Partition of Bengal 1905 and the Swadeshi Movement: Causes, Methods and Annulment

Partition of Bengal 1905: Curzon's Plan and the Two Provinces

Timeline of the Partition: From the 1903 Plan to 16 October 1905

The Swadeshi movement was the campaign that grew out of the protest against the partition of Bengal. It had two halves. Boycott meant refusing British cloth, salt, schools and courts. Swadeshi in the narrow sense meant making and using Indian goods and building Indian schools, mills, banks and ships. The word joins two Sanskrit words, swa, own, and desh, country, and means of one's own country. Mahatma Gandhi later called swadeshi the soul of swaraj.

The story runs in five stages.

1. December 1903 to July 1905: The plan is made public and the Moderates answer it with petitions and meetings.
2. August to October 1905: The Town Hall resolution launches the movement and the partition comes into force.
3. 1905 to 1907: The movement widens into a programme of boycott, national education and enterprise, and the Congress adopts four objectives at Calcutta.
4. December 1907 to 1908: The Congress splits at Surat, the government represses the movement, and part of the youth turns to revolutionary action.
5. 1908 to 1911: The open movement fades and the partition is annulled at the Delhi Durbar.

Eastern Bengal and Assam: How the Province Was Cut

The Bengal Presidency that Curzon divided was the largest in British India. In those days it extended over regions that now lie in Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha as well as West Bengal and Bangladesh.

Curzon's plan joined 15 eastern districts of Bengal with Assam to form a new province, Eastern Bengal and Assam. With Assam added, it held about 31 million people, most of them Muslim, which is why the two new provinces together held more than the 78 million of the old Bengal. Its centre was Dacca, the former Mughal capital of Bengal. Sir Bampfylde Fuller was its first Lieutenant Governor, and Eastern Bengal and Assam lasted from 1905 to 1912.

The western districts were joined with Bihar and Orissa to make the other province, which kept the name of Bengal.

Causes of the Partition of Bengal: Administration or Divide and Rule

The Official Case: Governing a Province of 78 Million

The official case rested on administration. For decades officials had said that the huge province was hard to govern and that its poorer eastern region was neglected. The government had seen the need for a separate administration for the east as early as 1868, and by 1903 it also saw a chance to develop Assam commercially, with promises of more investment in education and jobs in the new province.

The case was not baseless. A province of 78 million people was a heavy load for one government in Calcutta. The question was whether the particular line drawn by Curzon was needed to solve it.

Real Motives: Weakening Bengal, Dividing Bengalis, Courting Muslims

The real motive, as nationalists read it, was to weaken Bengal, the nerve centre of Indian nationalism, by putting Bengalis under two administrations. The plan did not simply remove the Hindi and Oriya areas to shrink the province; it kept them in the reduced Bengal. Risley, the Home Secretary to the Government of India in 1904, stated the aim openly: "Bengal united is a power. Bengal divided will pull in several different ways. One of our main objects is to split up and thereby to weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule."

Three divisions were built into the plan.

• By language: Bengali speakers became a minority in the reduced Bengal, outnumbered more than two to one by Hindi and Oriya speakers.
• By religion: The western half had a Hindu majority and the eastern half a Muslim majority, so a single nationalist public was split along a religious line.
• By courting the east: On a tour of east Bengal in 1904, Curzon argued that Dacca could be the capital of a Muslim-majority province that would give Muslims a unity they had not known since the days of the old Muslim viceroys and kings.

The English-educated middle class of Bengal, the bhadralok, saw the plan as a vivisection of their motherland and a way to reduce their influence, and the merchants of Calcutta feared losing their economic hold on the eastern districts. The government declared the partition a settled fact, but it was unsettled in 1911.

Anti-Partition Agitation: From Petitions to the Swadeshi Movement

Launch of the Swadeshi Movement: 7 August 1905 at the Calcutta Town Hall

The first answer to the partition plan followed the old method. Leaders such as Surendranath Banerjee, K.K. Mitra and Prithwishchandra Ray used petitions to the government, public meetings, memoranda and propaganda in pamphlets and newspapers such as Hitabadi, Sanjibani and Bengalee. They hoped that an educated public opinion in India and England would stop the partition.

Protest meetings were held within days of the July 1905 announcement in small towns all over Bengal, and it was at these meetings that the pledge to boycott foreign goods was first taken. Petitions were collected too, but the authorities did not move. Banerjee admitted that the petitions had failed, and as the date drew near he began to urge tougher steps such as boycotting British goods. He preferred to call this swadeshi rather than boycott. K.K. Mitra's Sanjibani had already called openly for a boycott of foreign goods on 13 July 1905.

