Dadabhai Naoroji

Dadabhai Naoroji sat in the British House of Commons as a member for a London seat and used the position to argue that Britain was draining India of its wealth. He was a Parsi from Bombay, the first Indian professor of mathematics at Elphinstone College, and a cotton trader in London from 1855. The drain theory, worked out over decades in pamphlets and finally in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, calculated the annual transfer of Indian wealth to Britain through salaries, pensions, home charges and trade, and argued that the poverty of India was manufactured rather than inherited. It became the economic foundation of the nationalist case. He was elected for Finsbury Central in 1892 by three votes, after Lord Salisbury had said publicly that a British constituency would not elect a black man; his supporters adopted the phrase. He was president of the Indian National Congress three times, first used the word swaraj from its platform in 1906, and mentored both Gokhale and Gandhi. He was three times president of the Congress - 1886, 1893 and 1906 - and the 1906 session is where he used swaraj from the chair, holding the party together between moderates and extremists for one more year. He co-founded the East India Association in London in 1866 to put the Indian case to a British audience. He served as diwan of Baroda before returning to England. His statistical method - comparing Indian per capita income with British - was crude by later standards and set the terms of the argument for fifty years. He is commemorated in London by a blue plaque in Finsbury.

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