadeshi rhetoric is devoid of coherence. You can’t but help feel his design is to merely trying to manage the disquiet bound to rise from the “revolution of rising expectations” that the Modi government might find difficult to satisfy.
This is the second and concluding part of this essay on swadeshi. Read part one here.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His book The Hour Before Dawn will be published by HarperCollins in December.
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In fact, no empirical estimates exist of the economic impact of Gandhi's swadeshi campaign. For their assessment of the situation, most historians rely on deductions they make from broad economic trends prevailing at the time. But these exercises are complicated because of factors like famine, the Great Depression of the 1930s, currency fluctuations and the disruptions of international trade during the two world wars.
However, the swadeshi campaign did inspire those who had capital. For instance, JN Tata established his Swadeshi Mill in 1886. Around the same time, Ardeshir Godrej fervently believed that India could realise its dream of self-rule by reducing its dependence on the West for manufactured goods, notes Dwijendra Tripathi, a former professor of IIM Ahmedabad and author of the acclaimed The Oxford History of Indian Businesses. “Godrej Boyce, established in 1897, was an eloquent testimony to Ardeshir’s belief,” said Tripathi. The idea of swadeshi even inspired Indians to float banks, such as the Punjab National Bank, which was born in 1892.
Courtesy: Clothing Gandhi’s India – Homespun and Modern India by Lisa Trivedi.
The protests against the partition of Bengal in 1905 provided a fresh impetus to the swadeshi movement, leading to successful ventures in sectors such as porcelain, soap, matches and cigarettes. These were not large enterprises. The paucity of capital was the limiting factor, notes Sumit Sarkar in his book, Modern India, 1885-1947. He cites a leading Calcutta merchant saying that it was much easier to make “money by an agency in imported goods than by investment in industrial enterprise”.
Nor did the swadeshi movement have an all-India appeal. For instance, the boycott of British goods prompted Mumbai mill-owners to hike the prices of their products, brushing aside the entreaties of leaders in Bengal. The Mumbai mill-owners wished to exploit the economic opportunity presented to them by the relative absence of competition from British manufacturers.
No doubt, British goods were boycotted and burnt in Bengal. In August 1906, the Kolkata customs reported a dip in imports – 22% in cotton piece goods and 44% in cotton twist and yarn, compared to the figures reported for the same month the year before. But this decline was also because of a trade dispute between Manchester manufacturers and Kolkata traders. The steepest decline was in the import of boots (68%) and cigarettes (55%), which Sarkar, citing contemporary accounts, says were still the staple of only the middle class. This testifies to the narrow social support for swadeshi.
The credit for providing a mass appeal to swadeshi is decidedly Gandhi’s. His tools for propagating it were the spinning wheel and khadi. Explaining their significance, Lisa Trivedi, associate professor of history at New York's Hamilton College writes in her seminal book, Clothing Gandhi’s India – Homespun and Modern India: “Gandhi promoted khadi as both a commodity and symbol of the swadeshi movement, which sought to establish India’s economic autonomy from Britain as the basis of self-government… Swadeshi…became a moral system of labor and consumption for the nation.”
Morality play
Consumption as morality is also the theme of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, but, unlike Gandhi, he does not provide alternative symbols of production and consumption. In typically Hindutva style, he spoke at his Vijaya Dashmi on October 3 of Indians buying “foreign-made statues of our Gods and Goddesses”, a relatively recent phenomenon. It suggests Bhagwat’s swadeshi instincts are largely aroused because of religion.
Bhagwat hasn’t presented alternative symbols because he hasn’t imagined an alternative model of production and consumption. By contrast, Gandhi clubbed all industrial cloth as foreign, even if it was actually produced in Indian-owned mills. Once Gandhi adopted the spinning wheel, he inspired the formation of the All-India Khadi Board to impart training in the production of khadi, and for supervising its propagation and sale.
Unlike Bhagwat, Gandhi did not merely pay lip service to the cause of swadeshi. Congressmen who didn’t wear khadi at official functions were deprived of their voting rights. Joining the Congress entailed contributing 2,000 yards of even spun yarn per month that the member had made themselves, as Trivedi notes in Clothing Gandhi’s India.
Nevertheless, this shouldn’t imply that khadi was a runaway economic success, or that the dovetailing of the swadeshi movement with the Non-Cooperation movement in the 1920s wasn’t contested, both inside the Congress and by the Indian business class. Economics, Bhagwat should note, was among the important factors behind opposition to khadi. It was nearly six times costlier than mill-produced cloth, its high price damming the tide of swadeshi passion.
Choice of elites
“Yes, people were certainly purchasing khadi despite the fact that it was more expensive then mill alternatives," Trivedi wrote by email in response to a query. "However, this was possible for those of middle class and elite backgrounds particularly. They could make choices to use consumption as a political statement, which peasants and working classes could not make so easily.” Isn’t there a lesson here for Bhagwat to draw?
