This blog accompanies Aashish Velkar’s Historical Journal article Swadeshi Capitalism in Colonial Bombay

Indian cities are lively places. One has to dodge manic traffic, stray dogs and shrouded dirt in equal measure. This was on my mind as I walked from Lutyens Bungalow in Delhi (once the residence of the famous architect, now a posh guest house) to Teen Murti Bhavan (once the residence of Jawaharlal Nehru, now a museum, library and archives). A week earlier, I had been journeying similarly from affluent residential South Mumbai to the corporate archives of Godrej Industries in the city’s industrial suburbs. It was December 2018 and I was visiting the archives in search of the historical roots of Indian capitalism. Whilst there, I serendipitously came across material on Indian nationalism and the links between the two during the country’s struggle for independence before 1947.

The swadeshi movement continues to resonate with Indians more than a century after it first emerged. Generally associated with protests against the 1905 partition of Bengal by the colonial government, swadeshi (literally ‘of one’s own country’) referred to protection of village crafts and of those whose livelihoods depended on them, as a socially-engineered institution to galvanise the mass population into a movement for political independence, and an expression of nationalist ideals more generally.

Swadeshi became a form of economic patriotism and can be distinguished from similar expressions of nationalism within the British Empire. Like the homespun cloth that became its symbol, swadeshi was woven within the very fabric of the nation. Alongside the crystallisation of India as an independent nation, swadeshi transformed from a simple notion of ‘boycott’ of British goods into a more sophisticated form of economic nationalism that sought to use and protect Indian capital for the benefit for Indian nationals. This notion of swadeshi capitalism was a cultural, political and economic response to colonialism, one which aimed to secure economic and political sovereignty.

Even as Indian capitalism transitioned from mercantile activities to capital-hungry industrialisation, nationalism was itself reframed from being anti-colonial in 1905 to anti-globalisation by the 1950s. The strong anti-globalisation rhetoric of swadeshi was used by the nationalists in conjunction with a sophisticated vocabulary of state-directed planning as a vehicle for India’s social development. The Bombay capitalists who supported swadeshi’s principles of state regulation of capital in the 1930s found themselves disengaged from the autarchic version of economic nationalism by 1950. At its most extreme, this hard nationalism resulted in indiscriminate protectionism, which in fact rejected engagement with Indian capitalists and their version of swadeshi capitalism.

Swadeshi became the fulcrum that supported expressions of nationalism and capitalism in late-colonial India. The participation of the business classes in Indian politics in the 1930s coincided with a radical, grittier form of economic nationalism than the intellectually driven version of the nineteenth century. This narrative of Indian capitalism during the independence struggle uncovers an important role of the business classes, their reasons for seeking political alliances initially with colonials and subsequently with nationalists, and their shifting preferences for India’s integration with the global economy.

Read the full article

Main image: “Concentrate on Charkha and Swadeshi,” bazaar art, 1930’s, Wikimedia Commons