The Swadeshi movement was formally started at the Calcutta Town Hall on 7 August 1905, when a massive meeting passed the Boycott Resolution. After the meeting the leaders dispersed to other parts of Bengal to carry the message of boycott, which meant refusing Manchester cloth and Liverpool salt. The date is still marked: India observes 7 August as National Handloom Day, first held on 7 August 2015.

16 October 1905: Partition Day, Rakhi and Amar Sonar Bangla

The day the partition came into force was observed as a day of mourning throughout Bengal. People fasted, bathed in the Ganga and walked barefoot in processions singing Vande Mataram, which almost spontaneously became the theme song of the movement. Surendranath Banerjee and Ananda Mohan Bose addressed huge gatherings, and 50,000 rupees were raised for the movement at one of these gatherings within a few hours.

The day also fell on Raksha Bandhan. People tied rakhis on each other's wrists as a symbol of unity between Hindus and Muslims and between the two halves of Bengal, and Rabindranath Tagore asked everyone to tie rakhi, especially to Muslims. On the same day the Mohammedan Provincial Union was founded, with Nawab Khwaja Salimullah of Dacca as its patron, which shows how differently the day was read by Hindus and by Muslims.

Songs carried the protest as much as meetings did. Tagore's Amar Sonar Bangla, an ode to Mother Bengal, is linked with these months. The year of its composition is not certain, since the original manuscript was never found, but its lyrics first appeared in September 1905, and it was adopted as the national anthem by the Provisional Government of Bangladesh in 1971.

Programme of the Swadeshi Movement: Boycott, Enterprise, Education and Organisation

Boycott of Foreign Goods, Schools and Courts

The Swadeshi movement was not one tactic but a set of linked forms of struggle. Boycott refused what Britain sold and the institutions it ran. Swadeshi enterprise and national education built Indian replacements. Samitis, festivals and the stress on self-reliance carried the message to ordinary people, and songs, paintings and symbols gave it an emotional language.

The boycott began with cloth, salt and sugar. Foreign cloth was burnt in public bonfires, priests refused to solemnise marriages in which foreign goods were exchanged, and washermen refused to wash foreign clothes. Wearing cloth spun and woven in India became a symbol of self-reliance and national pride. This form of protest met with great success at the practical and popular level.

The boycott then went further and aimed at British institutions, including government schools, colleges and courts. Its impact there was limited, because India's own institutions were not ready to offer a transition. When the Extremists took a larger part in the movement after 1905, they added a call for passive resistance, meaning a boycott of government schools and colleges, government service, courts, legislative councils, municipalities and government titles. Aurobindo put the aim as making the administration under present conditions impossible by an organised refusal to do anything that would help British commerce in exploiting the country or British officialdom in administering it.

Swadeshi Enterprise: Mills, Banks and the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company

The idea of self-reliance was older than the partition. In 1886 the industrialist Jamsetji Tata set up the Swadeshi Mills in Bombay, Indian businessmen started the Punjab National Bank in Lahore in 1895 with Indian capital, and in 1901 the chemist Prafulla Chandra Ray founded Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals. After 1905 the spirit spread to textile mills, soap and match factories, tanneries, banks, insurance companies and shops. These ventures rested more on patriotic zeal than on business sense.

The movement encouraged people to promote Indian-made products, which strengthened India's own industries and reduced economic dependence on British goods, especially textiles. As it gathered force, nationalists mobilised people to boycott foreign cloth, and Indian mills shifted from yarn to cloth. Production of cotton piece-goods in India doubled between 1900 and 1912.

The boldest venture was at sea. V.O. Chidambaram Pillai, a pleader of Tuticorin, registered the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company in October 1906 with a capital of ten lakh rupees, to break the monopoly of the British India Steam Navigation Company. It launched the first indigenous Indian shipping service, between Tuticorin and Colombo.

• SS Galia: The company's first ship was bought from France with the help of Tilak and Aurobindo Ghose, reached Tuticorin on 1 June 1907 and flew a flag carrying the slogan Vande Mataram.
• The fare war: When the British company cut its fare to one rupee, Pillai cut his to eight annas, half a rupee, and traders and passengers stayed with his ships out of nationalist feeling.
• Suppression: The British company, helped by the government, denied the Indian ships berths and schedules in the port. Pillai was arrested on 12 March 1908 for sedition and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment, and the company was liquidated in 1911.
• Remembered: Tuticorin Port was renamed after him as the V.O. Chidambaranar Port Trust.

