Dadabhai Naoroji is known to most students and scholars of Indian history through the oft-cited compilation of his writings on the drain of wealth theory, the 1901 Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. Many also know of his successful 1892 campaign for Member of Parliament from Central Finsbury, earning him the distinction of becoming the first MP of Asian origin elected to the British Parliament. Few know of his life, education, and works before that moment in the 1890s. Fewer still know of his busy and remarkably productive political activities, writings, speeches, and contacts from American clergymen, British socialists, and English feminists, among many others. Dinyar Patel’s deeply researched and thoughtfully written biography of Naoroji addresses these gaps within the context of “India’s journey toward self-government and freedom” (p. 12).

Patel organizes this portrait of Naoroji’s life as a political activist, politician, and intellectual in three stages. After a brief introduction to his early life and brilliant educational career in Chapter 1, the first stage of from the 1860s to 1885 offers a tour through the development of his controversial “drain theory,” regarding the poverty of India as caused by British imperial rule. Chapters 3, 5, and 6 explore how he “increasingly trained his sights on the British Parliament” (p. 6) in order to influence British policy toward India. These chapters include a discussion of his unsuccessful first campaign for MP in 1886 as well as his successful 1892 campaign. Finally, the third stage of his career features in Patel’s words, “radicalizing considerably” (p. 7), as he “evolved into a truly global exponent of anti-imperialism” (ibid) within his life-long cause of Indian Swaraj, or self-government.

Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism offers numerous angles on his life, works, and movements, likely adding up to the largest and most comprehensive account of Naoroji’s life ever produced. Patel begins his story with a grounded account of the Parsi leader’s upbringing via social and family history in Bombay in the early nineteenth century. Chapter 1, “Young Dadabhai, Young Bombay,” gives essential texture to the social history of his Parsi family life, his teachers, and the various elements that contributed to his rise as a top student and professor of mathematics in Elphinstone in 1854. Such an early distinction of his stature marked him as the first Indian professor at a government college in the subcontinent. His education and deep investment in promoting public works such as female educational institutions served him well in the next phase, begun in the mid-1850s, when he traveled to England to establish a mercantile firm Cama and Co., with a group of business partners.

Chapters 2 details his work in India and Britain during the 1860s and 1870s. During this time, Naoroji developed, in the backdrop of personal and family struggles and moments of business problems, a range of papers and published statistics that would eventually result in his famous drain of wealth theory. Patel offers extended analysis of his 1873 paper “Poverty of India,” which showcases his deep statistical knowledge as well official testimonials about poverty in India from government officials. Other facts of his life’s trajectory not often commented on feature his brief work as diwan in Baroda in 1873 and 1874 as well as the budding circulation of his works on poverty, famine, and the place of India in the British Empire by socialists such as Henry Hyndman and Karl Marx.

Chapters 3 and 4 delve into the subject familiar to many in Britain, that of his campaigns for Parliament in the 1880s and 1890s. Patel charts his entry into the politics of Britain at a time when Indians around the British Empire saw their movements restricted and monitored in various locales across the empire, including Canada, South Africa, and Australia. His 1892 victory as a Liberal followed an 1886 loss as well as the infamous 1888 speech by Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, who doubted that a British constituency would elect a black man to represent them. This “black man incident” (pp. 121–122) resulted in cartoons and reactions from various sides of the British press, from support for Naoroji to further indignation. Though Naoroji faced financial troubles in his early years there in the 1860s, he was widely viewed as a contact for aspiring Indians in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s, as Patel explores his many loans, donations, and other kinds of counsel offered to students and professionals in London at that time. In Chapter 7, Patel also features a rare look into the end of Naoroji’s life in the early twentieth century, after his return to India in 1907 to his death in 1917. His conclusion mentions his last public appearance as well as those who followed in his footsteps, such as Shapurji Saklatvala and Krishna Menon, both of whom served as Labour MPs in inter-war Britain.

The author treats the subject of the “Grand Old Man of India” in somewhat grand old-fashioned ways, as he offers a history primarily for non-specialist readers. In his introduction, he mentions that scholars of South Asia avoid studying political elites because they “do not mesh well with the Marxist and postcolonial traditions that still dominate the academy” (p. 10). The lack of any footnotes or explanation of this contestable claim signals a readership outside the academy. Furthermore, Patel mentions that biographies are avoided because of the perceived elitism or ineffectiveness of early nationalists in the minds of many scholars. It is undeniably true that writing of biographies of Indian political figures pose several challenges. Nonetheless, scholarship in recent years, such as the Routledge Pathfinders series, biographies and debates about figures such as Mohandas Gandhi1, as well as the methodological reflections on biography by scholars such as Gaiutra Bahadur and Ananya Chakravarty2, demonstrate a range of biographical works produced in our current age.

Naoroji the political organizer and Naoroji the intellectual both emerge in this biography at different times. The great power of a biography, which gives a life in all its complexity and entanglement of various spheres of life, lessens attention to any one given aspect of a person’s life. Given the vast range of his writings and works, it is impossible to cover it all, though readers may yearn for more connective tissue explaining the density of his contacts and networks. Patel’s analysis of correspondence with Irish-American activist George Freeman in the late nineteenth century, as an example of one of the many extraordinary connections he made, remain suggestive as to the overall significance of his contacts to the broader terrain of South Asian history. Naoroji appears to be connected to just about everybody who was anybody, from Angarika Dharmapala to Josephine Butler to George Holyoake, but how these contacts were developed or sustained is not fully clarified. Naoroji’s importance to history is undeniable. However, Patel’s claim that he “ranks among the great non-European thinkers and reformers of his era” (p. 8) may instigate further research about Naoroji’s place amongst the “great non-European thinkers” of his time. These minor observations aside, Patel has written an enjoyable and fast-paced biography of a figure many cite superficially but rarely know in any depth. When it comes to the subject of grand old men of India’s early nationalist history, this biography will likely command enduring attention.

Notes:
1 Biographies about figures as diverse as Muhammed Iqbal, Shyamji Krishnavarma, Veena Dhanammal, and Vidyasagar have been published in the Routledge Pathfinders series, https://www.routledge.com/Pathfinders/book-series/PF (14.04.2021). Recent biographies such as Goolam Vahed / Ashwin Desai, The South African Gandhi. Stretcher Bearer of Empire, Stanford 2015 contrasted with Charles Di Salvo, M.K. Gandhi: Attorney at Law. The Man Before the Mahatma, Berkeley 2013 as well as multi-faceted re-assessments of Gandhi’s life in South Africa and India in the public sphere of the twenty-first century attest to the liveliness of debates about questions of biography today.
2 Gaiutra Bahadur, Conjure Women and Coolie Women, in: Small Axe 56 (2018), pp. 244–253; Ananya Chakravarty, Mapping Gabriel. Space, Identity, and Slavery in the Late Sixteenth Century Indian Ocean, in: Past and Present 243/1 (2019), pp. 5–34.