Dadabhai Naoroji

The reality is that India, up to the present day, has been governed so as to bring about the impoverishment of the people … Is it necessary that for your benefit, we must be destroyed?

—Dadabhai Naoroji

In the nineteenth century very few Indians could even imagine a free country called India. Queen Victoria was ruling as the benign Empress and Mother Goddess of her Indian subjects and the sun never set on the British Empire. In 1892, elections were being held in Britain for the House of Commons, when to everyone’s amazement an Indian won the seat of Central Finsbury in London. Dadabhai Naoroji had fought elections four times as a member of the Liberal Party before finally succeeding. He was the first Indian to become a Member of the British Parliament and stood up in its hallowed halls, the lone voice demanding the rights of the Indian people.

The British ruling classes—the politicians, the bureaucracy and the nobility—had for years built up the image of Britain as a benevolent power, bringing civilization and economic benefits to a deprived and barbaric people. Dadabhai Naoroji used facts and figures to prove that British rule was in fact deeply harmful for India as there was no economic development of the country. That it was draining away the wealth of its largest colony and impoverishing its people, and the real picture was one of oppression and exploitation.

Dadabhai Naoroji was born on 4 September 1825 into a poor Parsi-Zoroastrian family of priests in Bombay. His father Naoroji Palanji Dordi died when Dadabhai was only four and his mother Maneckbai struggled to bring him up. In spite of being illiterate herself, she ensured that her son received a good education. He studied at Elphinstone College and then began to teach mathematics and philosophy there, to one day become the first Indian professor at his alma mater. Later he would teach Gujarati at the University College in London.

Naoroji soon became involved in social reform and what interested him the most was education because he understood that Indians could not fight for their rights without a modern western education. When he began literacy classes for girls, he had to go from house to house convincing parents that educating their daughters would not ruin society and that the girls would not become troublesome rebels just because they knew how to read and write. His efforts were so successful that in a few years the contributions from the public helped him build two schools for girls in the city. One of the biggest benefactors was the Cama family, which owned a successful trading house.

In his long life Naoroji would start at least thirty welfare and political societies. Among them was the East India Association, a predecessor of the Indian National Congress. Then he began to write on politics and social reform in the papers and started newspapers like Rast Guftar (The Truth Teller) that was distributed free, and later The Voice of India. Soon a stream of articles were educating and spreading awareness among readers, and Naoroji became a popular writer.

Notably, this was before the Indian Uprising of 1857 and it makes Naoroji one of the first nationalist leaders and social reformers of India. He was a generation older than the next group of leaders like Tilak, Gokhale, Surendranath Banerjea and M.G. Ranade, all of whom were deeply influenced by his thoughts.

In those days India was still under the control of the East India Company. In 1852 its charter came up for renewal with the British government and Naoroji organized a meeting to oppose it. A petition was sent to the British Parliament, pointing out how the officers of the Company Bahadur were systematically bleeding India to enrich themselves; it also gave details of high taxes and bad administration. Even though the charter did get renewed, the petition caught the attention of the politicians and the press in Britain, and it was discussed in parliament and covered in the newspapers. Naoroji realized that Indians had to influence public opinion in Britain to get their grievances heard. The East India Company finally lost its colony in 1858 when the British government took over the administration of India.

Very few people questioned the right of the English to rule India in the mid-nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, the general view, encouraged by the sahibs, was that British rule was a benevolent one and the government genuinely cared for its Indian subjects. At such a time, Naoroji was going against public opinion and saying that in fact India was being exploited, economically ruined and that the welfare of the people was rarely a concern for the government. Even if some Indians agreed with him, he knew few people in Britain would take him seriously.

Just then the Cama family decided to open an office in London and he accepted their offer of a partnership and left for England. Leaving his family behind, he voyaged to a strange land as the messenger of his people. Soon Naoroji’s London home became a refuge for the young Indian students studying there. Bhikaiji Cama and Mohammed Ali Jinnah worked for him and among those he played mentor to was a shy Gujarati law student who never forgot his kindness and generosity. Mahatma Gandhi later said, ‘Indeed, he was in the place of father to every one of the Indian students … And so Dadabhai became a real “dada” to me.’

From 1855 to 1907 Naoroji led a nomad’s life, commuting between England and India, carrying on propaganda work in London and then coming back to take part in the nationalist movement. He had a sharp business brain and soon Cama & Co. became a profitable concern, but he was unhappy to discover that the company was trading in opium and liquor. As this went against his principles, he quit and set up his own business, Dadabhai Naoroji & Co., in 1859. His business faced some ups and downs but ultimately made Naoroji a rich man, and a lot of his money was used for his social and political work.

Among the many political issues that Naoroji took up with the British government was that more Indians be given jobs in the Indian administration, especially in the Indian Civil Service. Leaders like Gokhale would later echo his viewpoint that Indians were perfectly able to run the administration and they understood the problems of the country better than the British. Famines were more frequent during British rule because of the inefficient administration of British officials, and Indians could have helped avert such situations. Naoroji’s first success came in 1866 when nine Indians were appointed to the ICS.

