The Swadeshi Movement: The First Step Toward Indian Independence
Beginning in the 1830s, the British East India Company provided Western education to a small number of Indian elites: it was cheaper and more effective than recruiting the entire work force of the empire back home in Britain. In addition to training clerks of all kinds, the East Indian Company created as a by-product what Thomas Babington Macaulay described as "a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect". A large proportion of this class came from Bengal province, home to Calcutta, then the capital of British India. Calcutta soon became the center of a thriving Indian intelligentsia.
Following the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, expanded opportunities for Western education and Queen Victoria's proclamation of equal opportunity for all races seemed to open the door for advancement. A generation of young Indians saw Western education as the path to jobs in law, journalism, education, and, most importantly, the Indian Civil Service. They soon discovered that the door was less open than it initially appeared. Thwarted in their desire to play a larger role in India's government, the most politically conscious among them founded India's first nationalist organizations. At first, their model was not the United States but Canada: not independence, but self-rule within the Commonwealth.
In 1905, the Indian government divided Bengal into two provinces, leaving its powerful western-educated elite a minority in its own homeland. The official explanation for the division was bureaucratic efficiency. The western-educated Bengali elite saw it as an attempt to undercut their power base.
Bengalis signed petitions against the partition and marched in protest through the streets of Calcutta. They also boycotted British imports, especially British cloth. Protestors burned British-made saris and other cloth to the cry of swa-deshi (of our own country). Wearing clothing made from swadeshi cloth became an emblem of nationalist beliefs. A few leaders called for Indians to boycott not only British goods, but British institutions, knowing that the law courts and government services could not function without the support of Indian employees. The movement soon spilled over into other regions of India.
As swadeshi sales grew and India's industrial base boomed, the Indian government cracked down. The movement's leaders were arrested. Politically active students found their financial air threatened. The police attacked protest marchers with long, metal-tipped poles called lathis.
After several years of increasingly violent protests, the Indian government annulled the partition of Bengal and instituted a series of reforms designed to give Indians a voice in local government. At the time, nationalist leaders were hopeful that they had taken the first step toward self-rule. In fact, the partition of Bengal proved to be the first in a series of decisions made over the next thirty years that would drive Indians to demand their independence.
Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas
It will come as no surprise to regular readers of History in the Margins--or anyone who browses my office bookshelves--that I am fascinated by maps. As I've mentioned before, history happens in both time and space. How can you understand an event/culture/war/empire if you don't have a feel for its geography?
As someone interested in the times and places where cultures meet, draws lines in the sand, and change each other, I am also fascinated by New Orleans*--a city formed by the meeting and melding of cultures.
You can imagine my delight when Shelf Awareness sent me a copy of Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas to review.
Unfathomable City is no standard atlas. Essayist Rebecca Solnit and film-maker Rebecca Snedeker bring together writers, artists and cartographers to consider New Orleans, a city in which the lines between races, cultures, and even water and land blur and shift. Environmentalists, geographers, scholars, local experts and newcomers to the city explore New Orleans through the lenses of their respective concerns, their findings presented in 22 full-color, two-page maps and related essays.
The initial map and essay illustrate "How New Orleans Happened", mapping three centuries of expansion and its causes. With the basic history and geography of the city established, the book goes on to explore both the things "everyone knows" about New Orleans and unexpected aspects of an eternally surprising city. Maps on cemeteries, the petroleum and natural gas industries and carnival parade routes are juxtaposed with maps on Arabs in New Orleans and the city's role in the international banana trade Several maps join topics that at first seem unrelated-- seafood and the sex trade, housing developments and the music industry--bringing new revelations in the process.
With beautiful maps and challenging essays, Unfathomable City presents New Orleans as infinitely complex and ultimately unknowable. The result is not a comprehensive guide to the city, but an invitation.
*But then, who isn't fascinated by New Orleans?
A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Road Trip Through History: The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum
More than a month ago I promised you a report on our visit to the LBJ Library. I fully expected to sit down and write it later that week. The fact that I wandered off into other historical by-ways is simply a reflection of how easily I'm distracted, not on the quality of the museum.
The Johnson Library was an eye-opener for me. Johnson was the president of my early childhood. My memories of him are limited to black and white photographs, set against a mental background of images from the Vietnam War. Laid over that was the image of Johnson as a major reform president, thwarted by the conflicting demands of the Great Society and the war*--the result of writing a book on the history of socialism.** I left the museum with a stronger sense of Johnson as man and as president--and a deep respect for his accomplishments. Historian Robert Dallek describes Johnson as "a tornado in pants". That's pretty dang accurate.
Here were some of the things that took me by surprise:
- Johnson's first job was teaching school in a rural district in Texas. His students were underprivileged Hispanics, who struggled against both poverty and discrimination. That experience shaped his political goals. If a president ever deserved to be known as the "education president" it was LBJ.
- Pictures of the young LBJ with lots of hair.
- After the attack on Pearl Harbor, LBJ (then 33) was the first member of Congress to volunteer for active duty.
- The sheer scope of reforms that his administration put in place, from civil rights bills to Head Start, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Medicare, the Clean Air Act. Johnson submitted eighty-seven bills to the first session of the eighty-ninth Congress. Eight-four of them passed.
I was particularly taken with a series of stations titled "Please hold for the president". You pick up a telephone and hear actual phone calls made by President Johnson to members of his cabinet, members of Congress, and other political figures. It gave me chills to listen to him assure Martin Luther King, Jr. of his support for the civil rights movement. It amused me to hear Ladybird critique one of his speeches--she gave it a solid B. A tender conversation with Jacqueline Kennedy soon after her husband's assassination brought tears to my eyes. And a call where the secure White House line got crossed with a long distance call between two ordinary American homes was laugh out loud funny.
If you're in Austin, take the time to visit.***
*"Guns and butter" is a hard motto to live up to.
**Blatant self-promotion alert
**Heck, if you're near any presidential library, take the time to visit. We've been blow away by both the Truman and Johnson libraries this year.