Boycott and Swaraj: these were weapons of mass unrest and grievance to challenge the British Indian Government announcement on 19 July 1905 to partition Bengal. Viceroy Lord Curzon had planned the new province would be called ‘East Bengal and Assam’, comprising Chittagong, Dacca and Rajsahi divisions, hilly Tripura, Maldah and Assam. What took the British government by surprise was the magnitude of protests, strikes and public grievances across towns and villages of Bengal, Maharashtra, Punjab, Madras and in England and Europe too.

Leaders of the stature of Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Aurobindo Ghosh; poets-educationists and painters Rabindranath Tagore, Sister Nivedita, Jagadish Chandra Basu and Abanindranath Tagore; barristers AC Banerji, AK Ghosh defending labour disputes; Satischandra Mukerji’s Dawn, Jogindranath Chattopadhyay’s monthly Swadeshi, the Sandhya of Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya were at the forefront when labour disputes, as in the case of the Burns Iron Works, gave the Swadeshi movement one of its defining moments.

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Reading the pledge of patriotism published by Krishna Kumar Mitra, the editor of Sanjivani, is soul-stirring till date: “We are taking this oath in the name of our holy motherland and for the welfare of our country that we shall never use foreign goods if we get goods manufactured in this country. For this if we have to bear financial or other sacrifice, we shall be ready to do it. We will not only do all these ourselves, but try to persuade friends and all other people to act accordingly.” On 7 August 1905, this boycott pledge, now a resolution, was adopted at a huge public meeting in Calcutta’s Town Hall. Lord Curzon had arrogantly declared, “Bengal partition is a settled fact.”

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Moderate Congress leader Surendranath Bandyopadhyay at once sharply retorted “We shall unsettle the settled fact”. Facts and figures on Swadeshi movement are bewildering, awe-inspiring, and accessible from diverse sources. “This ‘divide and rule’ measure of Viceroy Curzon provoked angry outbursts which also had a distinct working-class dimension in addition to intensification of the Swadeshi campaign and beginning of revolutionary terrorism,” noted DP Buxi, who chronicled ‘A Hundred Years of Its First Political Strike’, celebrating the rise of the Indian working class.

His writings in the CPI (ML) archives state: “The first trade union in the true sense of the term was formed on 21 October 1905 amidst intensive strike struggle in printing presses of the government. In 1905 itself workers of Burn Company (Howrah) and........

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