Ambivalence in Independence Movement
In July of 1905, George Nathaniel Lord Curzon, then viceroy of India, announced the decision of the British government in India to partition the
provice of Bengal. The partition was to be defined along roughly religious lines. In response to British intransigence on this issue, a group of
educated Bengalis, principally Hindu, organized a campaign to boycott foreign goods, to buy and sell only swadeshi, the goods of our home. In
the face of a recalcitrant peasantry, some leaders adopted terrorist methods, very often against Muslim traders in particular-in striking, and
tragic, contrast with the later Gandhian movement Hogan, 1993: 23-24. Swadeshi Movement was one of the major events in the history of Indian
independence movement from the British Imperialism which involved all of the people in India. There was a protest against the partition of Bengal by Lord
Curzon. Swadeshi movement, in short, can be seen as the attempt to boycott British commodities as a protest against British government.
There are famous figures of Swadeshi Movement. They are Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. Both Gandhi and
Nehru represented different idea of Swadeshi Movement. Somjee, in his journal Political Philosophy of Rabindranth Tagore, explained about the different thought
between Gandhi and Nehru that led the author of The Home and the World to apply their idea and depict the conflict during the Swadeshi Movement within
Indian activist. Gandhi proposed the form of passive resistance and non-violent movement because he saw modernity as a threat for the nation and culture which
is known as constructive Swadeshi. Gandhi was easily able to identify himself with the religious traditions of
this country. He could even identify himself with other countries where such traditions existed and was happy about it. His humanism was
religious in character and to that extent somewhat rigid. Nevertheless, he did not find any difficulty in discerning the humanistic unity of all
religions in this country and elsewhere 1961: 136.
While, Nehru saw that foreign domination should be banished with any ways, and this is known as destructive Swadeshi.
Nehru, in his Autobiography, has come out with some of the best lines ever written on rootlessness. They are: I am a stranger and an alien in the
West. I cannot be of it. But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exiles feelings. Nevertheless, the all-absorbing work of fight- ing for
Indias freedom and of governing it as its first Prime Minister gave him a sense of purpose and belonging to an ideal. It also kept him inordinately
busy either to let him dwell publicly on that emotion or to dramatise it in his writings 1961: 136.
In relation to history, Tagore’s The Home and the World was written during the process to get freedom from the British in Swadeshi Movement.
According to the novel’s setting, the process of reaching the independence has not finished yet. Therefore, Tagore precisely drew his attention to the conflict
happening and the searching of identity which causes ambivalence character of the colonised people through the traditional idea versus modernity idea.