Person · economist & politician

Dadabhai Naoroji

Also known as Naoroji, Dadabhai Navroji, Grand Old Man of India

Date

1825 – 1917

Function

Authority & administration

Tradition

Poverty and Un-British Rule in India

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

He won Finsbury Central in 1892 by five votes after the outgoing prime minister Salisbury said publicly that a British constituency would not elect a black man. Gandhi, Gokhale and Jinnah all treated him as a mentor, which is a range few Indian politicians have managed.

Connections (6)

• Life routeTowers of Silence & Parsi Mumbai

  Naoroji came out of the same small Bombay Parsi world as the Wadias and the Tatas — a community of perhaps a hundred thousand that supplied a disproportionate share of the city's merchants, its first modern industrialists and its early nationalist politicians. He read the trade figures that world lived by and turned them into the argument that British rule was extracting India's wealth by design rather than by accident.

• Teaching lineageMohandās Karamchand Gandhi

  Gandhi called Naoroji the father of the nation before anyone called him Mahatma, and wrote to him from South Africa for advice on the Indian community there. Gokhale and Jinnah also treated him as mentor. The drain theory gave the national movement an economic argument it could put in numbers rather than in grievance, and every subsequent Congress leader used it.

• Teaching lineageMuhammad Ali Jinnah

  Jinnah was Dadabhai Naoroji's private secretary in London in 1906, at the Calcutta Congress where Naoroji as president demanded swaraj for the first time from the chair. He joined the Congress before he joined the Muslim League, negotiated the 1916 Lucknow Pact between them, and Gokhale called him the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. Every step of the thirty years after that moved in the other direction.

• Disciple ofKarsandas Mulji

  Karsandas Mulji was Dadabhai Naoroji's close associate in the Bombay Parsi-Gujarati reform circle of the 1850s and 1860s — Naoroji was Mulji's teacher at Elphinstone Institution in the late 1840s and remained his political mentor through the Maharaj Libel Case and after. The Rast Goftar Gujarati reform weekly that Mulji edited was founded by Naoroji in 1851, and the two together ran the early phase of the Gujarati reform press from a Parsi-Hindu partnership that defined Bombay nineteenth-century public culture.

• Affiliated withDinshaw Edulji Wacha

  Dinshaw Wacha and Dadabhai Naoroji formed with Pherozeshah Mehta the Bombay Parsi liberal triumvirate that founded and ran the Indian National Congress's early decades. Naoroji's drain-theory economics, Mehta's institutional labour at the Bombay Municipal Corporation and Wacha's financial administration of the Congress and the Bombay Presidency Association together constituted the moderate wing's working infrastructure. Wacha outlived both — Naoroji died 1917, Mehta 1915, Wacha 1936.

• President ofIndian National Congress (founding era)

  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.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Dadabhai Naoroji”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.

• Wikipedia — Dadabhai Naoroji