The Joint Secretaries of the Bharat Stri Maha Mandal, Punjab Branch,
send a report of the Swadeshi activities of Shrimati Saraladevi
Chaudhrani ever since her return to Lahore from Bombay. Miss Roy and
Mrs. Roshandal, the Secretaries, state that meetings of women were held
respectively on the 23rd, 24th and 25th June at three different places
in Lahore. All the meetings were attended by hundreds of women who were
deeply interested in what Shrimati Saraladevi had to say. The burden of
her discourses was India's deep poverty. She traced the causes and
proved that our poverty was primarily due to the abandonment of Swadeshi
by the people. The remedy therefore lay in reverting to Swadeshi.
Saraladevi herself writes to say that her Khaddar Sari impressed her
audiences more than her speeches, and her songs came next, her speeches
last. The good ladies of Lahore flocked round her and felt her coarse
but beautifully white Sari and admired it. Some took pity on her that
she who only the other day was dressed in costly thin silk Saris now
decked herself in hand-woven Swadeshi Khaddar. Saraladevi wanted no pity
and retorted that their thin foreign scarves lay heavier on their
shoulders with the weight of their helpless dependence on foreign
manufacture whereas her coarse Khaddar lay light as a feather on her
body with the joy of the knowledge that she was free because she wore
garments in the manufacture of which her sisters and her brothers had
laboured. This statement so pleased her audience that most of the women
present resolved to discard foreign clothes. Saraladevi has now been
charged by these ladies to open a shop where they could buy Swadeshi
goods. She has since addressed more audiences. She spoke at the District
Conference at Sialkot and to a meeting exclusively devoted to ladies
numbering over one thousand. I hope that the men of Punjab will help
Saraladevi in her self-imposed mission. They may harness her talents and
her willingness in founding Swadeshi Sabha and organising Swadeshi
propaganda on a sound basis. Both men and money are needed to make the
work a success.
Swadeshi is more than reforms. There is much waste over reforms. There
is none in Swadeshi. Every yard of yarn spun is so much labour well
spent and so much wealth added to the national treasury. Every drop
counts. Swadeshi spells first production and then distribution.
Distribution without production means the raising of prices without any
corresponding benefit. For to-day demand exceeds the supply. If we will
not manufacture more cloth, more foreign imports must continue a painful
and sinful necessity.
Punjab has a great opportunity. Punjab grows splendid cotton. The art of
spinning has not yet died out. Almost every Punjabi woman knows it. This
sacred haunt of the Rishis of old has thousands of weavers. Only the
leaders need to have faith in their women and themselves. When
Saraladevi wrote to me that she might want goods from Bombay, I felt
hurt. The Punjab has all the time and all the labour and the material
necessary for producing her own cloth. She has brave merchants. She has
more than enough capital. She has brains. Has she the will? She can
organise her own Swadeshi in less than a year, if the leaders will work
at this great cause. It is playing with Swadeshi for the Punjab to have
to import cloth from Bombay.
The Punjab has to right herself by putting her Swadeshi on a proper
basis and by ridding herself of Messrs. Bosworth Smith and Company. She
will then be both economically and politically sound. Geographically she
stands at the top. She led the way in the older times. Will she again do
so? Her men are virile to look at. Have they virility enough to secure
without a moment's delay purity of administration? I have not strayed
from Swadeshi to politics. My Swadeshi spirit makes me impatient of
garments that denude India of her wealth and equally impatient of the
Smiths, the O'Briens, the Shri Rams and the Maliks who denude her of her
self-respect and insolently touch women's veils with their sticks, chain
innocent men as if they were beasts, or shoot them from armoured cars or
otherwise terrorise people into subjection.
_Y. I.--7th July 1920._