After British Raj, Trump revives ‘Swadeshi’ chic

Swadeshi was suddenly back in fashion this summer, thanks to a Trump.

And no, it wasn’t because of Ivanka Trump and her eponymous clothing line, but her father Donald J Trump, whose return to the White House and tariff war on Indian goods in the late summer of 2025 gave Prime Minister Narendra Modi the perfect cue to amplify a familiar call: choose “Made-in-India” because, while investment may come from abroad, “the sweat is ours”.

This is not entirely new. Modi has for years promoted campaigns such as Make in India and Atmanirbhar Bharat to boost domestic manufacturing, but the remark and related calls to promote local production were framed as practical responses to shifting global trade pressures.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, too, recently linked these campaigns back to a cultural and civilisational ethos. In his Vijayadashami address in Nagpur, he argued that Swadeshi was not just about economics but about self-respect, social unity, and national character, urging Indians to “use more and more indigenous products”.

Also read: Diversity, not ‘us vs them’ mindset, India’s tradition: RSS chief Bhagwat

From muslin to Made in India

On August 7, 1905, a crowd in Calcutta’s (now Kolkata) Town Hall passed a boycott resolution that would reverberate across the subcontinent: The Swadeshi movement. It was a campaign to promote Indian-made goods and revive village industry and it was formally launched as an opposition to British policies. The movement transformed what had been piecemeal resistance into an organised strategy of economic self-help and cultural mobilisation.

One of the most poignant backdrops to Swadeshi was India’s pre-colonial mastery in textiles. Bengal’s fabled muslin was so fine that a whole saree could pass through a ring—a quality that dazzled European leaders of fashion such as Marie Antoinette of France and Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. A popular story that’s done the rounds claims that the British chopped off the weavers’ hands to prevent them from producing such fine cloth ever again; but serious historians say this story is a myth.

Despite that, it still resonates with the public, as it reflects a brutal truth; it shows how the British policy dismantled our very rich indigenous industry. With the East India Company controlling trade, the British needed a captive market and so, in the churns of commerce, the rapidly booming industrial North of Britian flooded India with machine-made cloth from towns like Manchester and Lancashire. Local handlooms that would take days to produce handwoven cloth could not compete with this mass-produced “fast fashion” (yes, Chinese brands like Shein didn’t pioneer the concept; the British did) and were devastated.

Also read: Why 'Swadeshi' chest-thumping falls flat against production numbers

Bombay cotton, Manchester mills and lost traditions

Cotton grown in Gujarat, auctioned in Bombay (now Mumbai) warehouses fed the Lancashire mills, especially after the American Civil War cut off US supplies, and India became both a supplier of raw materials and a consumer of the British industrial production houses. In the process, exquisite traditions — from zardozi embroidery, chikankari of Lucknow, Baluchari silks of Bengal, Madhubani and Pattachitra painted sarees, mulberry silk inaphes and phaneks of Manipur, Ikkat weaves, Paithani and Narayanpet sarees of Maharashtra, Kanjeevaram of Tamil Nadu, and Lambani tribal embroidery, to countless regional handloom styles — suffered severe decline. Even fabrics that travelled abroad — from Madras checks that inspired Scottish tartans to seersucker (from “sīrsakar”) — originated in India. Seen in this light, Swadeshi was not only a political weapon but a return to civilisational roots — a way of reclaiming India’s artisanal brilliance that colonial capitalism had undermined.

Swadeshi was at once practical and symbolic. In cities and small towns, people publicly burned foreign cloth, set up khadi-spinning centres, and promoted local manufactures; in ports such as Tuticorin, VO Chidambaram Pillai and others turned the idea into enterprise, founding the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company in 1906 to break British shipping monopolies. Those acts boycott, boycott-driven enterprise, and local self-help gave the movement its muscle.

Also read: PM Modi pitches for ‘swadeshi’ goods, hails GST reforms as 'savings festival'

Hardliners vs. moderates: From Khadi to Salt March

Leaders differed in how far they embraced the Swadeshi movement. The school of hardline thought, which included the lines of Aurobindo Ghosh, Bipin Chandra Pal, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Lala Lajpat Rai among them, fused political agitation with an assertive cultural nationalism; moderates sought legislative reform but were drawn into the mass movement by its popular energy. Tilak’s rhetoric captured the logic: he urged Swaraj as the trunk of the national tree, with swadeshi and boycott as its branches; a formulation frequently cited in accounts of the period.

