Dadabhai Naoroji Started The Journey That Rishi Sunak Has Finished 130 Years Ago

Dadabhai Naoroji, the original grand old man of India, would have smiled at the steady rise of Rishi Sunak in Britain. The first Indian to ever be elected to the UK parliament was a Parsi professor from Mumbai (then still Bombay) who did so about 130 years ago.

Being the first Asian to hold the office of British MP made it an enormous accomplishment for Naoroji, who was also shattering several other glass ceilings in the process. The United Kingdom of the 1880s wasn’t quite the multiracial, global, and pro-freedom country it is today. It was the world’s most greedy colonial power and the most intolerant, with women still lacking the right to vote.

Naturally, Naoroji was accustomed to defying expectations. At age 28, he was the first Indian to be appointed as a full professor at Elphinstone Institution in Bombay, a college run under British administration. There, he taught physics and math. He went to Britain as a commercial partner of the trading company Cama & Company, which became the first Indian company to be established in Britain in 1855 since he was dissatisfied with academic excellence alone.

However, his political career in that nation didn’t get off to a good start. As a candidate for the Liberal Party, he lost his first election for the Holborn seat in London. The country’s Conservative Party Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, declared that an English constituency was not prepared to elect a Blackman in spite of the defeat. He was mistaken. The Liberal Party’s Naoroji was elected in 1892 by the predominantly working-class Central Finsbury seat in London, however, the victory was by a slim margin of only five votes.

The British might have imagined that Naoroji would retire to a quiet corner of Westminster following the effort of the campaign and the close victory. Naoroji dispelled any such assumptions of quiescence with his very first action. His own holy book, the Khordeh Avesta, not the Bible, was the object of his oath-taking. He belonged to the Zoroastrian religion and vowed to uphold its principles. That initial act of rebellion will be fully realized later this month when Sunak takes his own oath, most likely with his hand on the Gita as he did when he was elected a member of the House of Commons.

From there, Naoroji continued to carry out his mission, which was more about holding a mirror up to the Colonial powers’ dishonorable control in India than it was about serving his masters. He said he went there to speak for the millions of Indians who were subject to British law and had no democratic government of their own. He had long lamented the deepening poverty of India under British rule and had emphasized the drain of riches in his 1901 book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India.

By that time, he had also started the processes that, over the following few decades, would deliver freedom to his own nation. The Indian National Congress was established in Bombay in 1885 by Naoroji, Dinshaw Edulji Wacha, and Allan Octavian Hume. He would continue to be crucial to the foundling, preventing its collapse during its formative years. Thus, it was his conciliation approach that prevented the impending rupture between the moderates and extremists in the party during the 1906 Calcutta session of the Congress, where Swaraj was adopted as the aim of the Indian people.

His influence had already begun to fade by the time the Radicals and Moderates officially divided at the Surat session in 1907. In any case, despite criticism from some historians, his reputation as an advocate for Indians had already been cemented since 1867, when he assisted in the founding of the East India Association, whose goal was to promote Indian viewpoints among the British public. Additionally, it was intended to offset the propaganda put forward by the Ethnological Society of London, which attempted to demonstrate the inferiority of Asians compared to Europeans during its session in 1866.

Dadabhai Naoroji was a scholar, political pioneer, freedom fighter, and businessman who founded some of the first schools for ladies in Bombay. He is appropriately honored by having his name attached to the Mumbai street that is home to the famous CST Railway Station, the JN Petit Library, and the Oriental Building.

News Mania Desk