The Swadeshi spirit also reached the factory floor. In February 1908 workers of the Coral Mill at Tuticorin struck after a speech by Pillai, and the nine-day strike won higher wages, shorter hours and Sunday leave.

National Education: National Council of Education and Bengal National College

Education became a front because nationalists saw the colleges as training servants for the Raj. They called Calcutta University Goldighir Ghulamkhana, the slave-house by the lake. Curzon's Indian Universities Act of 1904 was read as an attempt to limit Indians' access to English education, and the government also disaffiliated private Indian colleges that it regarded as hotbeds of nationalist agitation. Since 1902 Satish Chandra Mukherjee's Dawn Society had called for national education with an emphasis on the sciences.

The partition gave the push. On 9 November 1905 Subodh Chandra Mullick pledged one lakh rupees for a national university, and the idea of a National Council of Education was taken up at a meeting at Park Street on 10 December 1905. The Council was set up on 15 August 1906, and Rashbehari Ghosh was appointed its first president. Its object was to organise education, literary, scientific and technical, on national lines and under national control, with Indian languages as the medium of teaching.

• Bengal National College: Set up by the Council in 1906, with Aurobindo Ghose as its first principal.
• Bengal Technical Institute: Founded on 25 July 1906 for technical education, brought under the Council in 1910.
• Study in Japan: Funds were raised to send students to Japan for advanced learning.
• Jadavpur University: The College and the Institute were later merged, and Jadavpur University was established on 24 December 1955.

The government treated the Council's institutions as hotbeds of Swadeshi activity and banned nationalist activities in them, such as the singing of patriotic songs. The Bande Mataram daily, started in 1906, added national education to swadeshi and boycott as a third demand, and the Calcutta Congress of December 1906 made it one of the four objectives of the Congress.

Samitis, Festivals and Atma Shakti: Organising the Masses

Corps of volunteers, called samitis, became a popular and powerful method of mass mobilisation. The best known was the Swadesh Bandhab Samiti, founded at Barisal by the educationist Ashwini Kumar Dutta to promote Indian-made goods and the boycott of foreign goods. Samitis spread political awareness through magic-lantern lectures and Swadeshi songs, trained members physically and morally, did social work in famines and epidemics, ran schools, taught Swadeshi crafts and held arbitration courts.

Traditional festivals and melas were used to reach people. Tilak's Ganapati and Shivaji festivals became a means of Swadeshi propaganda not only in western India but also in Bengal, and folk theatre carried the message in Bengal.

The stress on atma shakti, or self-reliance, meant reasserting national dignity, honour and confidence and regenerating villages socially and economically. In practice it included campaigns against caste oppression, early marriage, dowry and the consumption of alcohol.

Swadeshi Culture: Vande Mataram, Bharat Mata, Songs and Art

The movement gave Indian nationalism its symbols. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay composed Vande Mataram in the 1870s, and it was first published in 1882 in his novel Anandamath. It was widely sung during the Swadeshi movement, and the Congress adopted it in 1905 as a pan-Indian salutation to Mother India. The authorities banned its public singing, and people kept singing it. On 20 May 1906 over 10,000 Hindus and Muslims marched through Barisal carrying Vande Mataram flags. The Bande Mataram daily, started in 1906 by Bipin Chandra Pal, was soon taken over by Aurobindo Ghose and spread the idea of freedom day by day.

Writers, artists and scientists joined in.

• Songs: Tagore, Rajni Kanta Sen, Dwijendralal Ray, Mukunda Das and others wrote songs that nationalists of every shade sang. Vande Mataram travelled too: Subramania Bharati translated it into Tamil, and Lala Lajpat Rai gave its name to a journal he started in Punjab.
• Bharat Mata: In 1905 Abanindranath Tagore painted Bharat Mata as a calm, composed, ascetic figure dispensing learning, food and clothing.
• The Swadeshi flag: A tricolour of red, green and yellow, with eight lotuses for the eight provinces of British India and a crescent moon for Hindus and Muslims.
• Painting and the Bengal School: Abanindranath led the Bengal School, the Indian style of painting associated with Swadeshi, and the Indian Society of Oriental Art, founded in 1907, gave its first scholarship to Nandalal Bose.
• Science: Jagadish Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Ray pioneered original research that drew praise across the world.

