From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, economy, territory in colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907

This essay is organized as follows. The first section briefly lays out the broad historical-geographical field within and against which anti-colonial nationalism emerged. I shall identify and describe the ways in which colonial spatial practices engendered nationalist imaginings of India as a bounded national and economic space. The second section elaborates the nationalist argument against colonialism with reference to the emergent conception of a territorially delimited national economy. For the purpose of this essay, I shall draw selectively upon exemplary nationalist writings and practices from the period from 1870 to 1907. The concluding section examines the dynamic interchange between the nationalist demand for swaraj and the swadeshi movement, paying particular attention to the spatial presuppositions of national developmental ideology.