Concept · political organisation · India
Indian National Congress (founding era)
Also known as Indian National Congress, INC, Congress, National Congress
The subcontinent's principal political organisation, founded at Bombay on 28 December 1885 at Allan Octavian Hume's initiative with 72 delegates presided over by Umesh Chandra Bonnerjee. The INC's founding era (1885 to about 1907) was dominated by the Bombay Parsi liberal triumvirate of Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta and Dinshaw Wacha, the Bengali barrister tradition of Bonnerjee and Surendranath Banerjee, the Pune moderate tradition of Ranade and Gokhale, and the Madras lawyer tradition of Subramania Iyer. Its early constitutional demands — Indian representation in the civil service, taxation and legislative councils, the drain-theory critique of British economic rule — were the moderate political work from which the mass movement developed.
- Date
- 1885–None
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Tradition
- INC proceedings; contemporary memoirs; S. Gopal on the moderate era; Judith Brown's Gandhi's Rise to Power.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The first session's resolution calling for 'a national fund for the promotion of political work' was the organisation's financial founding. The 1907 Surat split between Tilak's extremists and Gokhale's moderates broke the Congress for nine years until the 1916 Lucknow Pact reunited it. The INC's twentieth-century mass-movement transformation under Gandhi after 1915 is the second phase of its history; the founding era is a distinct institutional formation.
Connections (11)
- FoundedAllan Octavian Hume
Allan Octavian Hume convened the first Indian National Congress session at Bombay on 28 December 1885 with 72 delegates, after his open 1883 letter to Calcutta University graduates had called for a national Indian political organisation. He served as the Congress's General Secretary from 1885 to 1908, drafted its early constitutions, and was its principal institutional architect through its first two decades. His house Rothney Castle at Simla was the Congress's effective headquarters through the 1880s and 1890s.
- First president ofUmesh Chandra Bonnerjee
Umesh Chandra Bonnerjee presided over the first session of the Indian National Congress at Bombay on 28-31 December 1885 as its founding president, and served again as president at the 1892 Allahabad session. The 1885 choice of Bonnerjee as president was Hume's and Pherozeshah Mehta's agreement that a Bengali Hindu barrister represented a national rather than a Bombay-local figure for the inaugural session. His presidency gave the Congress its first institutional precedent.
- President ofSurendranath Banerjee
Surendranath Banerjee presided over the Indian National Congress at the 1895 Poona and 1902 Ahmedabad sessions, and his earlier Indian Association (1876) and Indian National Conference (1883, 1885) merged with the Congress in 1886 to form its organisational base. The 1905-1911 anti-Bengal-partition campaign that Banerjee led from Calcutta was the moderate wing of the Swadeshi movement; the partition's reversal in 1911 was his career's defining political success.
- President ofGopal Krishna Gokhale
Gopal Krishna Gokhale presided over the Indian National Congress at the 1905 Benares session, led the Congress's constitutional moderates against Tilak's extremists in the 1907 Surat split, and founded the Servants of India Society in 1905 to train full-time political workers under a vow of poverty. The 1907 split broke the Congress for nine years until the 1916 Lucknow Pact reunited it; Gokhale's early death in 1915 removed the Congress's most consequential moderate leader just as Gandhi was returning from South Africa to take over.
- President ofPherozeshah Mehta
Pherozeshah Mehta chaired the Indian National Congress session of 1890 at Calcutta as president, and his close partnership with Dadabhai Naoroji and Dinshaw Wacha made the Bombay Parsi liberal establishment the Congress's central institutional spine through the moderate decades. His Mazda house at Nepean Sea Road in Bombay was the Congress's effective Bombay headquarters for the moderate decades, and his 1915 funeral drew the largest Bombay public gathering of its period.
- FoundedDinshaw Edulji Wacha
Dinshaw Wacha was present at the 1885 Bombay founding session of the Indian National Congress alongside Hume, Naoroji, Mehta and Bonnerjee, served as INC General Secretary and later as treasurer through the moderate decades, and chaired the 1901 Calcutta session as president. His seventy-year public life — from the 1860s Parsi reform movement through the 1930s Round Table Conferences — made him one of the longest-serving institutional figures in the Congress tradition.
- First muslim president ofBadruddin Tyabji
Badruddin Tyabji presided over the Indian National Congress's third session at Madras in December 1887 as its first Muslim president. Tyabji's leadership marked the Congress's explicit effort to secure Muslim institutional presence in Indian political life; he wrote and spoke against Sayyid Ahmad Khan's position that Muslims should abstain from Congress politics, and his judgment on the Bombay High Court from 1895 extended his authority beyond politics. The 1887 presidential address argued that the Congress represented all Indians and that Muslim political engagement was both possible and necessary.
- President ofDadabhai Naoroji
Dadabhai Naoroji served three times as president of the Indian National Congress — at the 1886 Calcutta, 1893 Lahore and 1906 Calcutta sessions — and was the Congress's elder-statesman presence through its entire founding era. His drain-theory economics in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901) was the moderate wing's central intellectual argument against British rule, and his 1906 presidential address at Calcutta — the one that introduced 'swaraj' into Congress vocabulary — was the moderate response to Tilak's rising extremist challenge.
- Member ofBal Gangadhar Tilak
Bal Gangadhar Tilak led the Indian National Congress's extremist wing from the 1890s, broke with Gokhale and the moderates at the 1907 Surat split, served six years in Mandalay prison for sedition from 1908, and returned to Congress affairs through the Home Rule League from 1916 and the 1916 Lucknow Pact that reunited the Congress's extremist and moderate wings. His 'swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it' speech of 1906 was the Congress's first popular slogan.
- Former member ofMuhammad Ali Jinnah
Muhammad Ali Jinnah joined the Indian National Congress in 1906 as Dadabhai Naoroji's secretary at the Calcutta session, served as the Bombay Presidency Association's secretary alongside Pherozeshah Mehta, and became Gokhale called 'the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity' for his negotiation of the 1916 Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League. He left the Congress over Gandhi's methods in 1920 and the League took him in a different direction over the following two decades.
- President ofAnnie Besant
Annie Besant became the first woman president of the Indian National Congress at its 1917 Calcutta session, held 26-29 December 1917. Her presidency marked the convergence of her long-standing campaigns for Indian self-government, education and political rights with the Congress movement. Besant's 1917 arrest by the Madras government under the Defence of India Act (interned at Ootacamund for three months, released on 17 September 1917) had galvanised mass nationalist sympathy and strengthened her position within the Congress leadership. Her presidency formally established women's leadership at the apex of Indian nationalism, 108 years before Droupadi Murmu became India's second woman President in 2022.