Swadeshi movement

How Chidambaram Pillai Single-Handedly Took on the British Maritime Empire

A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s book, ‘Swadeshi Steam’, is a tragic and heroic story of Pillai’s valiant efforts to float and keep afloat an Indian shipping company in the early years of the 20th century. It is also the story of the Swadeshi movement in Madras.

“Swadeshi ideology in Bengal, like Minerva’s owl, began its flight only after dusk,’’ Sumit Sarkar wrote in the chapter on Swadeshi enterprise in his pioneering and magisterial book on the Swadeshi movement in Bengal.

Sarkar was drawing attention to the fact that the idea of Swadeshi enterprise caught the imagination of Bengalis only after indigenous manufacturing had declined under the process called deindustrialisation in the 19th century. When the Swadeshi movement erupted in the first decade of the 20th century and Rabindranath Tagore, in the moving words of Ezra Pound, “sang Bengal into a nation”, it was already too late for Swadeshi enterprise to even waddle like penguins, let alone fly.

But in what was then the Madras Presidency, Swadeshi enterprise flew at day time during the course of the Swadeshi movement. At the helm of that Swadeshi project was V.O. Chidambaram Pillai, the subject of A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s detailed and poignant narrative. To label this book only as a “narrative” is to somewhat underestimate Venkatachalapathy’s achievement. This book is an act of historical retrieval. It rescues Pillai and the Swadeshi movement in areas outside Bengal from (to use E.P. Thompson’s unforgettable phrase) the “condescension of posterity”. The act of retrieval is grounded on assiduous research in various different archives and a range of documentation.

The book is an articulation of a rare passion and commitment since the subject occupied the author for four decades. I couldn’t help thinking, if a trifle tangentially, that Fernand Braudel took 40 years to write his magnum opus which was also concerned with the sea and the maritime world.

Swadeshi Steam: V.O. Chidambaram Pillai and the Battle against the British Maritime Empire by A.R. Venkatachalapathy (December 22, 2023; Allen Lane)

The book operates at two interrelated narrative levels. It is the tragic and heroic story of Pillai’s valiant efforts to float and keep afloat an Indian shipping company in the early years of the 20th century. It is also the story of the Swadeshi movement in Madras. The tide of that movement carried Pillai’s ships, and the counter-tows of the same movement forced his ships to run aground and to incarcerate him. The British government in the Madras Presidency strangled Pillai’s efforts because he dared to challenge the monopoly of the British Indian Shipping Company.

Venkatachalapathy brings out with vividness the intertwining of the British private enterprise and the British administration. Private profit worked hand-in-hand with an administration that drained wealth out of India to Britain. Greed was the bond between individuals and the empire. Any challenge to this thinly veiled partnership was suppressed with violence, the ultimate imprimatur of British rule. The Raj was the mailed fist in a mailed glove.

The Swadeshi movement in Bengal began on October 16, 1905, the day Curzon’s partition of the province became a reality. The movement had an echo in the Madras Presidency in early 1906. A very significant feature of the movement was the emergence of “a cluster of extraordinarily gifted younger patriots” among whom was Pillai. Like in Bengal, but not quite on the same scale, the movement had a strong cultural dimension. The name of Subramania Bharati comes immediately to mind. New journals began to be published and some of these had Swadeshi prefixed to their names. Many of these publications were in the local languages, but even English newspapers with strong nationalist leanings saw a spike in circulation. The circulation of The Hindu, for example, rose from 1,700 (in 1905) to 4,000 in the course of the Swadeshi movement. The CID believed that this increase in circulation was caused “undoubtedly” by its anti-British tone and content.

In this context of the emerging Swadeshi movement, Pillai registered in October 1906 the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company as a joint-stock company and raised a capital of Rs 8 lakh. He purchased two steamers which began to operate between Tuticorin and Colombo. This run was the virtual monopoly of the British India Steam Navigation Company. Pillai’s ships were directly challenging this monopoly.

The British Company responded with a rate-war. Beyond the realms of shipping and commerce, Pillai’s venture captured the spirit of the Swadeshi movement which aimed to build Swadeshi enterprise and boycott British commodities. Swadeshi leaders believed that by hitting at the economic operations of the Raj, it could end the rule of the nation of shopkeepers.

The Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company thus gathered considerable nationalist economic and political support. The company was not only a direct threat to British imperial economic interests but also part of a large and looming political threat. Indian nationalism was coming of age. It was no longer confined to a group of westernised Indians meeting annually over cucumber sandwiches and tea to petition the British government for a few crumbs from the empire’s high table – “Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition”, as one historian called this group.

It is an irony that apart from the British efforts to torpedo the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company, the latter fell a victim to the internal dissensions within the nationalist movement. In December 1907, in the Surat session, the Indian National Congress split between the Moderates and the Extremists. The Moderates were apprehensive that boycott, one of the principal instruments of the Swadeshi movement, was gathering momentum outside Bengal while the Extremists wanted boycott to become a pan-Indian phenomenon. Pillai was firmly on the Extremist side of the divide. Most of the directors of the company were, however, on the Moderate side and they began the process of trying to marginalise Pillai within the company.

Pillai, in his turn, intensified his political position by addressing public meetings to campaign for Swadeshi and boycott. Thus, in a bizarre way, the anti-Pillai actions of the moderate directors and the interests and aims of the British government and the British Indian Steam Navigation Company converged.

From this point onwards, the fate of Pillai was a chronicle foretold. Within the company that he had established, he was relegated to the position of a salaried employee and then was forced to resign. While he was still associated with the company, albeit somewhat tenuously, he continued his political activity, especially as a strong supporter and organiser of the striking workers of the British-owned Coral Mills. The British crackdown led to Pillai’s arrest on charges of sedition. He was sentenced to two life imprisonments and was kept in Coimbatore Central Jail. His shipping company, despite efforts to keep it afloat, sank; its ships had to be sold and the company liquidated. In 1912, Pillai was released from prison where he had served a rigorous sentence. He was a broken man reduced to utter penury.