The symbols had a cost. Many Extremist leaders drew on Indian history, cultural heritage and Hindu traditional symbols, and Muslims often felt that the movement had Hindu overtones.

Leaders, Regions and Participants of the Swadeshi Movement

Lal-Bal-Pal and the Spread Beyond Bengal

The Swadeshi movement of 1905 to 1907 greatly broadened the Congress's appeal among the middle classes and threw up towering leaders: Bal Gangadhar Tilak of Maharashtra, Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal and Lala Lajpat Rai of Punjab. Known together as Lal-Bal-Pal, they came from three provinces far apart, which showed the all-India reach of the struggle.

The movement spread from Bengal to other regions.

• Maharashtra: Tilak spread the movement in Poona and Bombay.
• Punjab: Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh led it, and Ajit Singh's Anjuman-i-Mohisban-i-Watan in Lahore carried its own journal, Bharat Mata.
• Delhi: Syed Haider Raza led the movement.
• Madras: V.O. Chidambaram Pillai led it from Tuticorin.

Tilak saw in the movement a challenge and an opportunity to organise a popular mass struggle against British rule and to unite the country in a bond of common sympathy. The militant leaders, Tilak, Lajpat Rai, Pal and Aurobindo, wanted it carried outside Bengal and extended into a full political mass struggle for swaraj.

Students, Women, Workers and Muslims: Who Joined

Students came out in large numbers to propagate and practise swadeshi and led the picketing of shops that sold foreign goods. Women of the urban middle classes, who had been home-centred, took an active part in processions and picketing and played a larger role in the national movement from then on. The social base of the movement grew to include sections of zamindars, students, women and the lower middle classes of cities and towns. Efforts were also made to give political voice to workers' grievances through strikes in British-owned concerns such as the East Indian Railway.

Some Muslims took part, among them Barrister Abdul Rasul, Liaqat Hussain and Guznavi, and Maulana Azad, who joined a revolutionary group. But most upper-class and middle-class Muslims stayed away or, led by Nawab Salimullah of Dacca, supported the partition because it promised a Muslim-majority province. The movement also failed to win the Muslim peasantry, because of a conscious government policy of divide and rule and because class and community overlapped in many places.

Moderates and Extremists: Calcutta 1906 to the Surat Split of 1907

Congress Sessions of 1905 and 1906: Four Objectives

The Congress meeting at Benares in 1905 under Gokhale condemned the partition and Curzon's policies and supported the anti-partition and Swadeshi movement of Bengal. The Moderates led the Congress and did not want the boycott carried beyond Bengal or applied to councils and similar bodies. The Extremists, who called themselves simply Nationalists, wanted a nationwide mass movement. A mild compromise resolution averted a split for the moment.

At the Calcutta session of December 1906 the Extremists wanted Tilak or Lajpat Rai as president. The Moderates proposed Dadabhai Naoroji, whom all nationalists respected, and he was elected. As a concession to the militants the Congress declared four objectives: Swaraj, Swadeshi, boycott and national education. Swaraj was not defined, and it could mean anything from self-government within the British Empire to full independence. The word was used by the Congress for the first time, which left room for different readings by Moderates and Extremists.

The two camps differed on almost every point, from their social base to their methods.

The Extremists themselves were not of one mind. For Tilak, swaraj meant some form of self-government, while for Aurobindo it meant complete independence from foreign rule.

Surat Split 1907: Causes and Course

The Congress split at Surat in December 1907, on 26 and 27 December. After Calcutta the Extremists called for wide passive resistance and boycott of schools, colleges, councils, municipalities and courts. The Moderates, encouraged by news that council reforms were on the way, decided to tone down the Calcutta programme. The British authorities, alarmed by the call for swaraj, pressed some Moderate leaders to step back.

The sessions ran into a fight over venue and president. The Extremists wanted the 1907 session at Nagpur with Tilak or Lajpat Rai as president and the Swadeshi, boycott and national education resolutions repeated. The Moderates wanted Surat, in Tilak's home province of Bombay, so that Tilak could not be president, wanted Rashbehari Ghosh in the chair, and sought to drop the resolutions. Both sides took rigid positions and there was no room for compromise.

At Surat, Tilak was prevented from speaking and chaos followed. The Nationalist camp led by Tilak, Lajpat Rai and Aurobindo Ghose held a separate session. The Congress was now dominated by the Moderates, who reiterated the goal of self-government within the British Empire and the use of constitutional methods only.