There were also issues of aesthetics and convenience. For instance, leaders such as Sarojini Naidu believed khadi “was aesthetically inferior to the traditional textiles of India” and did not wear it often. Congressmen found the task of spinning 2000 yards of yarn too arduous, and the wealthier among them simply purchased their quota of monthly contributions to the party. In fact, Jawaharlal Nehru was investigated on this count.
Ultimately, the Congress reverted to charging four annas for membership, the Khadi Board was disbanded, and Gandhi founded the All-India Spinners’ Association to oversee the swadeshi movement outside the Congress umbrella. Dressing Gandhi’s India cites the 1927 annual report of the Spinners’ Association to show that the sales of khadi grew 40% from Rs 2,399,143 in 1926 to Rs. 3,348,794 in 1927. Again, between 1928 and 1934, the number of spinners and weavers with the association more than doubled, suggesting a rise in demand ‒ but nowhere commensurate with India’s population.
Altering the definitions
Khadi did become a potent symbol of opposition to British rule. Yet funding was required to ensure the popularity of this sartorial symbolism. Industrialists such as Ambalal Sarabhai, Jamanlal Bajaj, GD Birla and Godrej donated lakhs of rupees to bankroll the swadeshi movement. JRD Tata donated 100,000 spindles to the Spinners’ Association.
Perhaps the munificent funding from industrialists led Gandhi to dilute the original meaning of swadeshi. From the late 1920s, swadeshi goods included both cloth produced in Indian-owned mills and those hand-spun. This was perhaps the reason why the sale of khadi in the 1930s did not expand at the same rate it had in the late 1920s, says Trivedi. Cotton mills invoked the slogan of swadeshi in their advertisements, claiming their cloth met the benchmark of being “made in India, by Indian labour, and by Indian-owned businesses”.
Courtesy: Clothing Gandhi’s India – Homespun and Modern India by Lisa Trivedi.
In this fact there is a lesson for Bhagwat – price was the principal determinant of the consumer’s choice even in pre-Independence India, except for the brief interludes of intense political activities. Thus, the total value of output of the small-scale and cottage industry (of which khadi was a part) in 1921-1922 stood at around Rs 1,400 million, at constant prices. It touched the peak of Rs 2,250 million in 1930-'31, the year in which Gandhi led the Dandi Salt March to spark off the Civil Disobedience Movement.
But once the passion dissipated, the net value of output slithered down to Rs 1,800 million. This prompted Trithankar Roy, professor of economic history at the London School of Economics: to conclude, “The historical evidence that swadeshi was ever either effective or generally beneficial to the poor is weak.” Nor can we categorically say the swadeshi movement uniformly boosted the growth of Indian-owned mills. “In fact,” said Tripathi, “between 1930 and 1932, the number of cotton mills in India went down from 348 to 339.” Perhaps the Great Depression had begun to impact Indian economy.
Undoubtedly, Gandhi’s swadeshi movement as a political project was immensely successful, as it enabled the Congress to strike roots in villages and bring the masses into the fold of the national movement. It was also a resounding success as a cultural ideology, spawning new ideas about the nation and bridging the divide between the political elite and the masses.
Import substitution
But Gandhi’s swadeshi movement was not an economic succes. Nor could it have been, Bhagwat please note. Roy explains why: “Moral calls (which Gandhi’s swadeshi was) never are successful, unless they are accompanied by policy instruments. The policy instrument in Gandhi’s time was a weak form of tariff protection to domestic textiles. After 1950, there came into being a strong form of protection. We can call that swadeshi. There is no difference between import substitution and swadeshi in effect.”
So can Bhagwat and the RSS succeed where Gandhi failed? It is hypocritical of the RSS to demand Indians sport a swadeshi outlook even when the Modi government pursues consumerist, market-oriented policies, locking India into the global economy. The RSS can influence the Modi government, an advantage Gandhi did not have vis-a-vis with the British colonial government. It is nobody’s case that India should close down borders to imports, but Indian industry, especially small and medium enterprises, has largely survived on protectionism.
To the Indian public, the choice often offered is an either/or option. Either we open the markets completely or turn India insular. It is as if there are no options other than these. Bhagwat has failed to clarify his position on economic policy, apart from shifting the onus on the Indian citizen to buy costlier indigenous goods and turning consumption into morality play. In this sense, his swadeshi rhetoric is devoid of coherence. You can’t but help feel his design is to merely trying to manage the disquiet bound to rise from the “revolution of rising expectations” that the Modi government might find difficult to satisfy.
This is the second and concluding part of this essay on swadeshi. Read part one here.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His book The Hour Before Dawn will be published by HarperCollins in December.