Thus ended the life story of the man who had almost single-handedly taken on the British dominance of the Indian Ocean. Venkatachalapathy rescues him from obscurity and in so doing brings out the Swadeshi movement from the confines of Bengal and Bengalis.

In 1884, Jyotirindranath Tagore, an elder brother of Rabindranath, launched the Inland River Steam Navigation Service with five ships bought at an enormous cost. The company carried cargo and passengers between Calcutta and Khulna and Barisal. Tagore’s company competed with the British-owned Flotilla Company. The resultant rate-war led to passengers in Tagore’s company enjoying free rides. The company collapsed with a Bengali landlord family, a toady of the British, buying up the assets.

There are parallels here with what would happen to Pillai and his venture. But the differences are more significant. Tagore may have been financially ruined but he did not end up in prison doing hard labour. In Pillai’s case, the charged atmosphere of the Swadeshi movement brought upon him the wrath and the might of the Raj.

Venkatachalapathy has written a remarkable book about a remarkable man who he has salvaged from the unfathomed depths of the ocean of Indian nationalism.

Rudrangshu Mukherjee Is chancellor and professor of History at Ashoka University. The views expressed are personal.

The Boroline Saga: From a Symbol of the Swadeshi Movement to a Bengali Household Staple

G.D. Pharma’s commitment to consistency has been unequivocally rewarded by its customer base, even by the globe-trotting Bengali communities of the present day.

New Delhi: On August 15, 1947, when India gained independence from British rule, two of Calcutta’s newspapers announced that one lakh Boroline tubes would be distributed for free in the nation.

Boroline was first launched in 1929 by a Bengali merchant, Gour Mohun Dutta. It was then colloquially called haatiwala cream (the cream with the elephant) because of its iconic white elephant logo on the green cover.

Since then, the product has managed to weather the eddy and flow of market change and is still just as relevant today as it was 95 years ago. Against all odds, Boroline was introduced in the colonial Indian market as an effective and potent alternative to imported foreign creams. Coupled with ‘Swadeshi’ sentiments and an effort to promote India’s economic self-sufficiency, Boroline’s popularity soon swept over the entire nation.

Initially, amidst the fervour of Swadeshi sentiments, Indians readily boycotted all foreign goods and embraced this multipurpose antiseptic cream that entered the market at that opportune moment at a cheap price. During the Second World War, G.D. Pharmaceutical sold the cream in any container available, with a label at the bottom that promised, “Original packing changed due to war emergency, quantity and quality of contents remain unaltered.”

From small cut wounds, scabs, chapped and dried skin to extra moisturisation during chilly weather – a thick layer of Boroline cream soon became a one-stop solution for all skin-related problems.

Henceforth, the product became synonymous with Indian cultural identity, serving folks living in the cold Himalayan regions and the Southern plains of the country, with the same measure of effectiveness.

The most curious thing about this product is its enduring popularity against the plethora of multinational brands that have been flooding the market with innovative formulations every few months. The antiseptic formula of Boroline – boric acid mixed with zinc oxide (jasad bhasma), paraffin and oleum, infused with a unique fragrance – is hardly a secret. Yet a deluge of innovative skincare products and counterfeit products entering the market every year fails to dupe Boroline users, without any success.

However, for a brand with Boroline’s equity, it generates a yearly revenue of only Rs 150 crore, which is quite underwhelming, according to Roopen Roy, a former managing director of Deloitte Consulting India Pvt. Ltd.

Debashish Dutta, grandson of Gour Mohun Dutta, said in an interview with Livemint, “We have made sure that our successful products are consistent—they don’t change.”

Analysts have found that such a conservative attitude towards change is a common trait in most Bengali business ventures. They tend to target a very specific and old customer base, focusing more on quality than the numbers on the profit scale and refusing to compete with short-term market trends. Their reservation towards scaling up is quite possibly a precautionary response to the immense loss once incurred by the Bengali merchants during their trade with the British in the colonial era.

However, G.D. Pharma’s 2003 launch, the antiseptic liquid Suthol, has diversified its market and is rapidly growing in popularity. It accounts for 30% of GD Pharma’s sales currently, showing remarkable growth on a year-on-year basis.

G.D. Pharma’s commitment to consistency has been equivocally rewarded by its customer base, even by the globe-trotting Bengali communities of the present day. Multiple tubs of Boroline go through customs at various airports every year when Bengalis move abroad for study or work.

Suchetana Chatterjee, a student living in Munich, swears by Boroline: “I’ve tried tons of skincare products, and in -10 degrees, nothing works as good as Boroline, also vouched for by some of my international friends!”

Shorbori Biswas, currently living in Georgia, says, “I use Boroline in Tbilisi as well, it’s best for dry skin like mine.”

Ranjini Mahalanobish, who has been living in Philadelphia for a few years now, says, “I stock up on [Boroline] on each visit to India. Its proven effectiveness and affordability make it my go-to choice, echoing a habit passed on by my grandparents.”

Anwesha Das, a student at TU Delft, Netherlands, says, “I brought along five tubs to last me as long as I was away from home. Mum and I applying Boroline on our elbows and lips had been our nighttime ritual long before these popular skincare potions hit the market and this is a habit I’d never grow out of.”

The Bengali community’s close relationship with the moss-green tube of Boroline is laced with a hint of nostalgia, community pride, and faith in a product that has been passed down through generations.

Debabratee Dhar was an intern at The Wire.

The History of Early Brands and Advertising Is the History of India

Nationalism and pride were built into the efforts of entrepreneurs who created companies and products, from soaps to steel.

Ramya Ramamurthy has made a very brave attempt to document the varied history of branding in India with her book Branded in History. It is copiously researched. In fact, I found that I was constantly making new discoveries about the history of branding in India – and that included brands that I thought I knew well, some of which I personally handled through my 42-year career in advertising.

