Dadabhai Naoroji

01Professor in Bombay, merchant in London

Dadabhai was born in Bombay into a family of Parsi priests and lost his father at four; his mother saw him through school. He became the first Indian professor at Elphinstone College, teaching mathematics and natural philosophy, and helped start schools for girls in Bombay. In 1855 he went to England as partner in the first Indian business firm there, Cama and Company, and spent most of the next fifty years in London, arguing India’s case with anyone who would listen.

02The drain and swaraj

Dadabhai worked out, from the government’s own returns, that the average Indian earned about twenty rupees a year, and that a large share of the country’s wealth went to England each year as salaries, pensions, interest and home charges. He collected these papers in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, published in 1901. In 1892 the voters of Finsbury Central in London elected him, the first Indian in the House of Commons. He presided over the Congress in 1886, 1893 and 1906; at the Calcutta session of 1906 he said the aim was swaraj, self-government. He died in Bombay in 1917, aged ninety-one.

Place · Villages of Sutanuti, Gobindapur and Kalikata on the Hooghly; Company settlement from 1690Kolkata (Calcutta)The city that grew from three Hooghly villages around a Company factory, capital of British India until 1911, and the birthplace of the Bengal renaissance and of the Swadeshi movement. Kalighat gave it its name.Read →