How did Swadeshi grow into a demand for Swaraj?

Swadeshi began as an economic boycott and ended as a political claim to self-rule, and the transition took barely three years.

The trigger. Curzon's partition of Bengal, announced in 1905, was read as a deliberate attempt to split Bengali nationalism along communal lines. The response — boycott of British goods and use of Indian ones — was initially a lever to force the partition's reversal.

How the demand widened.

• From goods to institutions. Boycott extended to courts, titles and government schools, and produced constructive alternatives — the National Council of Education (1906), Bengal Technical Institute, and swadeshi enterprises. Once Indians were building their own institutions, foreign administration became redundant in principle.
• From petition to self-reliance. Atmashakti replaced the Moderate method of prayer. Tilak's formulation that Swaraj is our birthright and we shall have it made the claim non-negotiable.
• From elite to mass. Samitis, melas, jatras and Tagore's songs carried politics beyond the professional classes for the first time.
• From economics to sovereignty. The drain theory already argued that poverty was political; if impoverishment was made by rule, only self-rule could end it.

The culmination. At the Calcutta Congress of 1906, presided over by Dadabhai Naoroji, Swaraj was adopted as the goal — though it was left ambiguous between self-government within the Empire and something more, and that ambiguity split the Congress at Surat in 1907.