Ramya Ramamurthy
Branded in History
Hachette, 2021

For example, did you know that Ardeshir Godrej, after returning from Zanzibar (how exotic to be in Zanzibar in 1915), borrowed money from a Bombay merchant called Merwanji Cama, who waived the repayment of the loan on the condition that the name of his nephew Boyce would be added to the name of the company? For some reason, while handling Godrej & Boyce from my days at the erstwhile J Walter Thompson, I had assumed that in its history there must have been a Boyce associated with the company. But I never knew this important detail.

In many ways I also found that the history of brands was inextricably linked with the history of the country itself, and its passion to create products of national importance from soaps to banks to steel. Here, the national fervour for ‘swadeshi’, which was driven by the likes of M.K. Gandhi, Annie Besant and Rabindranath Tagore, must be adequately acknowledged. It far exceeds the passion that is going behind ‘atmanirbhar’ today, for example.

Also, from Ramamurthy’s writing I got a sense of the commitment and pride in producing something Indian which was being pursued by all the Indian entrepreneurs of the day. And the key word here was ‘pride’. I feel that if we were as proud a nation today as we were before independence, we might have been less corrupt for example. For a proud person would hardly accept a bribe from anyone; it would hurt his pride immensely.

Ramamurthy starts the book with the history of FMCG goods, as it is often referred to in India, although I personally prefer to call it packaged goods. Naturally, our first wave of production seems to have gone into soaps, oils, biscuits, snacks and similar products, before we moved on to banking, cement and steel. This is but natural. If we look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the bottom segment of the famous Maslow triangle has always centred around physiological needs. Which means the need to remain physically clean and healthy is a primary one.

Also read: The Magical Nostalgia Of Old Brands

The author does touch upon the fact that soap was perhaps considered a luxury product in that day. Lux was probably one of the first soaps in the country, with an endorsement from Leela Chitnis. Another interesting piece of trivia. Ramamurthy says that Cinthol was launched in 1952 and it was coined by combining the word synthetic with phenol. And no doubt they preferred Cinthol to Synthol. The origin of brands can often be very interesting.

Another interesting tidbit. Wagh Bakri chai was started by Narendas Desai and was borne out of his experience of racism in South Africa. To spread the belief of equality, they designed a logo with a wagh or tiger, drinking tea from the same cup as a bakri or goat. Today it is the third largest tea company in the country. One can only wish our brands of today could be as noble as some of these old brands and uphold the principle of equality enshrined in our Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human rights by the UN.

Throughout the book, the author makes reference to the spirit of swadeshi and talks about an ad for Indian soaps that I found most interesting.

Ramya Ramamurthy.

Ramamurthy also covers the biscuits category and how the colonial high tea converted itself in India into “chai and biskoot”. It was a surprise to me that Britannia is even older than Parle and was established in 1892 in Calcutta. However, it is Parle which has the cheapest biscuit in Parle G which has about 450 calories.

But perhaps the real leap in self-sufficiency for India came from the core sector, including automobiles. And this is where the top industrial houses like Tata, Birla, Godrej and Mahindra aligned themselves to the nation’s interests. Tata Steel, for example, became one of Asia’s first steel plants by establishing itself in Jamshedupur in 1907. Tata’s effort, it seems, had a lot of support both from M.K. Gandhi and freedom fighters like Subash Chandra Bose. Gandhi was one of the biggest supporters of self-sufficiency in heavy industries. The development of the steel industry began to propel other industries like construction, shipping and transport.

The author also covers the banking industry in detail. The reader suddenly realises that banks like Punjab National Bank are really old institutions that were established at the beginning of the last century, along with other banks like Bank of India and Central Bank of India. PNB, Ramamurthy says, was the first Indian bank to have been started solely with Indian capital and its founders included several leaders of the swadeshi movement. She mentions how banks didn’t think of advertising as being very relevant to them to build brands, and I think this trend persists till today. A number of banks still don’t advertise much.

Also read: Enter the Smuggler: The Film Villains of the 1970s Reflected the Reality Off-Screen

After covering the categories of soaps, beauty products, snack and biscuits, Ramamurthy moves on to tonics and pharmaceuticals, tobacco and matchboxes and banks, textiles and heavy industries. I thought that using advertising on matchboxes was quite unique and with the death of the matchbox, we have no doubt lost an important medium for advertising.

Branded in History is a book about advertising and branding that I think would be useful to the practitioner, teacher, student and also laypersons.

Cicero apparently said, “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.” This book, through the medium of brands, tells us about our history.

Prabhakar Mundkur is an ad veteran with over 40 years in advertising in India, Africa and Asia.

How Swadeshi Brands Benefitted From Rabindranath Tagore’s Iconic Stature

“To most of my generation, talking about Tagore does not come easy. Because to us Rabindranath was more than just a person. He was to us a compelling symbol, a symbol of India’s cultural regeneration.”

– K. G. Subramanyan, ‘Rabindranath and Art: A Personal View in Nandan (1977)

As yet another birth anniversary of the literary polymath whose skills continue to unravel like a universe within another comes by, one cannot help smirking at Rabindranath Tagore’s long and illustrious career as India’s first advertising brand ambassador. If you are experiencing hiccups from the slowly morphing image of our very own snowy-bearded bard into a six-pack clenching, soft-drink-grabbing hero of exceptional parkour talent, you are in for some more of those. With a somewhat accidental beginning in 1889 with promoting his own song album right up to his death in 1941, Tagore has been involved in numerous adverts. 90 is the number that expert and researcher Arun Kumar Roy, author of the book Rabindranath O Bijnapan, arrived at. Cosmetics to food products, books to medicines, the variety of brands he endorsed is comparable only to his choice of themes in songs and literature.

