Swadeshi, the Extremists, and the Partition of Bengal

In 1905, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, partitioned Bengal, then India's largest province, into a Muslim-majority east and a Hindu-majority west, claiming administrative convenience. Nationalists saw the real aim as dividing Hindus and Muslims and weakening the growing political movement in Bengal. The protest that followed, the Swadeshi movement, called for boycotting British goods and using Indian-made, swadeshi, goods instead, and it spread from Bengal to Bombay, Madras, and the Punjab.

Swadeshi was more than a boycott. It promoted Indian schools, Indian industries, and national education, and it drew in students, women, and workers who had not taken part in politics before. The movement split the Congress between Moderates, who wanted to limit the boycott to Bengal, and Extremists, led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Lala Lajpat Rai, the Lal-Bal-Pal trio, who wanted to extend it across India and to demand swaraj, self-rule, rather than reforms. The split came into the open at the Surat session of 1907, when the Congress divided.

The same years saw the founding of the All-India Muslim League at Dhaka in 1906, formed by Muslim leaders who felt that the Congress did not represent Muslim interests and who sought safeguards for Muslims under British rule. The Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, embodied in the Indian Councils Act of that year, introduced separate electorates, under which Muslims voted for Muslim candidates in special constituencies. Nationalists later criticised separate electorates as dividing the electorate by religion, though their defenders argued that they protected a minority.

The Partition of Bengal was annulled in 1911, when the transfer of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi was also announced, but the movement left a lasting legacy. It showed that mass boycott and national education could mobilise people beyond the educated elite, and it set the pattern of split and reunion that would recur in the Congress. It also marked the point at which communal representation entered Indian politics as a formal institution, with consequences that lasted until Partition.