Swadeshi

Swadeshi was a car built by Bipin Behari Das, a Calcutta-based entrepreneur, in the 1920s, and was claimed at the time to be a wholly indigenous Indian automobile. Its name echoed Mahatma Gandhi's calls for self-reliance, and the car was assembled from locally available materials in a garage using very basic equipment, though whether it was built entirely from scratch or based on existing mechanical components was not established. The…