Chapter : 5. Clothing : A Social History
A. The Swadeshi Movement
(i) India accounted for one-fourth of the world's manufactured goods in the seventeenth century. There were a million weavers in Bengal alone in the middle of the eighteenth century.
(ii) The Industrial Revolution in Britain, which mechanised spinning and weaving and greatly increased the demand for raw materials such as cotton and indigo, changed India's status in the world economy.
(iii) Political control of India helped the British in two ways : Indian peasants could be forced to grow crops such as indigo, and cheap British manufacture easily replaced coarser Indian one. Large numbers of Indian weavers and spinners were left without work, and important textile weaving centers such as Murshidabad, Machilipatnam and Surat declined as demand fell.
(iv) In the middle of the 20th century, large numbers of people began boycotting British or mill-made cloth and adopting Khadi, even though it was coarser, more expensive and difficult to obtain.
(v) The Swadeshi movement developed in reaction to this measure. People were urged to boycott British goods of all kinds and start their own industries for the manufacture of goods such as matchboxes and cigarettes. Mass protests followed, with people vowing to cleanse themselves of colonial rule. The use of khadi was made a patriotic duty.
(vi) The change of dress appealed largely to the upper castes and classes rather than to those who had to make do with less and could not afford the new products.
(vii)Though many people rallied to the cause of nationalism at this time, it was almost impossible to compete with cheap British goods that had flooded the market.
(viii)The experiment with Swadeshi gave Mahatma Gandhi important ideas about using cloth as a symbolic weapon against British rule.
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