“Two trends can be identified of Rabindranath’s involvement and contribution to Indian advertising. One, where various business owners requested him to write or model for them, such as ‘Poyodhi Doi’ (curd) or ‘Kajol Kali’ (ink) and second, where companies like Bengal Chemical and many others used his quotations or song lyrics for their advertisements,” said Pabitra Sarkar, former vice-chancellor, Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata.

The history of celebrity endorsements in world advertising is a colourful one, and one that charts more than 250 years today. India has always been partial to its icons, making them gods and demons in the same breath. Over time, it is tough to recall any business vertical in this country that hasn’t used a “pretty face” to influence buyer behaviour at some point in its advertising history. From sensible star personality-product pairings to those that are sufficiently random – both testifying the Indian advertisers’ utmost confidence on endorsements. That being said, endorsements have proven time and again that purchasers identify with the brand through the brand ambassador – transferring the admired qualities of their superstar unto the brand they are promoting.

Also read: The Relevance of Rabindranath Tagore’s Politics on His 158th Birth Anniversary

An advertising icon

Rabindranath Tagore’s rise as India’s unchallenged advertising icon, comes as no surprise, especially if set in the context of an emerging Indian economy, where a number of brands were seeking to exploit the ‘Swadeshi’ environment for pitching their indigenously produced wares.

The Swadeshi movement, which gained momentum as a reaction to Lord Curzon’s decision to divide Bengal along communal lines in 1905, saw Tagore as a leading figure against the division. In this phase of tumult, where Tagore envisioned change would come with unity and education, he wrote songs of patriotism such as Banglar Maati Banglar Jol (Earth of Bengal, Water of Bengal) that bolstered the movements and also epitomised Hindu-Muslim unity. During this time, the British faced pecuniary loss and Indian industries got a chance to flourish in an environment made favourable by nationalist zeal. Among those who benefitted are Prafulla Chandra Ray’s Bengal Chemicals, J.N. Tata’s Iron and Steel Company, the Bengal Luxmi Cotton Mills and the Mohini Mill, newly established banks, insurance companies, ship-building industries and various other factories.

Many emerging Indian companies understood that competition was extreme within and without and gauged that the ‘Swadeshi’ tag could be used to their advantage to effectively tale on foreign products. And who better to strengthen their brand proposition than the country’s cultural ambassador, the perfect face for a brand that oozes Indian pride and world-class quality?

The legendary Hemen Bose-Tagore pairing is worth a revisit. Remembered distinctly for Kuntaline Hair Oil and literary award, the catchy jingle Tagore wrote for him is an absolute delight: ‘Kesha Makho Kuntaline/ Rumaletey Delkhosh, Paney Khao Tambulin, Dhonno Hok H Bose’ (‘Apply Kuntaline to your hair, Delkhosh in your handkerchief, Tambulin in your betel and bring fulfillment to H Bose’).

Bose launched the Kuntaline Magazine 1896 and later introduced a literary award as a clever branding tool for his line of products. Writers were invited to submit stories and win a cash prize. The catch? They had to mention ‘Kuntaline Hair Oil’ or ‘Delkhosh Perfume’ in the story. H. Bose maintained a strict Swadeshi stance, disqualifying the stories that emulated European literature. He used Tagore liberally in his advertisements along with other nationalist icons such as Surendranath Banerjea and Lala Lajpat Rai, and did not shy away from openly calling out the users of foreign products as ‘lacking self-respect’.

The Godrej No. 2 Soap story is a dream made in ‘moment marketing’ heaven. In 1919, Godrej launched India’s first vegetable soap, made with organic elements and free from animal lard, which was an ingredient in all European soaps. Due to his ingenious new technology, Godrej was able to get in the good books with sensitive Indian masses who were at that moment averse not only to European meat-eating habits but just about everything foreign. The brand gained endorsement from Rabindranath Tagore who featured in an advert along with the words, “I know of no foreign soaps better than Godrej’s and I will make a point of using it.” Annie Besant and Dr. C. Rajagopalachary also backed it, whereas Mahatma Gandhi, who was a direct beneficiary of Godrej’s Swadeshi-fuelled generosity, declined his support towards a competitive brand.

Rabindranath Tagore in an advertisement for Godrej Soap in 1930's.
Source- Godrej Archives. pic.twitter.com/KwMbucIPqQ

— Mumbai Heritage (@mumbaiheritage) November 7, 2014

Tagore’s involvement with Swadeshi advertising had the atypical pattern of the ‘ours is better than yours’ – understandable in a market where everything is too new to be loved in itself, and easier to be pitted against a common enemy. For Kajol Kali, he writes that the ink is no inferior to any European ink, praises Dwarkin & Son’s flute saying that it is more suitable for Indian music than foreign flutes; and compliments sculptor Kartik Pal’s work on his statue as superior to the work of Europeans and Americans who wore him out with long hours of posing.

Why was Tagore doing so many advertisements? Sarkar feels that though the reasons for his motivation are not clear, some of the adverts may have been driven by Swadeshi sympathies, but not all. The fact that the poet featured in foreign products Cadbury Bournvita, Bata shoe, and Lipton Tea’s commercials, point at other prosaic and necessary interests. Sandip Dutta, founder, and secretary, Little Magazine Library and Research Centre, Kolkata, says: “In 1927, Cadbury Bournvita took out full-page ads in Deepali Patrika that used both the poet and famous actresses of the era as models. In 1941, he gave his sanction to an advertisement that was published in Prabashi Patrika for Homeopathic Medicine (claiming he is a beneficiary of the same) that cured madness… it is unlikely he used these products, and therefore used them as a source of earning, possibly towards the development of Visva-Bharati.”

