I bought this at an antiques shop in London. Supposedly it was imported from India, and I know that the symbol has religious connotations as well as the obvious, but wouldn't the writing be in an Asian script? Why put a religious symbol on a bucket?
Anyone know what "SWJ" might mean?
Similar buckets can be found with a quick search on internet, essentially as auctioned goods, all in the United Kingdom but one in South Africa.
It's possible that SWJ was a British foundry, which used swastikas with their initials : it wasn't uncommon in the first decades of the XXth century, for exemple as a good luck charm.