Dadabhai Naoroji

London and the case for India

In 1855 Naoroji went to London as a partner in Cama and Co., the first Indian business firm established in Britain, and later set up his own firm. For most of the next half-century he lived largely in England, using his position to argue India's case before the British public. He founded the London Indian Society (1865) and the East India Association (1867), and gave evidence to parliamentary inquiries. In India he served briefly as Diwan of Baroda in 1874 and sat in the Bombay Legislative Council.

In 1885 he was among the founders of the Indian National Congress, and he presided over its sessions three times.

The drain theory

Naoroji's lasting contribution was economic. Working from official figures, he tried to estimate India's national income per head and concluded that it was far too low to sustain life decently. The cause, he argued, was the "drain": a large part of India's revenue left the country every year without return — as "home charges", pensions and salaries of British officials, interest and profits — impoverishing the country. He set out this case in papers from the 1860s onward and in his book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901).

The drain theory became the economic foundation of Indian nationalism, taken up by R. C. Dutt, Gokhale and others. Later economic historians have debated his figures and how large the drain really was, but his central point — that colonial rule transferred wealth out of India — is widely accepted.

Member of Parliament

In 1892 Naoroji was elected to the House of Commons as the Liberal member for Finsbury Central in London, by a margin of just five votes — the first Indian elected to the British Parliament. The Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury had earlier sneered that British voters would not elect a "black man"; the remark caused an outcry and helped make Naoroji famous. He took his oath on the Avesta and used his seat to press for Indian representation and for simultaneous civil service examinations in India. He lost the seat in 1895, but served on the Royal Commission on Indian Expenditure.

Swaraj, 1906

In 1906, at the age of eighty-one, Naoroji was called back to preside over the Calcutta session of the Congress, when the party was split between Moderates and Extremists. In his address he declared that the goal was swaraj — self-government like that of the self-governing British colonies. It is widely regarded as the first time a Congress president set self-rule as the national aim. Critics among the Extremists, then and later, felt that his reliance on petitions and on British justice was too patient; his defenders reply that his patient case-making gave the movement its arguments.