Rabindranath Tagore. Credit: Facebook

In her 1981 memoir, titled Jayashree-r Adiparba, freedom fighter and women’s rights’ activist Shakuntala Roy recounted a visit to Tagore in Kolkata in search of a poem or story for publication in the magazine Jayashree. Too tired and yet unwilling to send her back empty-handed, Tagore offered her a lot of Radium Snow powder, saying that they were of no use to him. When Roy and her companions expressed surprise, Tagore said that it doesn’t matter if he used them or not, it’s alright if advertising for them helped fill his ‘begging bowl’.

Also read: Tagore’s Prophetic Vision in ‘Letters From Russia’

According to Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay’s biography of Tagore, the Bard took out his ‘begging bowl’ to raise funds for Visva Bharati, a task for which he accepted more invitations than he would have liked to give speeches in different parts of India and the world.

Tagore grew disillusioned with the extremist form of the nationalist movement that had taken on a form that was narrow, “xenophobic, chauvinistic” around 1908 when he wrote to friend Aurobindo Mohan Bose, saying, “Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual center, I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity.”

Tagore’s 1925 essay, Cult of the Charkha, severely criticised the Swadeshi movement and Gandhi’s idea of ‘charkha spinning’ was a means to achieve independence. “A nation,” he wrote during this period, “… is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose”, a purpose often associated with a “selfishness” that “can be a grandly magnified form” of personal selfishness.

On his 160th birth anniversary, Rabindranath Tagore’s expansive advertising career makes his unimaginable genius almost conceivable, his superhuman stature almost one with common limitations of money, smiling at us from creams and soaps, and claiming the ridiculous. At last, our God has landed!

Sreemanti Sengupta is an internationally published poet and literary editor based in Kolkata.

Gandhi’s Swadeshi and Our Civilisational Pandemic

In the call for an ‘atmanirbhar’ Bharat to overcome the COVID-19 crisis is a visceral appeal to Gandhi’s swadeshi. However, in spirit and intent, it’s a violation not just of Gandhi’s swadeshi but of everything he stands for.

Exceptions apart, ritual bi-annual remembrance of Gandhi is all that is left of him in our lives. This is but a continuation of his periodic rejection during his own lifetime. This rejection was particularly pronounced towards the end of his life, and he was aware of it. For our part, we as a people let the fact lie buried under our protestations of his greatness.

Remembering him on his birthday, let us begin by reflecting on what he said on the only October 2 that he witnessed in Independent India:

Indeed today is my birthday…. This is for me a day of mourning. I am still lying around alive. I am surprised at this, even ashamed that I am the same person who once had crores of people hanging on to every word of his. But today no one heeds me at all. If I say, do this, people say, no, we will not…. Where in this situation is there any place for me in Hindustan, and what will I do by remaining alive in it? Today the desire to live up to 125 years has left me, even 100 years or 90 years. I have entered my 79th year today, but even that hurts.*

This, he knew, was tragic. Tragic not for himself, but for humankind, dukhi jagat as he would say. Just three-and-a-half months before he was killed, he said:

I will be gone saying what I am saying, but one day people will remember that what this poor man said, that alone was right.*

That alone is right. And ‘that’ includes many things. I shall stay with one of those things which, today, demand urgent consideration. It was more than a hundred years ago that Gandhi, in his Hind Swaraj, first articulated his fears about the self-destructive character of modern civilisation and proposed a radical alternative to it. As we writhe under the COVID-19 crisis, large numbers of us can see that history has since inexorably realised Gandhi’s fears. We are seized by a civilisational disaster.

Mahatma Gandhi Photo: Wikimedia Coommons, public domain

But the general tendency still is to see the disaster as unprecedented, unexpected, even unimaginable. That induces two illusions. One, this is a natural disaster. Two, the solution lies in greater control over Nature. That control, as always, science will ensure for us. It will bring a vaccine, hopefully even a cure, rendering the virus ineffectual. As victims of what Gandhi called modern civilisation’s ‘tyranny of temptation’, these people will not see that the solution is the problem. That, like most ‘natural’ disasters, which now erupt with increasing frequency, COVID-19 is a by-product of the never-ending endeavour to conquer Nature.

Gandhi has explained why they will not see the obvious:

Those who are intoxicated by modern civilisation are not likely to write against it…. A man whilst he is dreaming, believes in his dream; he is undeceived only when he is awakened from his sleep. What we usually read are the works of defenders of modern civilisation, which undoubtedly claims among its votaries very brilliant and even some very good men. Their writings hypnotise us. And so, one by one, we are drawn into the vortex.

Also Read: For Gandhi, Freedom of the Individual Was the First and Last Goal

Gandhi offered an alternative to this irredeemably ruinous civilisation. At the heart of this alternative civilisation is swadeshi: “that spirit in us which restricts us to the use and service of our immediate surroundings to the exclusion of the more remote.” Translated into action, he explained, it would mean:

“In the domain of politics, I should make use of the indigenous institutions and serve them by curing them of their proved defects. In that of economics, I should use only things that are produced by my immediate neighbours and serve those industries by making them efficient and complete where they might be found wanting.”

If “reduced to practice,” he affirmed, swadeshi would “lead to the millennium.” His dream was that free India would usher in that millennium by adopting swadeshi and inspiring the rest of the world to follow its example. That is the way to save humankind from collective destruction.

For long has Gandhi’s swadeshi remained misunderstood, causing it to be at the same time celebrated and reviled. It has been – thanks to a misleading narrow understanding of the word desh – linked with the country and, by extension, with the nation. As a sequel, depending on how one views nationalism, swadeshi is as fatuously embraced as it is spurned.

