in Calcutta and in the principal towns of the mofussil, the wildest reports were sedulously disseminated amongst the rural population.  Partition was meant to pave the way for undoing the Permanent Settlement which governs the Land Revenue in Bengal, and, once the Permanent Settlement out of the way, Government would screw up the land tax.  As for the creation of the new province, it was intended to facilitate the compulsory emigration of the people from the plains, who would be driven to work on the Englishmen’s tea plantations in the far-off jungles of Assam.  Reports of this kind were well calculated to alarm both the Zemindars, who had waxed fat on the Permanent Settlement, and the credulous rayats, whose labour is indispensable to the zemindar squirarchy.  In the towns, on the other hand, the masses were told that Partition was an insult to the “terrible goddess” Kali, the most popular of all Hindu deities in Bengal, and, in order to popularize the protest amongst the small townsfolk, amongst artisans and petty traders, the cry of Swadeshi was coupled with that of Bande Mataram.

The spirit of revolt against Western political authority had been for some time past spreading to the domain of economics. Swadeshi in itself and so far as it means the intelligent encouragement of indigenous is perfectly legitimate, and in this sense the Government of India had practised Swadeshi long before it was taken up for purposes of political agitation by those who look upon it primarily as an economic weapon against their rulers.  It was now to receive a formidable development. Swadeshi must strike at the flinty heart of the British people by cutting off the demand for British manufactured goods and substituting in their place the products of native labour.  At the first great meeting held at the Calcutta Town Hall to protest against Partition, the building was to have been draped in black as a sign of “national” mourning, but the idea was ostentatiously renounced because the only materials available were of English manufacture.  Not only did the painful circumstances of the hour forbid any self-respecting Bengalee from using foreign-made articles, but some means had to be found of compelling the lukewarm to take the same lofty view of their duties.  So the cry of boycott was raised, and it is worth noting, as evidence of the close contact and co-operation between the forces of unrest in the Deccan and in Bengal, that at the same time as it was raised in Calcutta by Mr. Surendranath Banerjee it was raised also at Poona by Tilak who perhaps foresaw much more clearly the lawlessness to which it would lead.  For, though the cry fell on deaf ears in Bombay, the boycott did not remain by any means an idle threat in Bengal.  The movement was placed under the special patronage of Kali and vows were administered to large crowds in the forecourts of her great temple at Calcutta and in her various shrines all over Bengal.