The rise and rise of Rishi Sunak in Britain would have brought a smile on the face of one Dadabhai Naoroji, the original grand old man of India. Nearly 130 years ago, the Parsi professor from Mumbai (then still Bombay) became the first Indian ever to be elected to the UK parliament.
It was a monumental achievement since Naoroji was breaking several glass ceilings in the process, having become the first Asian to become a British MP. The Britain of the 1880s wasn't quite the multiracial, cosmopolitan, freedom-preaching nation of today. It was the most rapacious colonial power that the world had ever seen and so illiberal that women still hadn't been given the right to vote.
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Naoroji, of course, was quite used to breaking stereotypes. At 28, he had become the first Indian to be appointed as a full professor in a British-administered college, Elphinstone College in Bombay, where he taught mathematics and physics. Not satisfied with excelling in academics, he had gone to Britain as a business partner of trading company Cama & Company which in 1855, became the first Indian company to be established in Britain.
But his political journey in that country didn't have an auspicious start. He lost his first election, for the Holborn seat in London as a Liberal Party candidate. Defeat didn't prevent a backlash, with the country's Conservative Party Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, pronouncing that an English constituency was not ready to elect a 'Blackman'. He was wrong. In 1892, the primarily working-class constituency of Central Finsbury in London elected the Liberal Party's Naoroji, though the win was by a slender margin of five votes.
After the exertions of the campaign and the narrow win, the British might have believed Naoroji would settle into a quiet corner of Westminster. With his very first act, Naoroji put to rest any such notions of quiescence. He took oath not with this hand on the Bible but his own holy book, the Khordeh Avesta. He was of the Zoroastrian faith and he had every intention of being true to it. Later this month when Sunak does his own oath-taking, presumably with his hand on the Gita as he did when he was elected MP in the House of Commons, that original act of defiance will find full fruition.
From there Naoroji proceeded to deliver on his agenda which was less to serve his Colonial masters and more to hold a mirror to their shameful rule in India. He declared that he was there to represent millions of Indians who had no democratic government of their own, and were ruled by the British parliament. For years, he had been expressing his dismay at India’s worsening impoverishment under British rule and highlighted the “drain of wealth" in his 1901 book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India.
By then he had also set in motion events that would in the next few decades, bring freedom to his home country. In 1885, Naoroji, along with Allan Octavian Hume and Dinshaw Edulji Wacha, founded the Indian National Congress in Bombay. He would continue to play a vital role in the foundling, ensuring that it didn't implode in its formative years. Thus, in its 1906 Calcutta session, where the Congress adopted Swaraj as the goal of the Indian people, it was his conciliatory approach that averted the impending split between the moderates and extremists in the party.
By the time the formal split between the Radicals and the Moderates happened at the Surat session in 1907, his powers were on the wane. In any case, despite criticism from some historians, his legacy as a champion of Indians had already been secured since 1867, when he helped establish the East India Association, whose objective was to push the point of view of the Indians before the British public. It was also aimed at counteracting the propaganda by the Ethnological Society of London which, in its session in 1866, had tried to prove the inferiority of the Asians to the Europeans.
The founder of some of the first schools for girls in Bombay, Dadabhai Naoroji was scholar, political pioneer, freedom fighter and businessman, rolled into one. Quite aptly, the road which boasts the iconic CST Railway Station, the JN Petit Library and the Oriental Building in Mumbai, is named after him.
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