This tendency is facilitated by the promiscuous utilisation of nationalism and globalisation so as to make the best of both worlds. Along with the arrogance of being a vishwa guru, a particularly insidious illustration of this comes in the call for atmanirbhar Bharat with its vacuous coupling of the local and the global.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi pays homage to Mahatma Gandhi on the occasion of his 151st birth anniversary at Rajghat in New Delhi, October 2, 2020. Photo: PTI/Atul Yadav

Also Read: How an Aspiring ‘Vishwa Guru’ Has Brought the ‘Third World’ Back to India

Though Gandhi is not overtly invoked, there is in this strange melange a visceral appeal to his swadeshi. But, in its spirit and intent, it is a violation not just of Gandhi’s swadeshi but of everything he stands for. Gandhi does want India to follow swadeshi and inspire the rest of the world to follow suit, so that humans may live happily by being at peace with other humans and with Nature. But that entails no grand entitlement. His swadeshi is not about self-reliant Bharat. It is about self-reliant individuals. For it is these individuals who constitute Bharat. The essence of swadeshi is that “whatever is essential for human life should be individually controlled.”

In the civilisation envisaged by Gandhi, the village would be the basic unit of organised human existence. “I believe,” he wrote in his letter of October 5, 1945, to Nehru, “that if India, and through India the rest of the world as well, is to attain real freedom, then sooner or later we would have to live in villages – in humble dwellings, not in palatial mansions. It is simply not possible for millions of city dwellers to live in mansions happily and peacefully, nor by killing one another.”

Lest he be misunderstood, Gandhi clarified:

“If you think that I am referring to the village of today you will not be able to comprehend what I am saying. The village of my conception exists in my imagination as of now…. In the village of my imagination, the villager will not be inert – he will exemplify pure consciousness. He will not lead his life like an animal, in squalid darkness. Men and women will live freely and have the confidence to face the entire world. There will be no cholera, plague, or smallpox. Life will neither be slothful nor luxurious for anybody. Physical labour will be a must for everybody.”

Gandhi, then, proceeded to say something which deserves particular attention. It will disabuse those who – reading the Hind Swaraj as a frozen text and missing the organic nature of Gandhi’s thinking – cling to the belief that he was opposed to mechanisation. He wrote:

“Along with all this I can conceive of many things that would be built on a large scale: maybe railways as well as post and telegraph offices. What there will or will not be I can’t say, nor do I care. If I am able to establish the essential idea, the things for our future well-being will follow from it. But if I forsake the essential idea, I forsake everything.” *

Also Read: Hindutva Leaders Revile Gandhi and His Message, But Can’t Resist Basking in His Glory

The civilisational disease

The disease that Gandhi – borrowing from Edward Carpenter’s Civilization: Its Cause and Cure – saw in modern civilisation more than a hundred years ago has since become terminal. Still, convenient blinkers continue to mar people’s vision. The impossibility of humble dwellings and palatial mansions coexisting peacefully should not have escaped anyone after the experience of COVID-19. It does. Even after months of the so-called lockdown, not many have quite understood that, except for the super-rich and the better off among the middle classes, it simply meant an impossible situation for the rest, which means the overwhelming majority of Indians. The self-quarantine that the lockdown was meant to ensure, its prerequisite of social and physical distancing was simply unavailable to them. What, and for whom, have they been paying this enormous price? For whom is their immeasurable suffering?

The forced reverse exodus during the lockdown should have served to demonstrate the indispensability of villages. It has, instead, resulted in coercive legislative measures which are designed to sacrifice the local to the global, individual men and women to corporate interests. Gandhi dreamt of individuals – men as well as women – who would exemplify pure consciousness – shuddha chaitanya – and live freely. These measures reduce individual men and women into helpless instruments of a fake atmanirbhar Bharat.

Migrant workers walk to their native places amid the nationwide lockdown, on NH24 near the Delhi-UP border, March 27, 2020. Photo: PTI/Ravi Choudhary

Like never before, the COVID-19 crisis has made imperative the severe limiting of man’s violence against Nature and against fellow human beings. It has also, by the same token, underlined, like never before, the urgent need for an alternative, like Gandhi’s, to the civilisation of which COVID-19 is an essential fruit.

That precisely is what will not happen. Never in human history has the rightness and justice of something by itself been the reason for its realisation. Something additional, too, is required. This is the centenary year of the historic Non-Cooperation Movement. That was when Gandhi taught Indians that their fear was the basis of Britain’s rule over them. The moment they got rid of that fear and learnt to say ‘no’, British rule would be over. They, he famously said, India would have swaraj within a year.

The root of our enslavement to modern civilisation is our greed. There is no freedom – no future – unless we manage to overcome this greed. Unless we say ‘no’ to the tyranny of temptation. Otherwise, a solution that requires greater control over Nature and makes life so much more ‘fun’ will continue to trump one that requires control over ourselves and our fun.

Sudhir Chandra is the author of The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India and Gandhi: An Impossible Possibility (both published by Routledge).

*Translated from the Hindi original by Chitra Padmanabhan.

The Relevance of Rabindranath Tagore’s Politics on His 158th Birth Anniversary

Swaraj for Tagore was not just political freedom, but freedom from hunger, disease, servitude and ignorance.

“Only the weak dare not be just.”
∼ Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World

In 1905, at the start of the Swadeshi and Boycott movements that began in many parts of Bengal to resist Lord Curzon’s declaration to divide the province, Rabindranath Tagore had been an important part of the movement both politically and ideologically.

He wrote powerful songs that were sung by Swadeshi volunteers through the streets of Calcutta and travelled extensively to address people on various issues. His nephew Abanindranath has written about one incident that showed the poet in action in one of the earliest examples of mass mobilisation for the cause of Swadeshi. On October 16, Partition Day, Rabindranath provided a novel gesture of protest: he decided to observe ‘rakshabandhan’ when everyone would tie a rakhi on everyone else to symbolise Bengal’s unity.

A great crowd took to the street around Jorashanko singing his song ‘Banglar mati, banglar jol’ while the poet with his family members went to take a dip in the Ganga and women from rooftops and balconies blew conch shells. As they travelled down Chitpur, Rabindranath, forever the iconoclast, went on to tie the thread of unity on some ostlers while his relatives waited fearfully, anxious that the Muslim ostlers would resent such a gesture. Later the poet went to the neighbourhood mosque to embrace the maulvis and tie threads on them too.

