Dadabhai Naoroji

Early life and career

Naoroji was educated at Elphinstone College in Bombay, where he later became the first Indian to hold a professorship, teaching mathematics and natural philosophy. He moved to England in the 1850s, initially as a partner in an Indian trading firm, and settled permanently in London, where he combined a business career with an increasingly public role as an advocate for India. He founded the East India Association in 1866 to represent Indian interests to the British public and Parliament, and helped establish institutions and networks that fed into the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885, of which he was a principal architect.

Parliamentary career

Naoroji stood for the British House of Commons as a Liberal candidate and, after an earlier defeat, was elected for Finsbury Central in 1892, becoming the first Indian member of the House of Commons. His narrow victory followed a controversy in which the Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury had dismissed the prospect of an Indian being elected. In Parliament, Naoroji used his position to raise questions on Indian administration, poverty and famine policy, and to press for greater Indian representation in governance, though he lost his seat in the 1895 election.

The drain of wealth

Naoroji is best known for developing the "drain of wealth" theory, an early systematic economic critique of British rule. Drawing on trade and revenue statistics, he argued that a substantial share of India's wealth was being transferred to Britain each year through mechanisms such as home charges (pension and administrative payments to Britain), unequal terms of trade, and the remittance of salaries and profits by British officials and businesses, leaving India persistently impoverished despite its productive capacity. He set out this analysis at length in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, published in 1901, which became a foundational text for Indian economic nationalism and influenced later nationalist economists.

Congress leadership

Naoroji presided over the Indian National Congress three times, in 1886, 1893 and 1906. At the 1906 Calcutta session, held amid the agitation over the partition of Bengal, he used his presidential address to declare swaraj (self-government) as the Congress's goal for the first time in an official session, a milestone in the movement's shift from moderate petitioning toward an explicit demand for self-rule. He mentored a generation of younger nationalists, including Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Mohandas Gandhi, both of whom regarded him as a formative influence.