In Inviting the “Invaders”: India, Inc. – for Sale (Jaipur, 1998), Dharmendra Bhandari describes how the Government of India is selling off its industries, assets and resources to private companies, in order to service its massive debt.  Following the World Bank and IMF’s Structural Adjustment Program, Indian banks have been taken over by foreign interests; TNCs have swept in and destroyed local industries; and each Indian man, woman and child bears a Rs.10,000 debt on their heads. Calling for swadeshi,Bhandari asks the Government to impose stricter financial controls on corruption and to give preference to Indian companies over foreign ones. 

Swadeshi has re-emerged in the age of globalization.  For many Indian industrialists, it means protection from TNCs, until they are able to create their own to compete in the global marketplace.  For others, it means ‘India-First’; they encourage people to buy only those products made in India.  Others view swadeshi as xenophobic and ‘backward’ and condemn it in favor of free markets.  Even more confusing is the stance of the current BJP government, who preaches swadeshi while simultaneously removing restrictions on imports, adhering to WTO guidelines, and begging for foreign direct investment.

These understandings of swadeshi greatly contrast with those of Gandhi and Ananda Coomaraswamy.  For Gandhiji, swadeshi was a spirit of selfless service, conscious self-denial and simplicity; that is, “the Swadeshist will learn to do without hundreds of things which today he considers necessary.”  Swadeshi means living within the local – supporting our localities by encouraging our neighbors to take up healthy occupations, by seeking interdependent solutions to local problems, and by creating self-supporting villages, who exchange only the necessities that cannot be produced locally.

Ananda Coomaraswamy added another dimension to swadeshi: valuing the creative and aesthetic elements of the local.  He was concerned that Swadeshi literature seemed to emphasize India-based production of European things.  In the process, local arts and crafts were destroyed and the status of artisans degraded, in order to produce cheap imitations of European-type luxuries and styles.  Coomaraswamy called upon Indians to stop the Indian boycott of the Indian craftsman; he explained that “imitations, whether in [made in] Swadeshi factories or in our lives, of things European are, and must always be, for ourselves socially and industrially disintegrating, and for the rest of the world wholly valueless.”

Coomaraswamy also distinguished between true and false swadeshi.  True swadeshi posits that human beings are more important than products and profits.  It respects the dignity of labor and is therefore opposed to mass production, mechanization, dehumanizing working conditions, and other aspects of industrialization.  “True Swadeshishould be to restore, not destroy, the organic life of the village communities.”  False swadeshi, on the other hand, “does not object to crowding craftsmen into factories, where drunkenness, physical degeneration, [psychological impotence] and all other natural results of the factory system follow.”  Coomaraswamy felt strongly that if Indiawere to adopt swadeshi, it would have to be true in its purpose, values, and processes.

Taken together, these visions demonstrate that swadeshi can be self-organizing, regenerative and rejuvenating. It can challenge the brutality and exploitation occurring in Indian villages by the hands of Indian industries and Multi-National Companies, which seek to suck the village dry to increase their revenues. A true sense of swadeshi can also lead us to question the cheap imitations of Euro-American culture/values that many of the so-called educated are currently engaging in.

Questions to explore swadeshi:

- How would concepts of freedom, diversity, and creativity manifest themselves in a swadeshi economy?

- In what ways could Big Business, consumer culture, speed, profit, efficiency and free trade be resisted through swadeshi?

Sources: M.K.Gandhi, Village Swaraj. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing, 1996 ed.; A. Coomaraswamy, Art and Swadeshi. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1994 ed.