ABSTRACT
If any one political drama dominates the intellectual history of Calcutta during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries then surely it must be the Swadeshi movement of 1905 to 1908. These three hectic years of boycotts, protest marches, and revived domestic industry have been seen by several historians as epoch-defi ning. Swadeshi (literally meaning “of one’s own country”) appears as that crucial moment when a nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance discovers its radical voice and thrusts the “second city” of the British Empire to the forefront of the anticolonial struggle.1 Recently, Swadeshi has been presented almost as an apotheosis for the very concept of Bengali “culture” itself: the point at which “culturalism,” having migrated to India from northern Europe, transforms into the organising trope in a popular celebration of local and communal distinctiveness.2
