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It is only by pledging itself to Swaraj that the Indian National Congress has been able to maintain a semblance of unity. Moreover, if any doubt still lingers as to the inner meaning of Swaraj and Swadeshi, and other kindred war-cries of Indian Nationalism, the language of the Nationalist Press remains on record to complete our enlightenment.
He had hesitation in accepting Swadeshi as a plank in non-co-operation. To him Swadeshi was as dear as life itself. But he had no desire to smuggle in Swadeshi through the Khilafat movement, if it could not legitimately help that movement, but conceived as non-co-operation was, in a spirit of self-sacrifice, Swadeshi had a legitimate place in the movement.
And, as we do not abandon our pursuit after the millennium, because we do not expect quite to reach it within our times, so may we not abandon Swadeshi even though it may not be fully attained for generations to come. Let us briefly examine the three branches of Swadeshi as sketched above.
Real Swadeshi, stimulated by British teaching and by British enterprise, was thus already in full swing when the Indian politician took up the cry and too often perverted it to criminal purposes, and, though he may have helped to rouse his sluggish fellow countrymen to healthy as well as to mischievous activity, it may be doubted whether any good he has done has not been more than counterbalanced by the injurious effect upon capital of a violent and often openly seditious agitation.
I think of Swadeshi not as a boycott movement undertaken by way of revenge. I conceive it as religious principle to be followed by all. I am no economist, but I have read some treatises which show that England could easily become a self-sustained country, growing all the produce she needs.
Bee frowned a little as she murmured: "What makes you wish that?" "He is a man, you see, one of us. My only quarrel with him is that he delights in a misty vision of this world. Have you not observed how this trait of his makes him look on Swadeshi as if it was some poem of which the metre must be kept correct at every step? We, with the clubs of our prose, are the iconoclasts of metre."
And we would be making for the goal even if we confined Swadeshi to a given set of articles allowing ourselves as a temporary measure to use such things as might not be procurable in the country. There now remains for me to consider one more objection that has been raised against Swadeshi.
So it is with the term Swadeshi, which means anything from the perfectly legitimate and commendable encouragement of Indian trade and industry to the complete exclusion of foreign, and especially of British, goods by a "national" and often forcible "boycott" as part of a political campaign against British rule.
I have earnestly prayed that what I am about to say may bear fruit and I know that you will bless my word with a similar prayer. After much thinking I have arrived at a definition of Swadeshi that, perhaps, best illustrates my meaning. Swadeshi is that spirit in us which restricts us to the use and service of our immediate surroundings to the exclusion of the more remote.
Embittered and antagonistic, he listened only with half his mind to his own countryman's impassioned appeal for renewal of the true Swadeshi spirit in India; renewal of her own innate artistic culture, her faith in the creative power of thought and ideas. That spirit said the speaker has no war-cries, no shoutings in the market-place. It is a way of looking at life.
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