Swadeshi also provoked a literary and moral debate. Rabindranath Tagore dramatized that conflict in Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) (1916), where his protagonist Nikhil warns that blind worship of the nation can become a curse: “I am willing to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.” Tagore’s novel registers the ambivalence that Swadeshi inspired; patriotism tempered by a larger humanism.

For India’s Father of the Nation Mohandas K Gandhi, Swadeshi was not merely tactical but spiritual. He folded khadi and village industries into a vision of moral self-reliance, calling Swadeshi a law of social life and urging Indians to “restrict ourselves to our immediate surroundings”, an ethic that married economics to personal discipline and village regeneration. Gandhi turned spinning-wheels and homespun into political technology: boycott became a practical method of non-cooperation; much as he would later do with salt, when the 1930 Dandi March turned the simple act of picking up a pinch of sea salt into defiance of the British monopoly.

Also read: All about BSNL’s ‘swadeshi’ 4G network PM Modi launched in Odisha

#BeLocalBuyLocal: Why Gandhi could trend with Gen-Z

Most crucially, Gandhi grounded Swadeshi in a philosophy of local supply chains. “Every village of India will almost be a self-supporting and self-contained unit”, he wrote in Hind Swaraj. This was not an isolationist dream but an ethic of resilience; villages able to produce their own cloth, food and basic goods, reducing dependency on exploitative trade networks. In a world where supply chains are now globally intertwined, that exact vision may no longer be practicable. But one part of it has resurfaced: the idea of being local, buying local. Instagram handles now have hashtags like #BeLocalBuyLocal #FarmersMarketsOnly. So, Gandhi’s ideas, in a weird way, are becoming cool and back in fashion to a new generation of ethically conscious buyers. Also, against the backdrop of climate change, it’s no longer considered sensible to import exotic fruits and flowers carrying heavy carbon costs, but go with what’s available locally and what’s in season. Gandhi’s model of village self-sufficiency resonates anew — reminding us that the simplest way to shrink our carbon footprint is often to eat and wear what’s grown and made close to home.

Across the century, Swadeshi has steadily shifted in meaning. What began as an anti-colonial tool of boycott and hand-spun cloth gradually evolved into a broader idiom of economic nationalism and self-reliance. Today, its language returns in new contexts: not as burning foreign cloth in 1905, but as campaigns to “buy local”, boost indigenous industry, and frame industrial strategy in nationalist terms.

Also read: RSS at 100 | Was the Sangh anti-colonial? Not at all, says historian

Swadeshi gets an app-date: Join the Arattai?

That push has a visible, modern face. Zoho’s messaging app Arattai surged in downloads after endorsements from government ministers. Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal posted on X: “Nothing beats the feeling of using a #Swadeshi product. So proud to be on @Arattai.” Coverage by national outlets tracked steep short-term spikes in sign-ups and attention, and analysts flagged how political signalling can rapidly lift a domestic technology into the spotlight.

But even before such political controversy, there were Indian firms doing spectacularly well, and hitting it out of the ballpark. MapmyIndia (Mappls), for instance, has the likes of McDonald’s India, Maruti Suzuki, Mahindra, PhonePe, MG Motor, Coca-Cola, Paytm and Alexa as clients. An indigenous alternative to foreign map services, it pitches local data, offline features and enterprise APIs and sometimes works way better than even Google maps. Then there are our IT giants, servicing our IRCTC platform and income tax returns and our SaaS bigwigs like Freshworks, ChargeBee and, of course, Zoho. These firms are being folded into the modern vocabulary of self-reliance: Swadeshi today is often about digital sovereignty, supply-chain resilience, and platform alternatives rather than only cloth and charkhas.

Also read: Indian Navy inducts indigenously built anti-submarine vessel 'Androth'

120 years on: Swadeshi spinning new threads on Gandhi Jayanti

If history teaches one lesson, it is that Swadeshi has always meant different things to different people: a tactic of resistance for the early-20th-century radicals; for Gandhi, a spiritual discipline and village strategy; for some intellectuals like Tagore, a cause to be argued about rather than uncritically adored. The contemporary revival borrows the vocabulary of the past “vocal for local”, “Atmanirbhar”, but faces new tests: scaling indigenous manufacturing, building trusted digital infrastructure, and ensuring that symbolic endorsements translate into durable jobs and products rather than fleeting headlines.

On Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, these layers are especially resonant. The original Swadeshi was a mass moral project as much as an economic one. If today’s calls for Indian-made alternatives are to mean more than nostalgia, they will need the same mix of social persuasion, patient institution-building and honest debate that defined the movement a century ago.