Also read: Tagore’s Critique of the Modern Condition

However, the Swadeshi enterprises that interested Rabindranath the most were village reconstruction and education. Both these ideas, on which he spoke and wrote extensively, had few takers among the upper caste and upper class bhadraloks of Calcutta. The Swadeshi workers wished to incite the peasants to rise against the British but they had no real interest in their welfare. The poet, on the other hand, wanted the volunteers to reconnect once again to the pulsating heart of India: her villages and her village folk.

From his own arduous experiences in Shantiniketan, Rabindranath knew that this kind of work had no glamour and earned very little fame. For his part, he worked hard to raise funds for the National Council of Education and in one of his estates, he started a Benevolent Society involving 125 villages where money collected from the estate and from members was used to maintain schools and dispensaries and to provide clean drinking water and loans to distressed farmers. He was absolutely certain that the contemporary leaders ‘had no real sympathy with the real problems of India’ and even when the British were driven away, India would remain a prey to disease and deprivation.

One another aspect of the Boycott movement troubled him deeply. In Eastern Bengal, where Muslims formed a majority of the agriculturists, the forcible imposition of burning foreign clothes seemed to him an intolerable harassment. British clothes were cheap as against the clothes produced by Swadeshi mills and therefore the peasantry preferred to buy what was more affordable. In his essay Shodupaye (The Right Way, 1908) he clearly articulated the conflict at the heart of the movement:

“A few days ago, a letter arrived from the provinces saying that in a large market, traders had received a notice stating if they do not comply with the Boycott of foreign goods, their stalls will be set on fire. In some places such notices have been followed by arson. …. It is indeed sad that for some of our educated men this kind of oppression is not wrong. They have decided that such terror tactics are necessary for the good of the country. It is useless to talk of justice to such men. They claim that what is done for the sake of the country cannot ever be unjust, an ‘adharma.’ But even to a perverse mind we should repeatedly reiterate that injustice cannot be good for a land and for its people…….. The lower castes and the Muslim peasants have become impatient and the following thoughts run through their minds: Those who have never loved us, who have been indifferent to us in our misery and dangers, who treat us as animals socially, come to oppress us because of foreign cloth or any other reason and we will not tolerate it. Therefore, in spite of great personal loss and hardship, they continue to use foreign materials.

This is the reason why I say that the greatest curse upon the country is not foreign cloth but this quarrel within it. Nothing is worse than one section of the populace enslaving the opinions of another through force and against their will…”

Rabindranath was aware how Boycott inevitably alienated and marginalised the poorer sections of society and a decade later he would dramatise that in his novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 1916). But even years earlier, in his essay Byadhi O Protikar (The Disease and the Cure, 1907), he was brutally honest about what truly ailed India:

“We [Hindus and Muslims] have, for hundreds of years, lived side by side, partaken the crop from the same field, drunk the water from the same river, shared the same sunlight. We speak the same language, share the same joys and sorrows but ordinary human interactions that take place between neighbours have never been exchanged between us. We have not behaved like brothers. We have nurtured this sin for so long that even when we have lived with each other for decades, we have been unable to stop this separation from enlarging. God will not be able to forgive us this sin…..We know in many places of Bengal, Hindus and Muslims do not share the same seat; if a Muslim enters the room he is made to sit on a separate chair and the water in the hubble-bubble is changed for fear of pollution. During arguments we say, nothing can be done about this, the holy texts must be followed. No holy book states Hindus must hate Muslims. If any sacred text does say that, it will not help us to establish Swadesh or Swaraj in this land. In a country, where hatred of neighbours is taught by religion, where a man invites hell’s wrath by drinking water from the glass of another, when one race is redeemed by humiliating another, then degradations and insults await the people of that country. If one set of people look down upon another, then they will have to suffer the same humiliations in the hands of others…We have divided ourselves, and, since we understand difference more than unity, we will never rid ourselves of slavery and piteous humiliation.”

The poet was categorically clear about the real political work that remained undone in the country. He believed that all our energies must be directed to alleviate poverty, to inculcate amity amongst communities and all manner of people and to foster values of freedom and self-reliance, ‘atmashakti’. Swaraj for him was not just political freedom but freedom from hunger, disease, servitude and ignorance.

Also read: Why It Is Important to Preserve Tagore’s ‘Gurudev’ Image

Although his prescient admonitions were made in the context of the Swadeshi Movement, they ought to be recollected at this present moment of our history with a degree of urgency. We should take them to heart, for these words, even after so many years, carry the onerous but inexorable import of truth.

All translations of the Tagore essays by author.

Debjani Sengupta teaches at the Department of English, Indraprastha College For Women. Her translations of Tagore’s essays have appeared in The Essential Tagore (Harvard University Press) and she has edited, with Dilip Basu, The Home and the World(Worldview Publications).

Ramachandran’s ‘Monumental Gandhi’ Is a Symbol of Peace in These Frenzied Times

The seven-foot plus bronze sculpture of Gandhi, which has a bullet hole and the words ‘Hey Ram’ engraved on its back, is on display at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bengaluru.

A. Ramachandran. Credit: YouTube

At a time when every other Indian is experiencing an adrenaline rush in his dreams of forcefully crossing the Line of Control, even if vicariously, it is perhaps a good moment to contemplate on the representation of Mahatma Gandhi. The Indian landscape teems with realistic portraits of Gandhi. Every small town crossroads, every public office sports a clichéd likeness. So much so, the eye gets jaded with the lifeless portrayals and we effortlessly push Gandhi’s memory into oblivion.