Repression, Muslim Response and the Revolutionary Turn

Government Repression and the Carrot and Stick Policy

The government answered the movement with force. Schools and colleges whose students took part were penalised by disaffiliation or the loss of grants. Students found guilty were disqualified from government jobs and scholarships and were fined, expelled, arrested or beaten. Public singing of Vande Mataram was banned, public meetings were restricted, Swadeshi workers were prosecuted and given long sentences, leaders were arrested and deported, and the press was suppressed.

In 1908 the Eastern Bengal and Assam government banned Ashwini Kumar Dutta's Swadesh Bandhab Samiti and deported him to the United Provinces.

Between 1907 and 1911 five new laws were enforced against anti-government activity, among them the Seditious Meetings Act of 1907, the Indian Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act of 1908, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1908 and the Indian Press Act of 1910. Tilak was sent to Mandalay in Burma for six years. Aurobindo and Pal retired from active politics, and Lajpat Rai left for abroad.

The British combined this with conciliation. John Morley, the Secretary of State, spoke of rallying the Moderates, and the policy ran in three stages. It first repressed the Extremists mildly to frighten the Moderates, then placated the Moderates with concessions, and finally suppressed the Extremists with full force. The Surat split showed that the policy had paid.

Barisal Conference 1906 and the Vande Mataram Circular

Barisal, the home of the Swadesh Bandhab Samiti, became a test of how far the government would go. In 1906 the Bengal government issued a circular banning the singing of Vande Mataram in any procession or public meeting. The Anti-Circular Society was formed to oppose the ban, with K.K. Mitra, the editor of Sanjibani, as its president.

The Bengal Provincial Conference met at Barisal in 1906, and the police used force against its participants. Mitra condemned the police atrocities against Swadeshi activists at the conference. The brutality did not frighten the movement. It hardened a section of the youth, and the weekly Yugantar wrote after the Barisal Conference: "The remedy lies with the people. The 30 crore people inhabiting India must raise their 60 crore hands to stop this curse of oppression. Force must be stopped by force."

Muslim Response and the Muslim League of 1906

Muslim opinion shifted during the controversy. When the plan was first announced in 1903, Muslim bodies such as The Moslem Chronicle and the Central National Muhamedan Association condemned it. In 1904 Curzon toured the Muslim-majority districts of east Bengal to win support. Once educated Muslims saw what a province of their own could offer east Bengal, which had stayed backward while opportunities centred on Calcutta, most came to support it. The Mohammedan Provincial Union was founded on 16 October 1905 to bring existing Muslim groups together.

Not all Muslims agreed. Abdul Rasul, Maulvi Liaqat Hussain and others opposed the partition, and preachers such as Din Muhammad of Mymensingh spread Swadeshi ideas.

In December 1906 several prominent Muslim leaders founded the All-India Muslim League at Dacca, now Dhaka, to defend Muslim political interests. It grew out of the All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference held at Dacca from 27 to 30 December 1906, on the proposal of Nawab Khwaja Salimullah. At first it represented only a limited section of the Muslim population, mainly its elite. The League's demand for separate electorates was met in the Indian Councils Act of 1909, known as the Morley-Minto Reforms.

Revolutionary Activity: Jugantar, the Kingsford Attack and the Alipore Case

With the open movement checked and the leaders removed, some young nationalists turned to individual violence. They had found every peaceful route closed by repression, and they concluded that the British would have to be expelled physically. Revolutionary groups already existed. The Anushilan Samiti was set up in 1902, with centres in many towns and villages, to give young men intellectual, moral and physical training. In April 1906 an inner circle around Barindra Kumar Ghosh, Aurobindo's brother, started the weekly Yugantar and the Jugantar party, which collected arms and explosives. After the police action at the Barisal Conference, its writing turned openly to force.

In late April 1908 two young members of the group, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki, tried to kill Douglas Kingsford, a judge who had given severe sentences to Swadeshi activists, including flogging and long imprisonment. They threw bombs at a carriage at Muzaffarpur that they believed was Kingsford's, but it carried two British women, who were killed. Prafulla Chaki shot himself before arrest. Khudiram Bose, then 18, was tried and hanged on 11 August 1908, one of the first revolutionaries in Bengal to be executed by the British.

A few days after the attempt Aurobindo Ghose, Barindra and many others were arrested and held at Alipore. In the Alipore Bomb Case Aurobindo was defended by Chittaranjan Das and acquitted. Barindra and another accused were sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment in the Cellular Jail in the Andamans, and most others received long terms. The verdicts were given on 6 May 1909. Aurobindo withdrew from politics and settled at Pondicherry in 1910.

