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She was swathed in a cloth of dull, goldish silk; in typically Indian fashion, she drew forward modestly and hesitatingly, peering slightly from beneath the upper fold of her SWADESHI cloth.
With the Partition of Bengal it passed into a second phase in which, new economic issues were superadded to the political issues, if they did not altogether overshadow them, and the Swadeshi movement and the boycott soon imported methods of violence and lawlessness which had hitherto been considered foreign to the Bengalee temperament.
We have laboured under a terrible handicap owing to an almost fatal departure from the Swadeshi spirit. We, the educated classes, have received our education through a foreign tongue. We have therefore not reacted upon the masses. We want to represent the masses, but we fail. They recognise us not much more than they recognise the English officers. Their hearts are an open book to neither.
When Swadeshi had not yet become a boast, we had despised it with all our hearts. My husband still sharpens his Indian-made pencils with his Indian-made knife, does his writing with reed pens, drinks his water out of a bell-metal vessel, and works at night in the light of an old-fashioned castor-oil lamp. But this dull, milk-and- water Swadeshi of his never appealed to us.
Swadeshi and Swaraj are the battle-cries of this new Hindu "nationalism," but they mean far more than a mere claim to fiscal or even political independence.
The signature is an obvious nom-de- plume. I could see that this was the doing of our local students. So I sent for some of them and showed them the letter. The B.A. student gravely informed me that they also had heard that a band of desperate patriots had been formed who would stick at nothing in order to clear away all obstacles to the success of Swadeshi.
One change I have made and it is that, having taken to the occupation of weaving and agriculture and having taken the vow of Swadeshi, my clothing is now entirely hand-woven and hand-sewn and made by me or my fellow workers. Mr. Irwin's letter suggests that I appear before the ryots in a dress I have temporarily and specially adopted in Champaran to produce an effect.
Swadeshi must strike at the flinty heart of the British people by cutting off the demand for British manufactured goods and substituting in their place the products of native labour.
We may not go on taking our college degrees, taking thousands of rupees monthly from clients for cases which can be finished in five minutes and taking the keenest delight in wasting national time on the council floor and still expect to gain national self-respect. The last though not the least important part of the Maya still remains to be considered. That is Swadeshi.
This note has been accentuated since the political campaign in favour of militant Swadeshism, and when English Radicals sympathize with the Swadeshi boycott as a protest against the Partition of Bengal, they would do well to recollect that, before Indian audiences, the most violent forms of Swadeshi are constantly defended on the ground that British industrial greed, of which Free Trade is alleged to be the highest expression, has left no other weapons to India for the defence of her material interests.
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