THE first surge of working class action came in the wake of Partition of Bengal and the subsequent swadeshi agitation. On 19 July, 1905 Curzon issued his fiat partitioning Bengal. This sinister application of the British strategy of divide-and-rule in one of the most sensitive Indian provinces anticipated the eventual vivisection of the country in 1947. The Partition of Bengal provoked angry outbursts not only in Bengal itself but also in distant Maharashtra, a sure sign of the rise of a popular national consciousness.

In a two-pronged campaign, spearheaded primarily by the so-called extremist wing of the Indian National Congress led by Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal (the famous Lal-Bal-Pal trio), people were urged on the one hand to boycott British goods and promote Swadeshi ways on the other. Most of the Swadeshi leaders advocated the use of religious idioms to mobilise the masses. Tilak came up with the idea of celebrating Ganesh and Shivaji Utsavs.

This was also the formative phase for revolutionary terrorists. The attempt made by Khudiram Basu and Prafulla Chaki at Muzaffarpur on April 30, 1908, on the notorious British magistrate Kingsford was the most well-known terrorist action of this early period. But beyond this interface between religious revivalism and revolutionary terrorism, Swadeshi also had a distinct working class dimension.

The first real trade union, the Printers' Union, was formed on 21 October, 1905 in the midst of a stubborn strike in government presses. During July-September 1906, workers in the Bengal section of the East Indian Railway launched a series of strikes. On 27 August there was a massive assertion of workers at the Jamalpur railway workshop. The rail strikes would become more decisive and widespread between May and December 1907 covering important centres like Asansol, Mughalsarai, Allahabad, Kanpur and Ambala. Between 1905 and 1908, strikes were also quite frequent in the jute mills of Bengal. In March 1908, workers at the foreign-owned Coral Cotton Mills at Tuticorin in Tirunelveli district of the then Madras province went on a successful strike. Efforts to suppress the Coral mill workers led not only to protest strikes by municipal workers, sweepers and carriage-drivers, but municipal offices, law courts and police stations at Tirunelveli town too were attacked by the masses.

More importantly, Swadeshi signalled the arrival of the working class as a political force with workers beginning to take to the streets together with students and peasants demanding freedom and democracy. Militant street fights would soon become the order of the day. In the first week of May 1907, about 3,000 workers of the Rawalpindi workshop and hundreds of fellow workers from other factories joined the students in a huge protest demonstration against the conviction of the editor of the journal Punjabee for publishing 'seditious' matters. Peasants from nearby areas also joined this militant rally and virtually everything with a British connection came under attack.

Calcutta in Mourning

YESTARDAY was one of the most memorable days in the history of the British administration of India. It being the day on which the Bengal Partition scheme took effect, ... the people of Calcutta, irrespective of nationality, social position, creed and sex, observed it as a day of mourning ... From the small hours in the morning till noon, the bank of the Ganges from Bagbazar to Howrah presented a unique spectacle. It looked, as if it were, a surging sea of human faces. The scene in the roads and streets of Calcutta was quite novel and was perhaps never before witnessed in any Indian city. ... All the mills were closed and the mill hands paraded the city in procession. The only cry that was heard was that of Bande Mataram”.

- Anmrita Bazar Patrika, Calcutta, 17 October, 1905