Violence did not end there. In 1909 bombs were thrown at Viceroy Minto's carriage at Ahmedabad and a district magistrate was shot dead at Nashik. In December 1912 Rash Behari Bose and Sachin Sanyal threw a bomb at Viceroy Hardinge as he entered the new capital at Delhi. Revolutionary terrorism became the most substantial legacy of Swadeshi Bengal, but its narrow upper-caste social base, its religious idiom that kept Muslims aloof and its lack of any mass involvement meant that it could not withstand state repression.

Annulment of the Partition of Bengal and Assessment

Partition of Bengal Annulled: The Delhi Durbar of 12 December 1911

The partition of Bengal was annulled by King George V at the Delhi Durbar on 12 December 1911. The Bengali-speaking districts were reunited, Bihar and Orissa were taken out of Bengal, and Assam was made a separate province. The capital of India was shifted from Calcutta to Delhi in the same announcement, and Lord Hardinge was the viceroy under whom the settled fact was unsettled.

Accounts differ on the main reason. One says the government could not end the protests and agreed to reverse the partition. Another says it was done mainly to curb the menace of revolutionary terrorism. Both agree that the Swadeshi movement and its offshoots made the partition impossible to hold.

The annulment came as a shock to Muslims of Bengal, who had seen the eastern province as a sign of the government's concern for their interests. The move of the capital to Delhi, a city linked with Muslim glory, was meant partly as a sop to them, but they were not pleased. By 1911 the position of Muslims in the eastern province had improved. They held almost one-fifth of the 2,305 gazetted appointments held by Indians, against one-eighth of 1,235 higher appointments in 1901.

Lord Curzon's Policies and Their Long-Term Implications

Curzon was Viceroy from 1899 to 1905. He appointed commissions on education, irrigation, police and other branches of administration, and legislation followed their reports. He created the North West Frontier Province, sent Francis Younghusband's expedition to Tibet at the end of 1903, which ended in the Treaty of Lhasa in September 1904, and restored the Taj Mahal. He resigned in August 1905 after a dispute with Kitchener over military organisation.

Curzon had dismissed the Congress in 1900 as tottering to its fall. In the event the reverse happened. His partition of Bengal and the controversy that followed did much to revitalise the Congress, which he left more active and effective than at any time in its history.

Assessment of the Swadeshi Movement: Achievements and Limitations

Despite its gradual decline into inactivity, the movement was a turning point in modern Indian history.

Its achievements were lasting.

• Mass participation: Students, women and some urban and rural groups who had stayed outside politics took part, and every major trend of the later national movement appeared in it, from moderation and extremism to revolutionary terrorism, from petitions to passive resistance and non-cooperation.
• Culture and industry: Its richness went beyond politics into art, literature, science and industry.
• Colonial ideas questioned: It undermined the hold of colonial ideas and institutions, and later struggles drew heavily on its experience.
• New leadership: It brought Tilak, Lajpat Rai, Pal and Aurobindo to the front of the national movement.

Its limitations were as clear.

• Peasantry untouched: It stayed mostly with the upper and middle classes and zamindars and did not reach the peasantry.
• No organisation: It failed to create an effective organisation or party structure.
• Muslim masses: It could not carry the Muslim masses, in part because of divide and rule and in part because of its Hindu symbols.
• Unfocused methods: Passive resistance and non-cooperation remained mostly ideas and were never given a disciplined focus.

Why the Swadeshi Movement Declined by 1908

By 1908 the open phase of the movement was almost over, though the underground revolutionary phase went on. The reasons ran together.

• Repression: The laws of 1907 to 1910, the prosecutions and the deportations broke the organisation.
• Loss of leaders: Most leaders were arrested or deported by 1908, and Aurobindo and Bipin Chandra Pal left active politics.
• Divisions: Quarrels among leaders, magnified by the Surat split, did much harm.
• No new forms: The movement roused people but did not find new ways to use the energy it had released.
• Narrow base: With the peasantry outside it, the movement had no mass support to fall back on once repression fell on its leaders in the towns.
• Fatigue: It is hard to sustain a mass movement at a high pitch for long.

Dates, Names and Traps for the Examination

Key Dates of the Partition and Commonly Confused Events

Several events of other years are often confused with the launch of the movement.

Sources

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• NCERT: India and the Contemporary World II (Class X), Nationalism in India
• NCERT: India and the Contemporary World II (Class X), The Age of Industrialisation
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• Wikipedia: Khudiram Bose
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