Barabazar, October 1905: Should the Cloth Merchant Sign?
Calcutta, October 1905, a cloth shop in Barabazar. The merchant's stock is forty per cent imported Manchester and Lancashire cloth, thirty-five per cent mill cloth from Bombay, and twenty-five per cent handloom from Nadia and Shantipur. The local Swadeshi committee has asked him to sign a pledge boycotting foreign cloth and to burn the imported bales publicly. He owes a Marwari financer ₹6,000, his daughter's wedding is in December, and he knows that if imports fall the Bombay mills will raise their prices. Students and schoolteachers have already been picketing shops further down the lane. Meanwhile his cousin writes from Mymensingh that the boycott call is finding little response among Muslim peasants in East Bengal, where the new province is expected to give them a majority they did not have, and where the movement looks like a bhadralok Hindu affair. The committee wants his answer before the puja crowds arrive.
1. Advise the merchant. Should he sign the pledge, refuse, or do something else? Show the reasoning behind your advice.
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Advise him to read the pledge as an economic calculation, not a moral test. Forty per cent of his stock is imported; burning it means an immediate loss while he still owes ₹6,000 and faces a December wedding. Refusing costs him the custom of students, teachers and the professional families who are the movement's core. But if the boycott holds, the Bombay mill cloth he already holds rises in value and the Nadia and Shantipur handloom trade revives - so signing and then quietly selling off existing foreign stock protects both his purse and his reputation. That is not cynicism; it is the class arithmetic that made Swadeshi strong among petty traders, students and some professionals, and weak among those whose margins depended on imports. A good answer names this divergence of interest rather than praising or blaming the merchant.
2. Using the merchant's figures, assess the strengths and limits of boycott as a political weapon.
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Strengths: it gives people without votes or arms a way to act, it strikes at the most visible symbol of dependence, and it builds self-help institutions - national schools, swadeshi mills, indigenous banks. Limits are visible in the same numbers. With forty per cent of stock imported, a total boycott raises the price of cotton cloth for precisely the people asked to join, so the poorest pay first. Enforcement is difficult without coercion, and picketing easily turns into pressure on small traders who cannot absorb a loss. Goods can also be routed through intermediaries, so imports fall on paper while the bales still arrive. The conclusion to argue is that the boycott was a real weapon but a blunt one: it worked best where it was backed by an alternative supply - the handloom quarter of the merchant's stock - and worst where it asked consumers to pay more for an abstraction.
3. Why did the movement not become a mass movement across all of Bengal, and what did the annulment of the partition in 1911 actually settle?
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The movement's leadership, language and social base were largely Hindu bhadralok. The government presented the partition as a benefit to the Muslim majority of the new East Bengal province, and the promise of a university at Dacca strengthened that appeal; a call to boycott traders of another community carried little weight with a peasant who saw a majority province as an opening. So the movement was intense but narrow - a limitation of social base, not a failure of sincerity. The annulment of 1911 was a genuine victory: the partition was undone and the capital moved to Delhi, which reduced Calcutta's dominance. But it settled nothing communal. The separate electorates granted in 1909 remained, so the political division survived the administrative reversal, and the Swadeshi years had already taught both sides how to organise as communities.