ABSTRACT
Practising yoga, abstaining from sexual activity and reading the Gita formed central features of the daily discipline of the Swadeshi revolutionaries. The anti-colonial nationalist struggle in these years was often framed in religious terms. Swadeshi radicals believed themselves to be involved in pracesta (righteous striving). By the 1890s, in the prime colonial cosmopolis of Calcutta, it was common for individuals from diverse classes to have had some experience of foreign travel, or to know someone with stories of life abroad — whether he or she be coolie, lascar, free labourer, hajj pilgrim, student or bhadralok tourist. Ascetic spiritual practice on the part of individual Hindu aspirants was required to achieve this goal of blasting apart the frame of colonial universalism, taught Vivekananda. The notion of world-revising spiritual force erupting out of individual subjecthoods became a central trope of the Swadeshi avant-garde.