An artist’s conceptual portrait of Gandhi is quite a different matter. An example of this is A. Ramachandran’s seven-feet plus bronze sculpture titled ‘Monumental Gandhi: Hey Ram, Second Version.’ The first version was completed in 2012 and was shown a couple of years later. Both versions are similar in execution, but the ‘Second Version’ has on its back a bullet hole and “Hey Ram”, the poignant cry uttered by Gandhi when his life came to an abrupt end by the assassin’s bullet. It went on display in a retrospective of Ramchandran’s work at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Bengaluru on Wednesday.

Monumental Gandhi: Hey Ram, Second Version. Credit: Ella Datta.

Monumental Gandhi: Hey Ram, Second Version. Courtesy: Ella Datta.

Ramachandran’s ‘Monumental Gandhi’ is a standing figure with the flowing drapes of his chadar gleaming softly over his body. His hands are folded in a namaskar, expressing humility and respect towards all sentient beings. In contrast to the smooth, burnished glow of the robe, Gandhi’s head is roughened like an eroded rock-face. The figure stands on nearly a three and a half feet square base.

On this platform is carved in heavy, bold lettering of varying sizes, Einstein’s famous quote on Gandhi, “Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.” This blending of text and image endows the sculpture with a larger dimension.

Monumental Gandhi: Hey Ram, Second Version. Courtesy: Ella Datta

Not only may this sculpture be seen as a symbol of peace and truth, but in its evocations of compassion, it is also reminiscent of the standing Buddhas of early India. Such a conflation of the ideas of Buddha and Gandhi in the artist’s mind goes back to 1969, when Ramachandran was commissioned to do a mural in Delhi for Gandhi’s centenary. He titled it ‘Gandhi and the 20th Century Cult of Violence’. The occasion gave Ramachandran an opportunity to contemplate on the history of our times, not just of India, but also of the world.

The horrific narrative of violence replete with images of torture and bloodshed that are depicted in the mural is broken in the central section by the emergence of Gandhi’s bare leg, dhoti-clad till the thigh, from a veil of darkness and is topped with multiple images of seated Buddha. This is a positive assertion of human values to counter the negative, nightmarish vision of life that he expressed in the first two decades of his art practice.

From the mid-1980s, Ramachandran stopped painting manifest narratives of violence, torture, bloodshed and dehumanisation. In 1984, he witnessed from his home a Sikh shop owner from the neighbourhood being lynched and felt that no representation of violence that he had done so far could ever replicate the cataclysmic horror of reality. Bringing people face to face with the violence in society could not change their mindset. So he began painting and sculpting an idyllic vision of man in nature in the scenes from the lives of Bhil tribals living in the villages around Udaipur. Many contemporaries have critiqued Ramachandran’s representations of adivasi life and environment as an indulgence, but the artist has steadfastly engaged himself in representing an alternate vision of life.

This does not, however, mean that Ramachandran is not aware of the violence and turbulence seething below the surface that flare up from time to time. The Gandhi sculptures that he has made in the last four years indicate that he is responding to our troubled times in his own way. In a catalogue essay titled ‘The Multiple Worlds of A. Ramachandran’, art historian R. Siva Kumar wrote, “Our lives are shaped by our times, but we choose from the possibilities of our times on our own terms. This creates a variety of valid responses to the world at any given historical moment, …”.

When asked why he thought of sculpting Gandhi, Ramachandran said, “Gandhi is the solitary political image that haunts me even today.” As a young boy, Ramachandran remembers being drawn to Gandhi, especially because of a teacher who was a passionate Gandhian and who talked to the boys about the leader’s ideas.

Later, when Ramachandran went to study art at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, West Bengal, he encountered Nandalal Bose’s linocut portrait of the Mahatma titled ‘Dandi March’ with the legend Bapuji, 1930, inscribed on it. Sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, who was also an alumnus of Kala Bhavan,a has written about Bose’s respect for Gandhi. He has stated, “His admiration for Gandhiji and the Swadeshi movement could be seen in his portrayal of Gandhiji in his famous linocut … symbolic of the spirit of the Mahatma.”

Ramachandran also absorbed the vigour and strength of the bas-relief sculpture, ‘Dandi March’ by his mentor Ramkinkar Baij, which was modelled on Bose’s linocut, but was enlarged. Ramachandran was very impressed by this transformation. He said, “Ramkinkar cut grooves and gashes into the wet cement. It was as if the sculpture was turned into a line drawing.” Beside the bas-relief, Baij made two sculptures in the round of Gandhi, one of which, bold and rugged, is in the collection of NGMA, New Delhi.

Bose’s linocut and Baij’s sculptures show Gandhi in a heroic stance. The two artists conceptualised Gandhi as a brave, determined leader, exuding a moral strength and guiding his people to resist the British Raj. Although belonging to the same gharana, as it were, Ramachandran’s Gandhi has a different appeal. In its simplicity of form and larger than life proportions, there appears to be a spiritual force instilled in the two versions of ‘Monumental Gandhi’. Whereas the Gandhis portrayed by his teachers have powerful movement inscribed into the figures, the very stillness of Ramachandran’s portrayal emanates a different kind of power.

The idea of the simplification of form came to him in a flash of childhood memory. The woman who supplied his family with the daily requirement of clay pots brought some clay one day and showed him how to make a simple figure by rolling out a cylinder of wet clay and then pinching it here and there to make a human form.

The artist followed almost the same principle to make the ‘Monumental Gandhi’. Only pinching was not enough to give the clay cylinder a lofty human form. He had to beat the roll of clay, flattening out the chest, narrowing the waist and so on. Here the artist had to engage in a heroic struggle to overcome the challenges of the material and give form to the elusive ideas that lurked in his mind.

Ramachandran’s monumental Gandhis stand as icons of peace guarding against the violence that threatens to tear apart the communities of the world. The brutality and murderousness that peaked in the 20th century seems to be gathering added momentum in our present time. The retrospective organised by NGMA, Bengaluru in collaboration with Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi will be on view for three weeks. It is worth a visit, if only as an antidote to these present, frenzied times.