The Many Spaces and Times of Swadeshi

This article argues that the deterritorialised politics of affinity generated by swadeshi, over and against the imagined community of the nation, was its greatest legacy. It holds that though the swadeshi agitators have been taken to task for not having a political programme to displace the colonial power through mass mobilisation, they found filiations on an emerging map of freedom the world over. Swadeshi politics thus created nodes, strategies, techniques of power and technologies of the self, and created another paradigm against the dyad of state power versus public representation that the moderates had been trapped in.