Naoroji’s financial acumen and administrative abilities became so well known that in 1874 he was offered the position of the Dewan of the State of Baroda. The Maharaja of Baroda Mulharrao Gaekwad was in trouble with the government because of his misrule and he hoped Naoroji could save him from losing his throne. The British Resident at Baroda was highly displeased and sent many critical reports to the government, but the government was so impressed by Naoroji that the Resident was transferred instead! Within a year the Baroda administration had been cleaned up, but Naoroji’s honesty and efficiency made the Maharaja unhappy, so Naoroji resigned and returned to Bombay to join the city’s municipal corporation.

Naoroji was one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, attending its first meeting in 1885. As a shrewd political strategist he recognized quickly that this could be the organization that could lead the campaign to win more political rights for Indians. He became the mentor of younger leaders and members affectionately called him ‘The Grand Old Man’. As he said later in life, ‘Is it vanity that I should take a great pleasure in being hailed as the Grand Old Man of India? No, that title, which speaks volumes for the warm, grateful and generous hearts of my countrymen, is to me, whether I deserve it or not, the highest reward of my life.’

Naoroji was elected thrice as the president of the Congress—in 1886 and 1906 at the sessions in Calcutta and in 1893 at Lahore. In 1893 he returned to Bombay right after winning his seat in the House of Commons and the news had spread like wildfire through the country. The Governor of Bombay was waiting to greet him when his ship docked at the port. Then when he travelled to attend the Congress session, his journey from Bombay to Lahore was like a victory parade, with joyous crowds waiting at every railway station with garlands.

The 1906 session in Calcutta was in comparison a sad occasion and fraught with conflict between the Extremists led by Tilak and the Moderate faction of Gokhale, both groups wanting their own candidate as president. Leaders feared that the party would break up; so the eighty-one-year-old Naoroji was requested to accept the post and play peacemaker as he was a friend of both Tilak and Gokhale. The strategy worked, as no Congressman could oppose his election. In his presidential address Naoroji said that Indians could not expect real self-government under the British; he called for Swaraj and endorsed the campaign of boycott and Swadeshi.

Naoroji will be remembered most for what came to be called the Drain Theory. He had used his superlative business brain to study the Indian economy carefully and came to the conclusion that the wealth of India was being drained away to make Britain rich. And Naoroji was not just talking theories—he was giving hard facts and figures that the government could not deny.

He collected the economic statistics for years to prove conclusively that colonial rule was systematically impoverishing Indians. Besides, there were very high taxes, especially on agriculture, that had ruined farmers and led to frequent famines, and he had the figures to prove that there were many more famines during British rule than during the rule of the Mughals. Then India was the supplier of raw materials, but Indian industries were not allowed to develop. For example, cotton was imported from India, woven into textiles in the mills of Manchester and then sold back to Indians at high prices. But when an Indian started a textile mill in India, he faced high taxes and a very uncooperative government. This monopoly of trade and industry had ruined the textile industry that during Mughal times was the biggest in the world.

According to Naoroji, this now deeply impoverished country had the ‘lordliest and costliest administration in the world’. Officers in India earned much more than their counterparts in Britain and then went home on generous pensions. As a matter of fact, when the Prime Minister of Great Britain earned a salary of Rs 5000 per month, his subordinate, the Viceroy of India, was earning Rs 20,000 a month! Naoroji studied the export-import figures of three decades and showed how India earned a lot from exports but none of the money ever came to the country. Very often it paid for wars that Britain was fighting in other parts of the world.

Naoroji published a book about this drain of wealth from India, titled Poverty and the Un-British Rule in India, which became compulsory reading for Indian nationalists. He warned the government that if the economic welfare of the people was ignored, then one day it ‘would drive the people to a boycott not only of the British wares but of the British rule’. He was the only Indian member of the Welby Commission in 1895 that looked into the expenditures of the government in India. Debunking the view that the country would fall apart without British officials, he bluntly told the Commission that all India needed were a British viceroy, governors and a commander-in-Chief and even those would not be required after a few years.

In 1907 the Grand Old Man finally came home and settled in Bombay. He kept a close track of the nationalist movement and his home in Versova saw a stream of visitors seeking his advice on a multitude of matters. He continued to write, and personally replied to every letter he received. He had one of the sharpest constitutional minds in the country and when the Minto–Morley Reforms were being drafted to increase the participation of Indians in the country’s government, he sent ninety pages of suggestions. Naoroji died at the age of ninety-two on 30 June 1917. By then the national movement that he had so carefully nurtured was a well-organized and highly efficient force.

Dadabhai Naoroji was always unimpressed by British propaganda about how beneficial British rule had been for India. He opened the eyes of Indians to the reality of colonial rule. If the common man in India became convinced that India deserved to be free, it was because—decades before—a man had the courage to stand up in the heart of British democracy and demand the same rights for his country. Naoroji simply asked the British to show that they believed in the principles of equality by their actions in India. He admired British organizations but was convinced that with education and training Indians could be just as good, thus removing any sense of inferiority. He was one of the first Indians to say that India is for Indians and inspired the generations of nationalist leaders who followed him.