Art and the Swadeshi Movement

In my quest to discover the origins of the exquisite tiles in my aunts’ home in Karachi’s old Amil Colony, I stumbled upon a whole new dimension of the Swadeshi, and later Swaraj, movement, an important rallying point for the Freedom Movement. Swaraj is commonly identified with Non-cooperation, Civil Disobedience, and political rallies. Behind the public bonfires of European cloth, manufacturers, designers, artists, poets and journalists quietly built factories, established presses, redesigned art school curricula that not only spread the spirit of revolution across India but ensured there were locally produced alternatives.

Jamshed Nusserwanji established Bharat Tiles with Pheroze Sidhwa in 1922 in Bombay with a manufacturing branch in Karachi, as his swadeshi contribution, saying “India needs both economic and political independence”.   Developing a new process using coloured cements, the exquisite tiles we see in all heritage buildings in South Asia replaced the competition - Minton Tiles of Stoke on Trent, England.  Stamped on the back of every tile, was a map of India.

Fifty years earlier, the Parsi statesman, Dadabhai Naoroji  ( 1825-1917), laid the foundations for Home Rule, by raising the question of drain of wealth from India to England in the British Parliament. `He opened for the first time, a branch of an Indian company in Britain, and established in 1867 the East India Association to put across the India point of view before the British public.  The Association successfully countered the propaganda that the Asian was inferior to the Europeans and soon became an influential voice in the British Parliament. Naoroji published “Poverty and un-British Rule in India” in 1901. He worked side by side with Jinnah, Tilak, Gokhale and Gandhi.

The attempt to partition Bengal in 1905 gave rise to the first swadeshi movement. Soon local manufacture of bicycles, matches, fans, papermills, fabrics and a host of everyday products began proudly displaying nationalist slogans: “ Buy Swadeshi” “ India’s Pride Nation’s Wealth”; “Boycott Foreign Goods”. Pakistan’s famous Tibet products  of Kohinoor Chemicals grew out of this swadeshi movement.

The Freedom Movement is usually defined as a Hindu Muslim effort, however along with Parsis many Christians played an important role in the 30s and 40s including JJ Cornelius, Paul Ramasamy, Anne Mascarenes , Joachim Alva and others. Lal Din Sharaf formed the Pakistan Masih League in 1945, the minority wing of Pakistan Muslim League.  All India Christian Conference along with other minorities also rejected the Nehru  report supporting the stance of Mr. Jinnah. Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first female ( and Parsi ) photojournalist, and Lahore’s Faustin Elmer Chaudhry  documented the movement from the Indian perspective. Pakistan’s National anthem composed by A.K.Chagla was set to orchestra by Tollentine Fonseca.

The dissolution by the British of the Mughal art karkhanas sent court artists to the palaces of Nawabs and Maharajas, New art forms emerged incorporating local styles. The 19 C  Kalighat caricature style paintings were already a voice of dissension.  The conscious decision to reclaim art in the service of nationalism grew with the Bengal Art Movement in Calcutta. Although supported by an Englishman, E.B.Havell, artists led by the poet Rabindranath Tagore and his artist nephew, Abanindranath, turned to traditional canons of art. Tagore’s Shantiniketin School became very influential with branches in many cities including the Saranagati building at Pakistan Chowk in Karachi, where Sughra Rababi first trained. Tagore’s modern day “Bharat Mata” (1905) and  'The Last Hours of Shah Jahan' ( 1902), A.R Chughtai’s romanticized oriental imagery and Jamini Roy’s folk art, became iconic of the movement. The artist Fyzee Rahamin, renounced his western portraiture in the 1920s in the wake of Mahatma Gandhi's nationalist movement.  Nandalal Bose and his pupils at Santiniketan were selected by Gandhi to decorate the Haripura Congress enclosure in 1937.

Bose’s1930 linocut print of Gandhi on his salt march,, Ravi Varma’s Sarswati ( 1896) , Amrita Sher Gill’s Three Girls( 1935); Zainul Abideen’s Bengal famine Series ( 1943) were as much political as artistic statements. Ananda Coomeraswamy’s  publications of extensively researched local aesthetics are still of great importance. The Art historian, Partha Mitter writes “the extremist political leader, Aurobindo Ghosh, deemed art important enough to be brought into his political programme”    

The Indian People’s Theatre Association formed in 1943 used music and theatre to awaken  the common man.  Songs became an important medium to express patriotism, best known being the Vande Mataram and Iqbal’s Tarana e Hind, “Sara Jahan se Achha Hindustan hamara”. Cinema, too played its role.  The popular song from the  film ‘Kismat’ (1943) “Door hato aye duniya walo hindustan hamara hai” was written and sung by a Freedom fighter, Kavi Pradeep. Poetry and song united farmer and landlord, the educated and the illiterate, city and village.  

Hasrat Mohani’s “Inqilab Zindabad “ became Bhagat Singh’s slogan. The political poetry of Shibli, Iqbal, Josh, Jauhar, and countless others in almost every language of India directly impacted the Freedom movement. Poems were recited in prison, at rallies, published in revolutionary newspapers and even recited on the gallows.  

The new printing presses allowed poetry and books to be published and shared and gave rise to newspapers and journalism. A vibrant nationalist press emerged from 1870 onwards despite press acts to restrict anti British writings. Fearless writers faced imprisonment, confiscation of presses, only to continue upon their release. The names of newspapers -  Comrade, Hamdard, Young India, Bandemataram, Inqilab and The Dawn, were themselves a message of revolution.

The expansion of the Freedom Movement was only possible by first undermining the absolute cultural authority of the British, by reviving pride in all things local from the charkha to indigenous languages and traditions.

Durriya Kazi

Karachi. May 14, 2018