CHAPTER XIV THE SWADESHI MOVEMENT THE abuse with which one finds the British Raj occasionally assailed in India is the finest tribute to our integrity and toleration that could be conceived. It is the tremendous faith in our honour which the native has which makes him so outspoken of what he takes to be a breach of it: he honestly believes that our devotion to an ideal would prevent our resenting, as unmannerly, the most censorious assistance to its preservation. It is really rather touching, and really rather nice; though coming straight from England one hardly knows, when offered such assurances, in what attitude to receive them. Still such a confidence is proof that it has been deserved; faith is not bred of broken vows; and if one has to blush for England's present indifference to India, one can swell with pride at this evidence of her magnanimity in the past. Thus it was that when, as a result of Manchester's refusal to interest herself in the partition of Bengal, a boycott of British goods was decreed, the Bengali was astonished to find the boycott treated by English officials and in the English Press as an act of disloyalty, when he never imagined it could be regarded save as a perfectly legal and the only effective method of calling attention to his wrongs. It was thus avowedly "a political weapon used for a definite political purpose," and those who unreservedly condemn must not forget how tightly closed are their ears to any of India's arguments which does not affect their pockets. The boycott served this useful end; that it called attention to the condition of local industries, and thus directly inspired the Swadeshi movement. Swadeshism means nothing more than the patronage of home-made goods, and this encouragement has come at a time when the village industries of India were passing, one by one, out of existence. The life of India is essentially the life of the village, the people of India are in overwhelming proportions a village people, and their communities are, or at least were, the most attractive, the most complete, the most contented in the world, Within their self-sufficing confines trade is no vulgar source of profit for which men scheme and strive, but a calling, often a holy calling, handed down from father to son through the generations, each with its own unchanging ideals, its own zealously-guarded craft. At the entrance to the village street beside his wheel, which is only a wooden disc weighted with mud and spun on an axle, the potter sits, with dreamy fingers squeezing the clay to the shapes of his fancy; on one side of him a brown heap of earth, on the other the frail children of his fancy waiting for the fire which shall fit them for use; type, since man made pots, of the unchallengeable authority and detachment of the Eternal Potter. Further down the street, past the green and orange and salmon-pink piles of the grain sellers, raised but a foot from the ground, open to all that care to lounge and look, are the workshops of the brass and copper smiths, ringing all day to the sound of the hammer, and with the red breathing of a furnace in their dusky depths. Hard by is the tinsmith, slowly grinding his amalgam in a mortar; while, further on, a woman with a sari drawn across her face, watches the silversmith, with no tools but a hammer and nail, graving some shape of god or beast upon the bracelet cast from the silver she had brought him; for his wife is the poor man's bank, and on her, against the evil day, he hangs his earnings, a burden to which she does not object. In this district or that the village may be distinguished by a special craft; by carvers in ebony or ivory, blackwood or stone; by some famous maker of swords or worker in lacquer; or a stall may glimmer with the brightness of glass beads and bangles. Behind the houses the looms will be at work, gay spaces of blue and purple and scarlet in the shadow of the green trees on which the frames are hung, and from which, as the shuttle is thrown to and fro, the scented blossoms fall upon the workers' fingers; while, further on, the dyers swing from side to side across the width of the sunlit street, some length of intense and dripping colour. As the afternoon wears on the women make their way to the well, their robes rich as illuminated letters, brass chattis or brown water jars upon their heads, there to loiter and gossip till the calmeyed kine are driven lowing from the fields, with a silvery trail of dust behind them. Then the sounds of the hammers begin to cease, a film settles on the red-eyed furnaces, the dyer hangs his last damp sari up, the looms are covered and put away, and the village elders gather in the "gate," there to hear the latest news read out to them from the cheap daily sheets which circulate everywhere, to discuss recent judgments, from Tahsildar to Deputy Commissioner, which have come to their hearing, and to shake their heads at the crops; till the lights begin to glimmer in the growing darkness and the sound of songs— songs straight from the Ramayana or Mahabharata -rise from round the cooking pots upon the cooling air. That is a picture of village life all over India, a picture whose restful and contented charm cannot anywhere be bettered, but a picture of a life which is gradually ceasing to be, as the work of the hand craftsman is undersold and displaced by the cheaper uglier products of the machine-driven West. |